How I Rediscovered Reading Fiction — and How I Ultimately Rediscovered Writing It (Part Two)

…and now the thrilling conclusion!

For as long as I can remember, I was always interested in stories. Yes, up until the age of 13 or so, my primary interests were in mechanics and natural history: I loved trains, trucks, steam engines of any description, geology was cool, and prehistoric beasts were the best! But even as I indulged in books full of Bedford Vehicles, steam locomotives of the American Old West, and extinct animals, I often placed the “characters” of these works within in fantasy worlds of adventure. Things got blown up, villains committed evil deeds in the pursuit of world conquest, or just good old-fashioned destruction, and male stereotypical heroes (often an author avatar) got the stereotypical girl — yet once I did not think to write anything down.

I learned to type on a manual typewriter when I was around six years old, but did not think to actually attempt to write a story until I was thirteen, whence upon I received my first PC. “Rites of Way” at around 12,000 words remains my longest work of fiction, and was my longest piece of writing in any category until I finished my masters thesis. By this time I had gotten into science fiction literature, and had just read Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney; I was fascinated with the idea of the apocalypse (I was, and still remain, a fairly morbid sort). As such, “Rites of Way” (there is literally no reason for this title over than it sounded cool to me at the time), has it all: a nuclear holocaust; a Bottom-like relationship between the flatmates who survive it; mutant animals and crops; flesh-eating zombies; weird sexual tension between them and another female survivor (to give it an “adult edge”); and gun-toting German-speaking wasteland warriors.

It may still exist somewhere, but I couldn’t bear to look upon it again. It must be truly terrible to behold.

Even at 13 I knew that what I’d written was utter juvenile garbage — but I also knew that that was okay. The themes within could be revisited as I practiced my craft and read more SF literature, trying to study how it should be done.

Over the next few years, at the weekends in my grandparents’ house where my computer was kept, I penned around two dozen short works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, along with occasional forays into more surreal and bizarro territory: post-apocalyptic societies divided by gender; interdimensional things living in toilets taking over the minds of the householders; bloodsucking half-brothers who lived in closets; bathroom sinks possessed by the spirits of fairy warriors; and others I’ve either forgotten or which I’d rather forget. It was also during this period that on a number of occasions I experimented with humourous verse (although at this stage this was purely for my own amusement and did not see myself as a poet in any way).

In addition to this, there were literally hundreds of ideas that I wrote down that I intended to write as full works as soon as I “got better” and could give them a fair treatment.

When I left sixth form college two months into my crappy ICT course (I remain programming illiterate to this day), part of my agreement with the Connexions programme (which if you don’t know, finds educational and employment opportunities for those aged between 13 and 24) which would grant me a weekly allowance of £45 (oh, the New Labour years…) was that I would join a writer’s group at Ashton-under-Lyne’s public library. I had already been part of an online workshop and had not found the experience very satisfying — I can admit now that I was simply too immature to spend the time reading and critiquing other people’s works that weren’t up to a ‘professional’ standard (even though that was the whole point).

Being the only person there younger than sixty was also a bit discomforting, but they gladly accepted me as one of their own (“Young Man!” they called me, exclamation point included), and it was during this period that I actually began to write poetry more seriously — although the subjects were still mostly humorous. Poetry could be written quickly, and read to an audience quickly as well, and to great satisfaction if it tickled them right.

I also continued to write fiction, concentrating on horror, having been reading Stephen King and Clive Barker for the first time.

At one point I finally had something of a success: two of my horror stories were published by an online fanzine of sorts, one that really just accepted anything. It was so long ago now, I’ve actually forgotten the name of the website and one of the story titles, although I’m sure one story was called “The Dhampyr” (supposedly an old term for a half-human, half-vampire). That the site no longer seems to exist in any form, along with the hideous pseudonym I used, is probably for the best. But at the time, it proved to me that, as low quality as I knew the stories still were, at least one person would publish me — and that meant, as things progressed, eventually other, more professional editors would (not that I’m disparaging the guy in hindsight — he just wanted to give as much horror fiction to the world as possible).

Just before I went back to college in the next academic year, I committed what must remain my worst literary sin — I gave my first poetry reading, but with a poem plagiarised from Clark Ashton Smith (I changed a few words here and there, reversed the odd line, but that’s all). Why I did it I still don’t know — it may show that I still had no real confidence in my poetry, or maybe anything I had written. My stomach now wrenches from thinking about it now; the thought of plagiarism disgusts me utterly. I was, however, not found out, and I have never admitted it until now. (Remember though: I was still a dumb-arsed, socially awkward 17 year old with a few Nietzschean delusions to spare.)

