How To Be A Proper Writer :: The Beginning of a Great Adventure

Illustration by Allie Brosh

“Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t … There has to be a cut-off point though. If you’re in your mid-to-late ’40s, and you still don’t know what’s going on, then maybe try a little guilt. What harm can it do?”

For too long I have been a paper bag on the breeze. Not a paper lantern with a flame to light the way and a bold and noble purpose that elicits gasps of appreciation from an awestruck crowd. No. More like that nondescript plastic carrier bag in American Beauty. But made of paper. Lightweight, white, slightly waxy, torn down one side like a ruptured lung. Dancing for sure, but to what, goddamit?

For too long, I have allowed myself to be whipped and tossed hither and thither, slapping on occasion – in the process – into the half-cocked gob of near-near disaster. Slave to whims that washed up slyly on the vast formless waters of my will, I fell and swooped like the comedy frown of a clown, borne on solely by the wind.

My life has been mostly heartfelt, ultimately, but rarely more than half-arsed, at best.

Now it’s time to stop all that. And focus. Focus on one final venture. Less ludicrous than the others I think, and hopefully 100% arsed.

Eight years ago this week, I started pretending to be partially physically deformed and I gave myself a year, online, to find love. As it happened, in the real world, I already had love, and by the time the year was over, I had lost it. How funny.

Of course, in the real world, when I originally set out to find love, online, what I was really after was an audience, and direction. Both of which I found.

Then lost again.

Years ago I used to know this artist, a painter, and whenever you’d ask him about what he was working on, he’d reply, after a brief, clearly painful inner struggle, ‘It’s a process.’ Christ, he was annoying.

But aside from the irritation he caused and his evident fear of speaking the truth, which was that he hadn’t actually painted anything for months, he was right: it is a process. And one thing – no matter how half-arsed, no matter how ethically questionable, no matter how irrefutably futile – inevitably leads to another. And ultimately, the process, your process, becomes your life. It becomes who you are. You are what you do.

And here I am.

Doing something else.

This project, however, is the one I’ve been putting off all my life. Essentially, I’m giving myself a year to make a decent living out of writing. That’s it. And I’m going to chart my progress here.

My aim is to treat it the same way I did Bête de Jour, and to apply the same diligence. Mostly I’ll be aiming to gain a regular supply of work writing for magazines, whilst building up relationships – responsible and true – with editors and other journalists. I’ve done this to some extent in the past, so I think I know roughly what I need to do, although I recognise I’ve got an awful lot to learn. I also know that much of it comes down to a numbers game. The more hours you put in – targeted, disciplined, wise and well-wrung hours – and the more pitches you pitch, the more successful you will be.

So that’s what I’m going to dedicate myself to in 2016.

Along the way, I’ll read books, talk to people, take advice and apply myself. This blog will be a space for me to focus myself and to track my progress, as I attempt to turn my aimless, predominantly unheeded writing life into something more purposeful, and something more fruitful.

First off, I need to master time.

Wish me luck.

Anon!

 

Filed under: HTBAPW