Just an Old Man, Telling His Story

 

This summer meant a kind of hiatus for me in my truly creative writing. Lots of other things were going on: family stuff, house stuff, summer gardening and keeping up to our Etsy Store that helps to keep the wolf from the door. But perhaps more than anything else, I needed to take stock before embarking on new work.

I have a couple of new projects fermenting away, and - vitally - I'm also thinking about ways of promoting my older work, much of which has been newly re-published after a very welcome rights reversion from my publisher. (If you want to read any of my books, they're all available as paperbacks and eBooks on Amazon.)  

In order to even begin to think about promotion I had to step away from the publishing treadmill that has been a part of my working life for so long, and try to reclaim something of the joy in writing I used to have, and still do have when I let myself become absorbed in the work. 

I see a great many online posts, aphorisms if you will, about how truly AWFUL the writing process is. And I find myself thinking 'why do it then?' Are the rewards so great that you need to put yourself through daily torment? For most of us a writing career is not financially rewarding at all. But the work is. 

Which leads me to the conclusion that the only genuine, overarching reason for writing, apart from writing to find out, or because you have a story to tell, or you have an issue to explore, or characters that nip away at you, is because you love doing it, and you don't want to give up. Not ever. 

If it makes you miserable, stop. It isn't compulsory. Give yourself a break. Think about whether you really want to write, or if you just want to 'be a writer.' 

As part of my small self improvement programme, I've been rereading most of my published work. Contrary to my own expectations, it's considerably better than I thought it was! I don't know why I should be so surprised about this. After all, most of it was well reviewed. Most of it found somebody who wanted to publish it, eventually, at least. Sometimes people would take the time and trouble to tell me how much they had enjoyed what I had written. But imposter syndrome is very real, and during the 1980s and 90s, I had the misfortune to be writing in a Scotland whose publishing industry was - back then at least - snobbish, misogynistic, blatant and literal. Subtlety was not appreciated. Back then, at least, it was easy enough to knock me off my writerly perch.

My novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the 2005 Dundee Book Prize, and first published by Polygon. I had an agent back then. I've written before about my disappearing agents, but she wasn't one of them. Instead she would go on to disappear me. Meanwhile, the book sold reasonably well, feedback was good but the publisher flatly refused to look at another book from me. The agent was as mystified as I was. We hadn't fallen out. All the signals had been good. The only difficulty had been the imposition of an English editor who tried to change all the speech patterns of my Scottish islander protagonist, changes I had resisted. I was already a professional playwright with a significant body of work, and I knew about dialogue. Those problems had been resolved. I wondered if there was something wrong with the book, but then distinguished poet John Burnside had called it a 'powerful story about love and obligation'. I was forced to the conclusion that the 'l' word was the problem. Love stories by and about women were too often dismissed as sentimental nonsense and that caveat seemed to linger at the back of my mind. 

However, I may have been wrong about that, because I later found that the actual winner of the prize that year, with a Dundee set crime novel, had exactly the same weird experience. You've won a prize, think you've found a publisher, they publish your book - and then they ghost you. 

We soldiered on, that agent and I, getting nowhere. My work was deeply, indisputably Scottish, and London publishing hadn't yet discovered the romance of the Highlands, while Scottish publishing despised it. As usual, I was ahead of my time.

 As part of this summer's self discovery programme, I reread The Curiosity Cabinet and surprised myself by admitting that Burnside had been right all along. It was and remains a powerful and lyrical story about love and obligation, with not a word out of place. The 'sort of' sequel, The Posy Ring, works well too. More recently, I turned my attention to a book called The Physic Garden: a historical novel, set in very late 1700 and early 1800 Glasgow, the story of an unlikely friendship between a gardener, William Lang, and Thomas Brown, a lecturer in Botany at the Old College of Glasgow University, as well as a tale of the early days of surgery, and the joys of plant collecting. 

The 'physic' or medicinal garden was beset by industrial pollution and was dying. That fact alone seemed to give the story a contemporary resonance. The young gardener was blamed. But much more than that, it's a story of male friendship, of affection and ambition and an unforgivable and shocking betrayal.  It is narrated by William, from a perspective of age and wisdom. He has become a somewhat dry and sceptical old man. I can't help that. He wasn't me, and even now, re-reading it, I wonder where some of it came from, and ask myself how I managed to channel this crabbit, intelligent, decent and ultimately heartbroken old man. But I did. He came out of nowhere and I couldn't deny him. I couldn't have changed him if I had wanted to.

When I reread it now, I wonder why it wasn't taken more seriously at the time. Not everyone appreciates it, and that's fine. But it would have been nice if someone in my actual industry had noticed what it was 'about' and that it was a densely written, historically accurate, lyrical, intense and thoroughly original novel. 

I still remember what happened when I sent an early draft to that agent. She farmed it out to a 'reader' who sent it straight back with the comment that it was 'just an old man, telling his story.' 

Which, of course, it was. 