Going back to college the way I did proved the death knell for my writing however: for whatever reason, the English literature teacher took an immediate dislike to me on registration day (she may have sensed that going back to college was not really my own initiative), and instead tricked me into doing the (almost entirely linguistics-based) English Language A Level. At that moment, it seemed fine for me: you couldn’t particularly control what literary works you read, and I mostly hated the choices in secondary school for GCSE English (Steinbeck and Browning were good enough, but the hell really wants to study Educating Rita? There was also a terrible collection of short stories all about racial conflict; the subject is obviously more important than ever, but the stories were awful.). It was a joint project of disaster.

As I went to college, I strove to read more “literary” works — The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Catcher in the Rye, Dubliners (I failed on my first attempt) — while continuing to read (and listen to audio of) speculative fiction. I remember telling one of my fellows that all I wanted to be was a writer of some description or another.

However, as my formal study of politics went on under the auspices of the college, an old side interest in philosophy came to the forefront. The idea that one could not only study philosophy but actually become a philosopher enraptured me, and despite not being the best reader of philosophical literature, I made it a solid intent to become one by my second year in college, and thought about the far future in terms of being an academic — an idea which only recently I have come to disavow.

My last work of fiction, “Metzenger” (which must still exist somewhere in my archived collegiate work), was written for the creative writing requirement of AS Level (first year) English. A work of other-worldly fantasy containing a fairly in-your-face message about climate change, and with more than a few nods to both Poe and Ted Chiang, it was well-received and was granted an “A”. At the same time I wrote an article on abolishing the monarchy which was even better received; it appears the entire English department passed it amongst themselves. This was actually my first true piece of non-fiction.

After these two pieces, I wrote nothing at all in any capacity, or even thought much about writing, until my first year at university when I attended an inaugural meeting of The Whistler, the new independent student newspaper. Even though I desired to be an academic, I still wondered about journalism as a possible career (it was also obvious to me that many contemporary philosophers made a decent side living selling opinion columns to newspapers and political journals).

Ending up in the opinion section — I could write pretty much anything I want without having to go “on the beat” like a reporter — I managed to publish one article (on the myths of Christmas) before an unfortunately timed use of the C-word soured my older female editor on me and she ceased to reply to my emails. My last written article was also perhaps too anti-capitalist in spirit to be printed in a publication funded through local advertising.

So that ended up being it for my prose for approximately five years. During this time the only writing I did was for university assignments, and I like to think I did well as an essayist (with a fairly decent average mark of 67%). However, as I’ve said about the lack of reading, a lack of casual writing probably held me back.

After leaving London in June 2016, I spent a lot of my time sat in the house being very despondent — only broken by trips to the pub. It was there a few months after returning to Manchester I had a chance meeting with a local poet, who invited me to come to the amateur poets’ reading they had there on a monthly basis.

By this time I had started reading poetry seriously — mainly Eliot and Chesterton — as part of my renewed effort at reading for the sake of reading. But as yet I had even considered the possibility of writing again. By this time almost all of the poetry and a sizeable chunk of the fiction I had written had been wiped out several years earlier in a viral incident.

The only piece of verse — written as it used to be, for my own amusement — in this period I had written happened to have been on my 24th birthday, and read as such:

Today I am twenty-four

I am still a frightful bore

This listlessness I can’t take anymore

At least I’m not some corporate whore

(Ridiculous I know, but it was the first for many years.)

I attended the first meeting and quite liked it — I didn’t join in as I had nothing to read, either of my own or of anyone else’s — and I promised to return.

That very weekend, sat in the garden, and trying to escape something the smell of burning in the oven, I wrote my first true “adult” poem on my iPhone’s Notepad called “Saturday”. Looking back, it’s not a bad first effort, but it’s far too obscure in its references to be enjoyable, as well as lacking narrative flow.

Over the next few months the odd poem came about, until one night in November, unable to sleep and with John Cooper Clarke on my mind, I wrote about eight poems in one bed-sitting. I became hooked! Between then and now I’ve written somewhere along the lines of 150 poems, haikus, and loose verses, and have managed to have two accepted for paid publication (the latter I’ve just signed the contract for publication). Poetry has proved both the easiest and most difficult form to write in; easy because I write in a fairly stream-of-consciousness fashion, and then edit it for whatever reason to make its verses better synchronised (although I can’t write in poetic metre at all, being death to how a syllable is stressed or unstressed), but also hard because the form is so subjective and difficult to master to the level that an editor will either like your style off the mark or at least understand it enough to accept it (even if just out of curiosity).

Poetry I’d actually wager, when taking place outside of an academic circle, is often a complete shot in the dark.

Prose should really be easier, but prose is scary. Prose can’t fall back on elision and mystique to elude the harder parts of characterisation and description (well, it can, but it often either fails miserably or has to be undertaken by a writer of great and well-honed skill, which as of yet I am still not).

