Why writing doesn't have to be a lonely struggle
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Version 0 of 1. Being an author is the most desirable job in Britain, according to a YouGov poll. Not so, responded Tim Lott. Writers are driven by demons, he wrote, the work is unimaginably hard – as complex as brain surgery, apparently – not to mention solitary, and fraught with rejection and professional envy. The meagre consolation is the “small legacy” we may leave behind us when we go. It’s a dismal prospect - enough to have us weeping over our keyboards, while taking nips from a bottle of absinthe. Related: You think writing’s a dream job? It’s more like a horror film Sorry Tim, but we have to disagree. That’s not how it is for every writer. Take those demons, for example. For some of us, writing is not a matter of being driven by them, but casting them out. Difficult family relationships? Sort them out on the page. Horrible love life? Write it again with a better ending. Feeling your age? Slip into the skin of a 20 year old and go off and have some fictional adventures. It’s not a horrible, exhausting struggle; it’s therapeutic. And then there are the rejections and the self-criticism. It’s true that we should strive to do our very best. We all know when we haven’t managed it, when something needs rewriting or tearing up altogether. But getting a rejection slip isn’t the worst thing in the world. In business, there are bosses who have the red pen out ready to slash it across your carefully drafted marketing plan before they’ve even read it, without any regard for your feelings at all. Neither of us has ever had an editor or agent quite as heartless as that, and we cherish the whole process of working out problems with ours. Maybe male writers have bigger problems with those hoary issues of ego and insecurity because other male writers, like Orwell, have told them they ought to. And maybe they think that if they don’t, they’re not “proper” writers. There’s delectable irony in Jenny Offill’s bittersweet portrait of a writer-mother in Dept. of Speculation, gloriously intensified by the brilliance of the novel she inhabits: My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” Funnily enough, you can write and lick stamps. For a woman with children, there can be few other jobs which so easily accommodate school pick-up times, assemblies announced at the last minute, and chickenpox. There’s no commute, and no disgruntled boss looking at the clock if you try to knock off early. You certainly learn not to be precious when working with children around. At times you might feel you’re only a good-enough mother, but there’s a consolation in knowing the neglected (or at times enslaved – young eyes make very sharp proofreaders) offspring are learning how the world of work can operate. They see exactly what you do all day. They go into a bookshop, and look! There it is on the shelf. Writing is also the perfect job for the autodidact. Some people pay thousands of pounds to enrol on an MA. If you’re a writer and something grabs your attention – whether it’s a German ghost-story, a civil war, a Parisian massacre nobody seems to know about, or an electric sex doctor – then get the book commissioned, and you can actually be paid to slope off to libraries. There’s a rare pleasure to be had in steeping yourself in other worlds and times. And when the fictional landscape takes over your nights as well as your days, it becomes quite literally a dream job. As for the solitude, and the backbiting, we’ve both had the opposite experience, and this collaboration is the evidence. There’s certainly a thriving community of children’s writers out there, many of whom – like us – have never met in person, but are happy to exchange ideas, support and nourishment. In his piece earlier this week, Tim Lott quotes John Dos Passos: “Writers are like fleas, they get very little nourishment from one another.” We think worker bees are closer to the truth - with perhaps the odd queen or drone thrown in. • Helen Grant’s books include Carnegie medal-nominated novels The Glass Demon and Wish Me Dead • Lydia Syson’s A World Between Us was longlisted for the Guardian children’s fiction prize |