Archives de catégorie : My Reading

Becoming a writer

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I have an increasing conviction that I need to be writing; disciplined, long-form writing with a view to publication. The grass withers, the flowers fade, news articles disappear almost as soon as they are written, but books seem to last.

Running the marathon was a massive commitment. But a writing life will be harder and lonelier, and it won’t be as healthy. And after all that work, maybe publishers will simply judge my work substandard, and it will all have been a waste.

Is it worth even starting, when the goal seems remote, distant and uncertain? For a start, I don’t presume to think that I’ll be any good – I’m completely untested at long-form. This seems like a huge gamble. Could you train a year for a marathon only for someone to tell you that you don’t know how to run and never will?

Perhaps a few small things give me hope. I) I’m reasonably good at discipline, which seems to be a key skill for a writer, II) I’ve already started listening to podcasts for writers, as well as general cultural podcasts, III) I read a fair bit, though I’d stop short of calling myself well-read, IV) I’ve based a lot of my professional life so far on writing, even if it’s not in the book-length field V) I blog (though with frequent errors, I know), VI) I have a slight philosophical bent, and a touch of humour, both of which seem to work well in high-brow long-form, VII) my writing would almost certainly be focused on Ivory Coast, for which almost nothing exists in English.

On the downside, I’m not currently writing, and I never have (in the sense of long-form). As a white Brit writing about West Africa, I’ll probably be rather unpalatable in the very field I want to be a part of.

At least in the modern age, one can self-publish online as a last resort to rescue something from failure.

Just don’t start asking me how my book’s coming on.

The writing life

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I’m close to finishing ‘How to be well-read: a guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities‘ by John Sutherland. It’s a book I bought on a whim after a recommendation from blogger/economist Tyler Cowen. It’s full of useful bite-sized articles on novels I’m sure I’ll never get around to reading (how many of us read more than 500 novels in an entire life-time?).

What I’ve found most useful is getting an overview of the literary canon (or at least Sutherland’s sometimes curious vision of it). What are the ingredients and ideas behind good literature? Following the general trends – adultery, murder, suicide, war, alcoholism and abuse are common themes. Happy marriages either don’t exist for writers or they don’t make good material. At several times I’ve thought: how come I and apparently many of my friends are in extremely happy marriages when for novelists fictional marriages always fail? Writers frequently have lives that follow many of these themes, and it’s clear that many fiction writers are simply transforming their own non-fictional experiences (which also explains why writers frequently write about writers). Many of the best literary works seem to have faced a rough ride getting into print, or never to have been applauded in their day. Many writers die penniless – and even unpublished – in their own life time.

So if you want to be a writer and have a boringly happy life, you might struggle. And even if you write the best novel in the world, there’s a good chance publishers will turn their noses up at it, and even if you publish a masterpiece, you may be long gone by the time your genius is recognised.

Morning reading (in Bangui)

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Enjoyed reading this (very long) sentence today from Brideshead Revisited:

« I heard the Mottrams’ names in conversation; I saw their faces now and again peeping from the Tatler, as I turned the pages impatiently waiting for someone to come, but they and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems; a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other’s fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other’s pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them. »

The morning routine

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This week I was chatting with a friend of mine who works in finance and who takes the same work-bus as me in the morning. We got into a conversation about sport and I mentioned that I tried to do some sport every morning before coming into work. He said ‘I used to be good at doing exercise, but I struggle to find the time.’ I said that I was able to make the time by getting out of bed just after six o’clock. He replied that he gets out of bed just after five o’clock. But when I asked what he does before catching a bus in the morning, he said that he basically just had a cup of coffee.

Recently a friend posted something on Facebook: « You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. » For me, getting a morning routine hard-wired into the day makes for a great start, and a good way to fix some basic things into the weekly programme. By putting quite a few things into the morning routine, I can take the stress off weekends and evenings and just allow certain things to just happen naturally.

At the moment, I’m waking up at 610. We don’t have curtains, so in the summer that means waking up with the sun, but at the moment, it’s just a bit before sunrise. I’ll check whatsapp and then head out for some sport. When I was training for the marathon, this was almost always running, but now I’m putting the emphasis on working out with weights, and a more varied set of aerobic exercises on alternate days (running, cross-trainer, cycling). I have a small breakfast (2 Weetabix, 1 piece of fruit and a cup of tea) either before or after the exercise. If I’m working out in the gym, I’ll go down with my tea. While cycling or cross-training I can read my Kindle (Bible reading (3 chapters) + another book); I just find you need to increase the font size. Other exercise is done to podcasts.

