W is for Writer by Compulsion

I wrote my first novel fifty years ago. I’d be about thirteen or about fourteen the time and this 5,000 word-epic, handwritten in a notebook, was a truncated adaptation of Fleming’s Moonraker. I say adaptation; what I really mean is rip off, retelling the story the way I saw it through a schoolboy’s eyes.

I’ve always had this compulsion to write. People ask what drives me, why I do it, and the answer is, I can’t not do it… well, I can, but I’d probably end up even crazier than I am now.

I have a prodigious rate of productivity, but there’s no real secret to that. I do little else with my sad life other than write, and when you use it to fill many waking hours, the number of words you write goes up. My all-time record was about 16,000 words in a day. Boy, I slept well that night.

The missus and I are off on holiday next week, and even there I will have my netbook. I may do nothing more than make a few diary notes every day, or scribble down some comic incident, but I will write.

Do you recall the old Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut advert where Frank Muir left his lawnmower running across the garden because he’d just had an idea? The punch was, “As a writer, you never know when an idea will strike, so it’s important to get it written down.” And it’s right. I’ve been known to pull over while out driving because I’ve just had an idea and I needed to make a note of it before I forgot.

And when I get out of bed on a morning, there’s a system in place. I pass through the kitchen, knock the kettle on as I go by, make my way into the front room and switch the computer on so it’s ready to begin writing. Only then will I let the dog out and open the curtains to let the daylight in.

Will I ever stop?

Don’t think so. Even when it ceases to be fun, which it does now and then, and becomes, instead, a drudge, I still can’t get through a day without putting virtual pen to virtual paper and scribbling out a few words.