At the end of January 2017, I made my first attempt in nearly seven years at writing a short story. I cannot fathom where its original inspiration came from (my book log from the time notes nothing like it that I was reading or had read), and it attempted to combine elements of horror, dystopian fiction, social satire, and black humour, albeit all in a more “literary” vein; it remains unfinished, even though I know everything that happens in it and know exactly how it ends.

This failure to finish set me back I admit, but in the coming months I read several works that I now hold dear to my heart and inspired me to carry on.

In February I read Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and then in March, his Tales of Ordinary Madness. The former is a collection of columns he wrote for the underground Los Angeles newspaper Open City in the ’60s, while the latter is a collection of short stories; however, both have a similar attitude of mixing fiction and (alleged) fact, involving a blend of the dirty realist style Bukowski was most famous for, and a literary form you might call “dirty surrealism”. His clarity of prose — even in his most pretentious and filthy moments — made it clear to me: anybody can write a good short story if they have the guts and tenacity to do so. (As he himself wrote: “if you’re going to try, go all the way.”)

Later in April I finished Borges’ Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, which in contrast to Bukowski, contains some of the most complex, learned, beautiful, and intricate pieces of modern short fiction in existence. They showed me a standard of structural intricacy and language use that I should strive to uphold.

But it the end, it took me until September that year (while reading more of Bukowski’s novels), to actually attempt to write a piece of fiction, and manage to finish it off. “After ‘Ours” is a short story (just over 2000 words) based on events in my own life but depicting characters who were fictionalised representations of real people (including myself), as well as incorporating a few completely fictitious elements. It took its model directly from the Henry Chinaski-centred fiction of Bukowski. It was eventually submitted to The Nottingham Review, where after a three month wait it was rejected without individual comment (a common occurrence I have since learned).

A few stories later I wrote “House of Chance”, inspired by a Channel 4 News report on the rising rates of obsessive gambling, which was to prove to be my very first piece of fiction published as an adult. Disclaimer Magazine — the only British publication I could think of to send such a self-consciously British piece — accepted it after I inquired subsequent to a month’s wait, publishing it as their ‘Weekend Fiction’ piece. Subsequently the general editor Graham Kirby contacted me and asked if I was interested in writing a column with a specific format: a weekly analysis of the most factually incorrect opinions and remarks sent on Twitter that I could find. I set the limit at five tweets a week (any more would be too exhausting for both me and the reader), and just over a fortnight later the very first Tweet Checking column was published. I was a columnist at last!

Since September last year, I’ve written around 70,000 words in total, fiction and non-fiction, not counting poetry. This comes to around thirty complete short stories (and a further dozen incomplete), three dozen microfictions (as I define it, short stories of less than 500 words), 31 Tweet Checking columns, two miscellaneous articles for Disclaimer, and a few experiments in writing for stage and TV. Of all the fictional works, only eleven have been published, all of the longer fiction in Disclaimer.

Eleven months into my renewed writing career and I admit I’ve already entered a slump. Since leaving hospital after an operation nearly three months ago I’ve written only one short story (of nearly 2000 words), only a handful of microfictions, and maybe only a dozen poems, while the Tweet Checking column carries on (although Disclaimer is currently on its Summer hiatus). I think an immediate lack of success has dulled me a bit — why write if no one will buy? How can one live? — but I know this is foolish. Many writers wrote fiction and poetry ‘on the side’ for years (maybe for even their entire lives), surviving as copywriters, journalists, labourers, homemakers, or even as bankers (as did Eliot) and mail clerks (as did Bukowski). It is also a paradox: the only way to get better is to write more and more, but I lack the motivation to write while not getting accepted by even relatively obscure non-paying publications.

On Submittable are logged twenty-nine rejections of fiction and poetry and one acceptance (that aforementioned poem I’ve just signed the contract on). It is disheartening to stare at that long line of grey ‘Declined’.

At least a dozen half-completed stories lie idle — largely because I don’t have the confidence to finish them knowing that I do not yet have the skills to do so with justice.

Poetry writing has almost ground to a halt even as I’m reading Armitage and Lorca for the first time.

My reading behaviour itself has become dysfunctional — at least 12 books lie about my bedside unfinished, more being added by the week.

I am the last person who should be giving advice to burgeoning writers, but I’m still, in my arrogance, going to articulate some things to illustrate what I’ve learned (or at least what I think I’ve learned) so far:

· DO NOT start writing with a novel. A very few select people can get away with this, but it virtually never works (and Christ knows I’ve got at least four stalled or stillborn novels under my belt, three of them from my teenage years). The only way to build your skills as a fictionist is to write shorter fiction of differing lengths — it’s also a good thing to experiment with how short a story you can actually write in order to be able to “trim the fat” off your prose style (over-writing annoys editors, and wastes both your time and the reader’s).

