Unbind your inner Prometheus

It has been some years since you decided to take your puny talent stalking through the halls of  literary folk. And you have been punished for it. (see previous posts) Over this time, solicitous friends,

members of your family, people at work and the man at the corner shop,

have all taken you aside and asked you to stop.

But you can’t, because a cardinal of Canadian writing, once convinced  you that you had some kind of talent. (see first post)

W.O.Mitchell

You took a temporary office job, to tide you over the few months before your inevitable publishing contract came through. That was years and years ago. You are now one of the senior members of the office.  Long since, you stopped accepting invitations for social events.  Back when you thought that publication was a mere formality, you foolishly announced to everyone that you were writing a novel. Consequently, all conversations begin with one of three  questions.

•  How’s your writing going?

•  What’s your book about?
•  Am I in your novel?

If you answered these questions truthfully, it could spoil a social occasion. The answers are:

• It’s not, I can barely scrawl a sentence. I cry soundlessly for hours.
• If  I outline the main theme of  my book and the explanation takes longer than a very short sentence, several things will happen. Firstly, you will lose concentration and start eyeing those goat cheese stuffed piquante peppers.  Secondly,  I will hate you for this. Thirdly, I shall loathe myself for even beginning to take your inquiry seriously.
• 
•  If I lived a thousand years and wrote a novel a year, YOU wouldn’t be in ANY of them.

In the meantime, you have written two novels, half a dozen short stories and four radio plays. All of which have elicited about as much interest as a canape ground into the carpet, at the end of a book launch.

These days, instead of avidly consuming the book review sections of the newspaper, you screw them up and throw them onto the fire unread. You cannot walk through any bookshop without everything inside you buckling up into a tight pretzel of jealousy. Yes, you HATE anyone who has, even temporarily, had their name printed on a leaflet, let alone a work of fiction. You have had a disturbing fantasy involving the Frankfurt Book Fair, a small team of Special Forces and stun grenades.

Then one day while you are routinely working over Nick Hornby with the stapler (see previous posts) you have a revelation. There are hundreds and hundreds of people out there who write as well as you do. Yes, HUNDREDS.

Writing well is NOT ENOUGH, you have GOT to write something  of such outstanding originality that no one will be able to reject it. You have been tied to a rock, with literary folk pecking your constantly re-generating liver for long enough. You shall be Prometheus unbound. That weekend you start your third novel.

Your second novel; the decline of nations and repetitive strain injury

 You’ve done it! It’s written! And even though you say it  yourself,  it really is damned good. Your second novel is tight, taut and straining at the leash. There is not a word that hasn’t been weighed, not a sentence that hasn’t been honed, not an extraneous adjective undeleted. (See previous post) The plot concerns a woman who runs away from  her mundane life, running a mail order surgical appliance business, in order to take her jaded, fading soul to a Greek Island. There she is seduced by LIFE, as well as a part-time taxi driver/ bar owner.

The resulting effect is that she becomes the woman she was always meant to be.

You send the manuscript  to your agent.  However, when you call, someone else answers her phone. Her name is Arabella. You can’t get past her. Arabella blocks every attempt to speak to your agent, like an pepper-spraying  riot policeman intent on stopping an anarchist running up an alley. It becomes apparent to you that from the start of this conversation, Arabella has been speed-fingering her Rolodex, and has found your name with a big ‘X’ through it and the instruction, ‘Tell her I’m dead, suggest she contacts Flavia Hogsbootham, I’ve heard she’s just left an agency to set herself up and is as green as a slush pile that been left in a damp bathroom.’

You call Flavia Hogsbootham, send your manuscript and the months roll by. Your excitement and anticipation that nine months ago were causing you high altitude giddiness, have dwindled to a subterranean accommodation with reality. You pass the time at the office by viciously stapling yet more emerging bright young novelists. (see previous post) You really work over Kate Atkinson.  Then one day when you had given up all hope, the phone rings and you are invited to the new agent’s office to discuss your manuscript.

She loves every single thing about your manuscript, apart from the fact that it is set in Greece.

‘Greece darling, sooooooo dated, so Seventies.’

‘Are you sure?’ You ask.

’100 percent dear, write the same book, just change the location’

‘But Greece is the subject of the book, sort of intrinsic, ‘

‘Nonsense’, she says and waves you goodbye as she answers the phone.

You go back home, burn your manuscript and climb back into bed in the foetal position and stay there.

Six months later a friend invites you out. It’s a blatant attempt to get you speaking again. She has tickets for a play in the West End. It’s got ‘rave reviews’. It is by a Liverpool playwright. It’s brilliant. The plot concerns a woman who runs away from her mundane life and takes a holiday to GREECE and there finds love and FULFILMENT. You search for pictures of Willy Russell with your stapler set to ‘kill mode’.