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.