Monday 22 August 2016

Is this the world's worst novel?

I have this Ira Glass quote stuck on my cork board (or, as my inside voice wankily calls it, ‘the inspiration station’):

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Ira Glass has obviously never read the novel I wrote when I was in my late teens. Sure, he’s right about a few things; my work disappointed me, and it definitely wasn’t that good. And I never got past that phase, because I did quit. I did a lot of work, but I quit. My work has never been as good as my ambitions, and I don’t think I’ve ever closed that gap, though I finish stories.

People think The Shining is about a haunted hotel. It isn’t. It’s about writer’s block. Jack Torrance, clacking away at his typewriter, going slowly mad. I wonder if the snowbound Overlook Hotel becomes a metaphor for the isolation and loneliness of trying (and failing) to write a book.

Even when I had three months (THREE!) to do nothing but write, I still couldn’t do it. There became so many more tempting things to do. But as a teenager, and in my early twenties, I couldn’t stop writing. I didn’t have a computer then, so I wrote long hand in wire bound notebooks, typing up and printing out pages when I had a late shift at my reception job. I wrote so much that I developed this weird little lump on the second finger of my right hand (it’s still there, to remind me I don’t write that much anymore.)

This massive pile of notebooks and loose sheets was actually my second attempt at a novel. I am not even sure what order they go in, and I doubt I could tell from trying to piece together the plot. From what I remember, there was a teenage girl, an inappropriate relationship with a much older man (MUCH older, don’t know why I did that.) unrequited love, and two dead rock stars sent to torment our heroine into sorting her life out. Magic realism written by a 17 year old isn’t going to be any good, but thanks for the encouragement, Ira.

2,000 pages of crap

Don't make notebooks like they used to



I found this scribbled in an old diary: ‘the only thing I write these days is shopping lists.’ It's the sort of thing that at the time I think is pithy and witty, but it's really just lame and unfunny.


So when the muse is failing to crap on my head, or I’m feeling a little spooked out from the posts about missing people and unsolved deaths, I’ll post a chapter of the Not So Great English Novel. (it had two titles, neither of which were any good, ‘The People vs Alice Same, and I Wish My Friends Were Someone Else’s) E.L James, prepare to surrender your crown as The World’s Worst Writer.