Tag: Beginnings

Q&A part 1: background and inspiration

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I had an interesting Q&A session answering a range of questions about my writing, how I got started, my routines, and inspiration and so on. What’s interesting about it is that it forces me to think about and articulate many of the things I take for granted or haven’t considered for a long time. Whether you’re a writer or not, I think it can be a rewarding and enlightening experience.

There’s quite a bit, so I’ll add the entire session over a few posts. This is the first. Feel free to ask me your own questions.

Question: Can you tell us about your journey from the corporate world to becoming a writer?

P. J. Moroney: Well, I was always a writer, I think, but it was easier making a living working in corporate, so that’s what I did. I was good at it mostly and enjoyed a lot of it. It’s an interesting question to consider as I think the split between those two options reflected different sides of my persona. And I think my writing fed off my work to a large degree.

To start with, I never considered my writing to be a viable career option, so it was easy to work a job instead. My dad was a bit of a mover and shaker and would wear a suit to work every day, so I grew up around that. I never really considered any other option but white collar.

It suited me in ways. Back when I started, it was pretty ruthless, but I took to it. I saw it as a challenge and I discovered I was more robust and competitive than I thought. I enjoyed the cut and thrust. Enjoyed the striving. I think it made me a little of who I am.

It wasn’t a bad life. We were the cliche, worked hard, played hard. I had the attitude that I didn’t want to moulder and grow old in the corner, so I put my hand up for a lot. It was more interesting that way, and it could be very rewarding. It financed a lifestyle for many years.

For a while, I styled myself as a bit of a corporate bohemian. I was deliberately out of step in ways, but much of it came naturally. I realised it was more fun doing things for the experience than the reward, though I prospered from it. I was very confident of my abilities and always reckoned I was more value giving my honest opinion than toeing the conventional line. I think I got a reputation for being blunt, though once someone said I was like a wholesome, private school type. It might sound corny, but integrity was always important to me. I was never a yes man.

Long story short, you get older, life happens, shit happens, perspectives change, and so do the times. I was pretty jaded towards the end. Stale and unhappy. Even angry. I was writing a lot more by then – I’d always written – and was beginning to think that I might make something of it. The big moment came, and I took it – a redundancy. That’s when I really started to take my writing seriously.

I’m skipping over a lot of stuff here – a few catastrophes along the way, Covid, cancer, and so on, but that’s the general drift.

I still do some corporate stuff, but freelance, minus suit and tie, working from home and only when I want to. Have to pay the rent.

Question: You said you were angry. What were you angry about?

P. J. Moroney: I’d had cancer. I felt damaged. I was damaged – didn’t have the strength or stamina of before, I was half deaf and couldn’t speak near as well. It’s hard to take. I felt diminished, and it was a long time before I could accept it. I was always too proud.

Anyway, I returned as this lesser person. I had the will for the contest but not all the tools. So it seemed – and I think, in hindsight, I thought myself more deficient than I was. In the meantime, I felt labelled, categorised, squeezed into a smaller space. There was a bit of paranoia in it, but healthy paranoia, if such a thing exists. I could have let it go, but that wasn’t my style. Here I am.

Question: That’s quite powerful. How do you use that experience in your writing?

P. J. Moroney: Time will tell.

Question: How ambitious were you in your corporate life?

P. J. Moroney: That’s an interesting one to answer. I think I was ambitious on principle, but I was never much interested in status. I took things on like they were a contest I had to win. The harder and tougher it was, the more I liked it. When I started out one of my best mates told me he didn’t want any responsibility and I couldn’t get that. I wanted responsibility. I wanted to be the man, and that was true for many years. There’s some interesting psychology in that I might write about one day. Maybe I have already.

I never wanted to be CEO or anything like that, though. It was too reductive to me. What I craved was the challenge, which is why I moved from contract to contract and took on projects, I think. I liked jobs I could score.

I was ambitious from the point of view of the challenge and the rewards, but it was all about life experience. I wanted to live fully, which is why I moved between jobs and why I travelled. I had my own business for a bit, and I’m glad I did – that was a dare I couldn’t refuse. It was lucrative while it lasted, but life moves on.

Question: What inspired you to write your first novel?