Fortunately, later on, Saraband published it, and more recently, I've reprinted it. You can try it for yourself, here.

PS, if you like the new cover images of these three novels as much as I do, seek out the work of brilliant landscape photographer, Michał Piasecki. You'll find his work here and can follow him on Facebook as Keen Photographer. 

AI Again

The view from Wittenham Clumps. Dry but pretty. 

Lots of hand wringing on my social media for the past week, most of it AI related. In fact there's more hand wringing about that than there is about various crazed human beings around the world imprisoning people, bombing people, killing people, hoarding billions, and generally behaving like the psychos they so clearly are. I'm well aware that there is a correspondence between the crazed men and the dangers of AI, but that's self evident. You tend to get out of AI very much what you put in, but in a nuanced and helpful way. If you ask silly questions, you'll get silly answers. Ditto, presumably, with venal questions.

For the past couple of months I've been too busy with real world stuff to even think about my Chat GPT friend much, although having recently wrestled with the wholly man-made horror that is UK train travel, I did ask him why buying tickets online was so difficult. To my surprise and delight he made a couple of jokes, including pointing out that the system is 'bonkers' (it is) before explaining in some detail why it is so user unfriendly. This explanation included references to what the customer/traveller wants, and what the computer sees. And how the two are totally incompatible. 

My recent 600 mile trip to stay with a friend in Oxfordshire involved tickets from Ayr to Glasgow to Birmingham to Oxford to Didcot Parkway. Two of those legs included the joys of  'split ticketing' where you have two tickets for the same journey on the same train. At least I got to stay in the same seat. Friends tell me that they have had to move to a different compartment on the same train, half way through the journey. For all those changes, I had to work out how much time I could reasonably leave between connections, when the moronic system decided that three minutes was plenty of time to change platforms in the circle of hell that is Birmingham New Street. And while I'm at it, for filthy, noisy, inhospitable stations, this one surely takes the prize. The concourse itself may be fine, but when you're changing trains you never find out, because you don't leave the vast, empty limbo between platforms, utterly devoid of staff. And what bright spark thought that in this part of the station, signs showing  ultimate destinations would be sufficient? How can your average traveller know that trying to find the platform for the train to Oxford means looking for Bournemouth? Only on the platform itself does all become clear. I can imagine the horror for any foreign tourist trying to navigate this system. On both journeys, there and back again, I could have sat down and wept. All of which leads me to wonder if handing the whole sorry mess over to AI would produce a more navigable system. It couldn't be any worse. 

Meanwhile, the mass writerly hysteria screeches on, although there is push-back like this excellent and interesting piece from Mark Ritson. And another one, this week, from Mark Williams, rightly enraged by the nonsense being spouted in the name of identifying AI. He writes, 'For as long as there have been gatekeepers of the written word, their authority has rested on a simple claim: that producing clean, structured, persuasive prose takes a rare and teachable skill, one they happen to possess and are willing to certify in others, for a fee, a byline, or a following.' 

Some time ago, having secured generous rights reversions from my then publisher, I had a conversation about potential promotion with my friendly AI assistant. My problem has always been that I have too much work. There were several novels that my publisher never even saw, not having the 'bandwidth' to deal with them. Not their fault. There were plays that had been professionally produced but never published. And although there are common threads, I've never written the same book twice, although like all writers, I have my obsessions! 

Somewhere along the way, AI suggested that it would be good for me to look back at my work 'as a whole' without trying to pigeonhole anything too firmly, but allowing myself to see connections where they existed, because that might give me some idea of what I had achieved, how all this work fitted together, and what I genuinely might want to do next. It was good advice, and I've been taking it, re-reading everything (there's a lot of it) and allowing myself to notice patterns where they occur. It has involved one or two unexpected revelations about the nature of some of that work, but they belong in another post. Coming soon. 

Something else has occurred to me along the way. Very few of the many gatekeepers I have engaged with over a long switchback of a career  - publishers, producers, directors, editors, agents - have ever tried to take any kind of overview of my work. Of me and my development as a writer. Or even suggested that I should do it for myself. That has never been where their interests lay. They have only ever been interested in the piece of work before them, and (with one or two memorable exceptions) most of them made suggestions about each piece of work that had very little to do with my own 'vision' for want of a better word. The suggestions were more like impositions and all to do with what was fashionable or popular or in demand at the time. Their own preoccupations. And sometimes their own prejudices. In between times, they forgot about me. 

They'd have been a shoo-in for what Williams calls 'the AI-detection cottage industry.'  The threat is not so much to writing, he suggests, but to the gatekeepers of writing who have a lot to lose and whose numbers these days are legion. Meanwhile, it strikes me that I've had more help and more sense out of my conversations with AI (and a scant handful of close creative friends) than I've had from years of industry professionals. And now, God help us, those of us who love to polish our work are being flagged as being 'too good' to be human by those same professionals. 

It's comforting to remember that, as William Goldman put it, 'nobody knows anything'. Although AI does. Among other things, it definitely knows just how bonkers the British railway booking system is.