I need to be in the shower by 730, and then out the door by 745-755, after a short prayer with my usually-sleeping wife. It’s a 5 minute walk to the metro, two stops on the train, and then a bus to work that leaves at 820 to arrive at 900. Taking the bus is something I find a key part of organising my mornings: I can just switch off and concentrate. On the walk to the metro I listen to podcasts. Then, when I’m waiting for the train, I’ll take out my phone to surf. I’ll quickly check Facebook and Emails (though only to browse quickly as I prefer emailing on a laptop at work). Then I’ll open the BBC News app to read some news stories/headlines, and then open Feedly to clear my RSS feeds. i can finish with these main two phone tasks in the train, or waiting for the bus, or on the bus.

The next step is to pull out my Kindle. The first priority is to read my three Bible chapters, which I’ll generally follow by a short prayer. Then I’ll do other reading. I’m reading the Qu’ran at the moment, though I tend not to segway between the two religious books without something in between. The morning is often a time to exchange whatsapp messages.

The result is that every time I arrive at the office in the morning I’ve done some exercise, eaten, washed, caught up on the news, cleared my blog inbox, advanced in my reading and podcast listening, and read some of the Bible and prayed. This all helps to advance a number of core life objectives, and make sure that important things aren’t being neglected.

I don’t think such things are for everyone, but I’m very much a morning person, and I feel I can thrive where things are very regular like this (bus always leaving at the same time, etc).

Driving over mangoes

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Just finished a book I’d wanted to read for many years – Chris Stewart’s Driving over lemons. I remember reading a review in the Sunday Times many many years back, and since being published it became a huge success, spawning several sequels. Following on from an earlier generation of books with A Year in Provenance, it charts the first few years of a young English family buying a subsistence farm in remote southern Spain.

As an aspiring aspiring writer, you read these books looking for the sorts of things that give clues to its success. And the book was as you might expect – well written and easy to read, full of (British) humour and with a light touch. Chris comes across as bashful and disarming and you follow his adventure in southern Spain – many no doubt going through the dreams they themselves have but will probably never act upon. Both books triggered a wave of ‘moving to France/Spain’ television series in Britain and I remember at some points a decade ago finding almost wall-to-wall programmes of this sort.

Like many, I occasionally have dreams of upping sticks for some rural humble idyll. In my case, it would be my former home Ivory Coast. For that I draw a number of lessons from the experience and the book;

– there’s a large readership for these sorts of radical lifestyle change books, though no doubt as in many parts of publishing, far more books fail than succeed. Readers want to be able to connect with the experience – the adventure and the romantic nature of the enterprise, and meet characters. Although the book found a worldwide audience, it grew first with a British audience because it was about a British family leaving Britain for new, romantic pastures. Probably harder to achieve in rural Ivory Coast where people have few romantic notions of the country or reference points. You would certainly have an adventure – that’s what is so attractive about daily life in West Africa.

– such successful adventures usually work where the people making them actually already have a good skillset for the activity, even if in the writing and the story-telling this is marginalised to make us feel like ‘it could be us’ doing the same thing. In this case, Chris comes to the project with two decades of farming experience and rather good Spanish skills. The only time he really mentions Spanish is near the start of the book where he makes self-deprecating remarks about his own abilities, though the book wouldn’t have been possible without a strong grasp of the language. Many of us who might dream of such projects (myself included) have virtually zero farming or indeed handiwork skills. While a previous generation may have known about basic plumbing and how to set a door, we have few such practical skills.

– A farming adventure along these lines now, or particularly in a decade (when I might do such a thing), would perhaps be rather different in the ‘spreading the message’ part. One could imagine a blog being integral to such an enterprise. Perhaps you could even self-publish everything – from the book to a television series (aka River cottage tv show). You could make the films yourself, publish on your own Youtube channel, and take it from there.

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At the end of the Kindle version of the book there’s an interview with the author. He ends saying…

« I don’t think there’s anything better you can do in the middle of your life than to pick it up and shake it around a bit. Do something different, live somewhere different, talk another language. All that keeps your destiny on the move and keeps your brain from becoming addled. »