P. J. Moroney: Was it inspiration? There was no light bulb moment. I was always writing. Scraps mainly. Short stories. I figured I wanted to write a novel one day, but…

This was about 20-odd years ago. One day, I had the idea for the novel. I don’t know where it came from. Elsewhere, I’ve said Heart of Darkness influenced me. I loved that book. The theme of journeying into darkness is a killer. Very me, as it turns out. Plus, the voice of Marlowe – I wanted first-person omniscient for my novel. But is there a direct connection? I doubt it. I think that probably came later.

I loved the old film noir movies, too. They probably had an indirect influence. But where did the idea come from? Magic. Thin air. One day, it wasn’t; the next day it was. That’s the beauty of creativity – it has depths you can never understand.

Mind you, though the idea came way back, it took many years before I started to write it. I’m glad it happened. For a long time, I thought it never would.

My kind of writing

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Go to the local library, and there’s a book on every subject. For every book, there’s an author. Scan across the bookshelves, and you’ll find thousands of books, each one different from the one before. Each book has a mind behind it, a history and perspective, passion and ambition. There’s a story behind each story.

Though I read books of every type, my writing is contained within a narrow band – fiction, literary. I read books that educate me, books that stir and excite, books that explain and elucidate, books that divert and entrance, every kind of book, but the only kind of book I want to write are those informed by the so-called human condition.

I think when you start out writing – as a young person anyway, as I was – it comes from a love of reading. Books are a great club, and you feel privileged to be a member. You read all the time, taken away to different times and places, with different voices whispering in your ear and different perspectives to share. You live it so richly that there comes a time when you think, I want to do that too.

I think I remember that moment in my journey, though it’s so cliched I’m almost embarrassed to relate it – but here goes.

One day at my local library, among four or five books I’d borrow every few weeks was a copy of The Essential Hemingway. I was about fifteen. I’d heard of Hemingway, naturally, but something had put me off him till that point – the cliche, perhaps. I knew I’d have to read him someday, so I finally plucked him off the shelf.

You can guess what happened after that. Like thousands upon thousands of people – men mostly, and often teenagers like me – I found myself transfixed by the seemingly simple but affecting prose.

As an adolescent boy, this was a period when I was particularly vulnerable to the robust language and attitude of someone like Hemingway. I didn’t know anything yet. I didn’t know who I was. Hemingway gave no sense to that but a feeling that was purely visceral. I could feel it in my stomach. I wanted to be as clear and true as he expressed.

Unfortunately, like thousands upon thousands of people, primarily men, I spent a good few years trying to emulate Hemingway’s style until I figured there was only one Hemingway and besides, I had my own way of thinking and my own words.

There comes a time when writing for its own sake is insufficient. You get older, you live more, you travel, you fall in and out of love, you suffer and you glory, you battle and you strive, and so on, as we all have. And somewhere in that, you feel as if you have something you want to say. Life takes shape in you; there’s an attitude, even perhaps some ramshackle philosophy; in any case, you feel it burgeoning in you. You must get it out.

But what is it? That’s the question. Indeed, that’s the journey – for me, at least. What the fuck is it? Writing is an exploration of that, a hypothesis. You seek to transmute some vague sense into words in the shape of a story. It’s a tryout. Is this what I’m trying to say? Is this what I know? What is this thing? And you try and try again, knowing you’ll never get all the way there, but you learn plenty by trying.

I was re-reading some Thomas Mann recently. He’s an author very different from Hemingway. He’s an author of the mind. An author of great sensitivity and insight. He’s one of those writers who make you look up from the page to ponder something you’ve just read. There is a kind of wisdom in such writers and often a terrible poignancy.

That’s the writer I want to be, though perhaps I need to be that man first. As much as anything, I want to do this for myself – and really, I am my own audience. I write to understand. It’s probably therapeutic, but at least it gives me an insight into the workings of human psychology.

Life goes much deeper than the simple routines we adhere to without thought, and each person much more mysterious than they generally allow. That’s what I want to write about, but through the lens of my own experience. I want to feel and know it and not let it slip by me. I want to articulate and remember it. Writing – for me – is a form of conscious living.

I’ll write next about the two novels I’ve written or am writing to explain this better. Suffice to say that my experience has led me to the kind of writing I do, though that doesn’t explain it all.