· Your first twenty or so stories are by-and-large ‘practice runs’. “House of Chance” was about the tenth story I wrote in this period, and its acceptance for publication is more of a fluke than anything else — it is said a writer can expect to write anything up to a million words before actually being accepted, especially for paid publication (which I myself have not yet received for any prose, only poetry). There are plenty of exceptions: John D. MacDonald (author of The Executioners, later adapted as Cape Fear, which I’m currently reading) wrote his very first story while in the army during World War Two as a curio and sent it to his wife, who then got it published in Story magazine without asking him. However, he then wrote another 800,000 words of fiction, dozens upon dozens of stories, over a three month period, and only managed to sell a small fraction of that for publication. As such, it’s best to build up your skills and develop a (and experiment with) style, testing the water with the best work in this body you create, and then carry on with what’s successful while taking in criticism.

· Even as you get things published, it may take a long time to be ‘realised’. Again, there are of course exceptions: Alyssa Wong’s very first story “The Fisher Queen” was nominated for four different awards; her fourth story won both the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award. But building a bibliography is important, as is building your recognition and audience. From his first published story, it took Ray Bradbury another nine years before he had his first book, and twelve years before his first novel.

· Start off small, but continue to think big and long-term for your prospects. Don’t waste time submitting to the New Yorker, or one of the larger remaining print SF magazines; read and submit to the little WordPress ezines, who don’t offer any pennies per word but get you responses and even admiration from communities of people who genuinely care about fiction and poetry for their own sake. You can then build from there; even Bradbury, Ellison, and Lovecraft all started off in the fanzines and amateur press.

· You need to keep reading no matter what. Never ever think that because you write you can skip out on ingestion of the raw material which made you want to be a writer in the first place. To keep reading, and in a varied way (while still being able to return to the writers and subjects you love), will keep you inspired and on your toes. No reading is a waste of time: You read a great short story? Well, then you’ve got a new standard to measure up to! Read a terrible short story? Well, then try and do better than that lucky idiot! Blow ’em away! Remember that reading is also just good for the soul anyway…

· Learn to accept criticism while insisting on your own style. For example, I’ve always been annoyed when several of my shorter works have been labelled “anecdotes” as opposed to stories when rejected, but ultimately these editors were right in that these pieces lacked real character and narrative development. However, this does not mean I did it all wrong because…

· There is literally no ‘correct’ way to write a short story, but there are still bad stories, because certain stories can only be written in certain ways (examples: an action-centric story cannot be done properly in an epistolary form; the use of a first person narrative in a story can sometimes make their knowledge of events outside of their immediate space implausible, if not impossible).

· However, it must also be remembered that, unfortunately, a few editors are, for want of more diplomatic language, idiots and frauds, and a single rejection should not dishearten you from submittance elsewhere. Most editors do it for the love of fiction, but some in reality do it because, to paraphrase an old cliché: those who can write, write; those who can’t write, edit.

· Write in different genres and forms to test your abilities and expand your possibilities. If you primarily write fiction, try writing a poem; if you primarily blog or write articles, give fiction a try; and so on. Writing in a different format may get you a ‘gig’ you were not initially trying for, like me and Disclaimer, and it ends up being a regular thing (but don’t count on it being a regular thing).

· Try to write every day, or at least on five out of the seven days of the week. Ray Bradbury used the analogy of a concert pianist: after the first day of not practising he notices; after the second, his critics notice; after the third day, his audience notices. If Behrouz Boochani can have the tenacity to write a novel through text messaging over the course of five years while being held captive in an Australian refugee camp, then you (and myself) really don’t have any excuse when it comes to a lack of writing.

· The penultimate is the bleakest: you must accept the possibility of failure. Many writers go through their lives only having minor successes; they never “get big”; they may have to spend their lives as teachers (which many writers end up doing anyway), office clerks, newspaper fillers; many writers are literally unknown because they have only ever had a tiny number of publications, if any at all (but not for want of trying). This could easily be you, even if you try your best. You may end up only ever writing for your own satisfaction, but believe me, that’s okay. The only advice in this area I can give you is: don’t quit your day job, or if you’re still quite young, ensure you can have a career to fall back on.

· However, the final point is positive: you are never too old or too young to start writing and potentially make a success of it. Haruki Murakami didn’t write a thing until he was 29, and now he’s considered one of the world’s greatest living novelists. Anne Sexton didn’t write any poetry until she was 27. Raymond Chandler didn’t publish any fiction until he was 45, having only started studying how to write pulp fiction after being dismissed as an oil executive and becoming a transient (although he was a journalist earlier in his life, as well as a poet, albeit not successful at either). On the other side: Lovecraft wrote both his first short story and first poem at age seven, and his first scientific articles at age nine; Ellison published his first short stories at age fifteen. Anyone can succeed if they can put pen to paper (or type pixels into a screen) and keep on doing it.

Wittgenstein said that to “imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” I guess then that to write must mean to create a form of life. So, go forth, and create (as must I)!