Despite my 40th
birthday coming up in June, I have managed to avoid midlife crisis by
not having stopped playing in rock and roll bands since I was 12. I
suppose I could cut off all my hair and take up accountancy at the
weekends, but I don't have time. George from my book, Weekend
Rockstars, had quite a big
crisis so I didn't have to. George Orwell (the novelist, not my cat)
dealt with it definitively in his classic Coming Up For Air
in which George 'Fatty' Bowling tries to go back to his youth,
discovers it isn't there anymore and moves on (ambiguously). Which is
how we should all deal with it: quickly.
This is not the George Orwell
who wrote the book
This one is my cat – the one
who likes Eastenders
40 is not a big
deal at all for me. I'm the youngest of three, and have already
attended both siblings' 40th parties, and my wife's.
Getting older doesn't bother me in the least. I am still affected by
the usual mid-life worries though, what haven't I done? Why is my
life nothing like the one I expected when I was 13? Why didn't I
start getting my shit together earlier? Why does Alan
Moore stare at me in the mirror every morning?
This
is not me, but he does haunt my mirror
(and
wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta)
The answer to many
of those questions is because my younger self was convinced he would
be a rock star and die at 27
(despite writing utterly dreadful songs) and a fucking dickhead. I'm
allowed to say that, because I am me. You're not, by the way, unless
you're my mum, in which case you wouldn't use that kind of language.
I am only now at the sort of stage in my literary career that I would
have liked to be in about twenty years ago.
The thing is though,
as an angry young man with a promising future I couldn't think of a
good enough plot to hide everything I wanted to say inside as well as
I can as a bitter, middle-aged git with a disappointing past. My 20
year old self would not be able to admit that he was writing terrible
songs, or that the novels he unfailingly failed to finish were
fucking frightful. I had not lived enough to write anything worth
writing at the time. What little of it survives is mostly
Pratchett/Rankin ripped off humour that lacks the charm and
cleverness of its source material. That which isn't is hugely
high-concept bollocks that I had neither the wit, nor the vocabulary
to pull off. The North Devon music fanzine I did was pretty funny
though, so not all bad.
The
Award-winning third issue of These Were...
It wasn't a real award, Matt
the Hat and I thought it would be funny
It was
The thing is though,
back then, writing was really hard. Much harder than it is now. I
don't just mean the act of thinking up words and writing them down. I
mean that I did all my drafts with a pen, like most people. I had no
computer. Those first drafts are now illegibly drenched with ink as I
edited, and edited, and edited. I was lucky enough to 'borrow' my
sister's electric typewriter in order to make some of those
masterpieces legible (sorry Kate, I really have no idea where it's
gone now). But if I went through it and decided to shuffle a bit of
punctuation about then I would have to retype the whole thing again.
Clearly that wasn't going to happen, so my writing career was put on
hold in an endless chant of 'Mervyn Peake didn't write Titus Groan
until he was 35, Mervyn Peake didn't write Titus Groan
until he was 35, Mervyn Peake didn't write Titus Groan
until he was 35, Mervyn Peake didn't write Titus Groan
until he was 35, Mervyn Peake didn't write Titus Groan
until he was 35, Mervyn Peake didn't write Titus Groan
until he was 35.' Until I turned 35.
If
only I could have highlighted, deleted and rewritten all this with
the swish of a mouse back then
For my first novel
writing attempt at 17 I would sit, in the middle of the night, at my
enormous desk in the wide open bay window (so that the smoke would go
outside, sorry Mum) next to the huge gothic fireplace of the
downstairs reception room my parents let me live in, a bottle of
whiskey on the side, imagining myself a Hemingway or Orwell,
suffering in the cold for my art (although nipping out every half an
hour for a cigarette break and keeping the window closed would have
been much better. I know this now, age is good). Now I sit with a
laptop, wherever I like (usually either on the sofa by the fire in my
slippers, or in the garden in my flip-flops, depending on the season)
and I know to leave the booze until after I've got my wordcount up
enough.
It took me a long
time to realise the importance of notebooks, and scrawling down every
idea you have. It took me even longer to realise that my handwriting
leaves the pages of those notebooks looking like a rorschach test and
I am incapable of not losing pens. I have a notebook app on my phone
now. But I still don't write everything down, mostly because I get
those ideas when I have the dog lead in one hand and a bag of
shopping in the other, a mouth full of toothbrush or both arms up to
their elbows in a sink full of dishes.
Why not use voice
notes Dave? Well, despite the fact that my inner monologue has never
remained inner and I constantly narrate my life out loud like a shit
sitcom (I am a street mutterer, sorry, the fact that the older I get
the more tramp-like I look does not help) I don't want to look crazy
by talking into my phone in public. So I never do – I know, it's a
phone, that is literally what they are for, I would look less crazy
if I did that. Also, I cannot organise my thoughts into useable
sentences without thinking them through and writing them down, so, on
the rare occasions I have made voice notes to myself (or used my old
dictaphone) they are so rambling and full of 'hang on, wait...
maybe... oh that's better..' and suchlike that I can't listen back to
them.
This
is not me either
Probably
won't be long though
Maybe if I had
stayed at the posh school and gone to university I would have had a
more conventional career, and be happily writing for a living now.
Though I would probably be joylessly writing what somebody else told
me to for money and abandoning creativity (see my paid musical output
for evidence). Despite every single facet of the writing process
being uncannily like pulling your own teeth out with pliers, I do
still enjoy it. I must really, why else would I do it? It is not even
paying my alcohol bills, and I don't drink much these days.
