Once upon a time when I was young and naive I thought you only had to get one book published and another and another one would follow and your career would be made.
Little did I know.
I didn’t know about creative writing classes or that writing is a craft that you have to learn. Instead I just sat down and wrote a novel and because I was lucky and the world was easier back then and because I knew someone in publishing I got it published. It did neither well nor badly but the publisher didn’t seem to mind and then another idea jumped into my head and I wrote that one too, and now I thought, Ah, I see how you do this – I’m on a roll here – I can’t go wrong – all you have to do is find a strong idea and write a book that people want to talk about – and there you have it, career made.
It didn’t work out like that.
The couple of years that followed were the most frustrating of my life. I wrote two more novels – both felt half-hearted, neither of them worked. I was over-thinking the problem, trying too hard and I had lost my spontaneity. Although if you had told me that back then I would have answered sadly, ‘Look, I’ve got the mortgage to pay, how can I be spontaneous?’
And so I stopped writing – or at least writing books. I built a different career, though I never stopped scribbling, in cafes and on trains and park benches.
‘The Museum Makers’ crept up on me gradually, took form of its own accord without me telling it what to do, became part cultural history, part memoir of my bohemian family. And this time I tried not to over-think the book, tried to keep the spontaneity, though it wasn’t easy with a full-time job and bills to pay. And then (the very great) septemberpublishing.org/ took it on so that now my life had come round in a circle and I was a writer once again, though this time I told myself it would be different. This time I would not torment myself trying to write another book. ‘The Museum Makers’ would be enough.
And then one day I pulled a book down from my shelf, thought ‘Oh this is a strange story’ and went to a not-very-well known library in London to find out more. I stepped in through its doors with a vague idea in my head and left at the end of the day besotted with a story. (Old libraries have this effect on me. I read Umberto’s Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ at an impressionable age and I think I never quite got over it.) It’s not so much that I found a story, more that the story ambushed me and has not yet let me go.
So now I am half way through another book and this is what I’ve decided to do from now on – to try not to put pressure on myself, to try only to write the stories that really grab me, to try to write from the heart for my own pleasure, and somehow – fingers crossed – if the story works for me then it will work for my readers also. And though I know it’s big ask – to stay spontaneous, even playful in these hard times – that’s what I’m sticking to.)
And the library? It’s the Warburg at the south end of Gordon Square near Euston in London. It’s atmospheric and like all the best libraries, it has its own personality.
- My last book was called ‘The Museum Makers’ published by https://Septemberpublishing.org
- The image at the top of this page is Rogier van der Weyden’s Mary Magdalen Reading (in the National Gallery in London). I love it that it is the bad girl of the Jesus story who loves to read.
- The image half way down is of the library at http://St.gallen-bodensee.ch in Swizerland (one of the most beautiful libraries in Europe).
- And the third image is of Chethams Library in Manchester (http://Library.chethams.com), which still retains its chained books and its locked-in alcoves.
