I have slowly come to understand that my main job is staying sane.
I have been a professional writer since 1992. I haven’t had another job since then. In the thirteen years after I left college, I did lots of jobs. I started out as a secondary (high) school teacher, but quit because I knew I’d never write in the evenings and during the school holidays. Then things got ragged for a decade, while I made many, many unpaid professional mistakes, and drifted in and out of paid employment. By the end of the Eighties I had sold a couple of short stories and started reviewing books, for literary magazines and then newspapers. I was given an advance of twelve thousand five hundred for my first book, which enabled me to write it without doing anything else for a few months, but I presumed I’d be scratching around again after I’d delivered the manuscript. I was a ten-year overnight success, and after Fever Pitch I never had to do anything else apart from stare at a screen. Fever Pitch gave me a career
.
So for the most part I have worked on my own, in a room. When I became a father, and I could afford it, I worked out of the house, eventually in a one-bedroom flat that was mine and mine alone, and I kept office hours. I don’t know if I am sane now - who does? But my mental health is still good enough that I can write with some competence and intelligibility, and people still pay me to do it.
My professional life has contained extreme elements, highs and lows. I have received nasty ad hominem reviews, and I have received praise out of all proportion to my talents. I have been nominated for prestigious prizes and won a couple and lost loads. I made more money than I ever thought I’d make. And throughout it all doubt, doubt and more doubt. That scene in The Shining when Shelley Duvall finds that Jack Nicholson has been writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again taps into a real fear writers have: how do we know we haven’t spent all that time alone producing something equally worthless? (I used to have a T-shirt with Torrance’s lines on it, and I used to wear it to work sometimes, possibly to dare the madness to invade my keyboard.
Let’s face it, there’s something rather disordered about anyone who wants to make art for a living. There is an unavoidable LOOK-AT-ME-I’VE-GOT-SOMETHING-TO- SAY vibe about us, however much we try to disguise it. I blame the parents. We want an audience, and wanting an audience is possibly suspect, as an indicator of personality. So we do have to watch ourselves.
These rules are intended to help:
Get dressed in the morning. It is very easy not to, if your computer isn’t too far from the bed.
Have breakfast.
At some point in the day, go outdoors, if only to get something to eat. You may have cheese, eggs and bread available, but that can be an excuse to avoid the outside world altogether. Of course, exercise is important. You do a job that involves only the most minuscule of movements.
Listen to AT LEAST the equivalent of one side of an album. (Approx five songs, or twenty-odd minutes of music, if you don’t know what an album is.) If you don’t like music…Oh, forget it. Everybody likes music. Read something that is not your own work, something that has been written and edited with care. Or look at art, somehow. This is all fuel for what you want to do. You are in the middle of whatever it is you’re doing. It probably seems messy and raw. It’s good to consume something that someone has finished. It makes you realise it’s both possible and worthwhile. Plus things have to go in, for something to come out. Art is food. ( I won’t continue with that analogy.)
Answer emails, both personal and professional. Whatever you think, you need friends and social arrangements, and you also need to pay your taxes, fines, etc. This is what normal people do, and you need to get as close to normal as possible in the way you live your life, even if your work is, like, really out there. Just because you create stuff, it doesn’t mean that your life has to be chaotic. Don’t be one of those artists, the kind that piss people off.
Look in the mirror at some point, especially as you live alone. Bald men in particular must remind themselves to do this. We don’t have bad hair days, so there is nothing to style or re-arrange, and as a consequence you may find that there is a piece of pepperoni on the end of your nose, and you’re not sure how long it has been there. (This may be the entire point of marriage - a spouse will eventually point out that you look stupid.)
Decide that you have finished work for the day. Decide it consciously. Say it. That’s it. No more. Make a clear division between work and leisure time. Don’t keep drifting back to the screen. I have literally drifted back to the screen, at 11.15 pm, to write that last sentence. It’s not good, to be a writer every waking hour. Because even if you’re not writing, you’re thinking about writing. Try not to, sometimes.
NO SCROLLING. You can buy a box that locks your phone away, for a period of time that you determine. Don’t Google yourself. Don’t look at Goodreads or Amazon reviews. You will learn nothing, and you may end up derailing yourself for hours, days, weeks.
Write.
If I could put that last instruction in smaller letters, I would. Writing is the easy part , in the sense that if you have a whole day in which to work, something will get done. That’s my whole career: something got done, most days of a working week, when I wasn’t promoting, or on holiday. I have been told I am prolific, but it really doesn’t feel that way (see below.) I understand that lots of people don’t have the whole day to themselves; I am really talking to myself here. And I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW HARD IT IS FOR ME TO ACHIEVE THE FIRST EIGHT OF THESE RULES.
I very rarely score a nine. Six on a good day. I always write something. I usually read something. I usually listen to music. I forget to look in the mirror. Some days I don’t leave the house. I scroll too much, and become addicted to games, and I do a lot of online quizzes. I am never tempted to Google myself or read reviews of my books. (That’s not discipline. It’s an aversion.)
I know writing isn’t coal-mining. And it’s not teaching kids, which is a hard, hard job. But you still need to look after yourself - because that’s what writing is, in the end: your self. You and your mind are all you have.
I long ago realised that everything I write is in some way intended to get my parents to notice me. Sigh. (I'm 53, one of them is dead and the other is well on the way out the door) Hey ho and onward. There's no unpicking pre verbal hard wiring. I live with it (and sometimes find it funny.)
I'm more of a typist (with shitty keyboard skills) than a "writer," but I've been typing for a living since I got my first job on a newspaper when I was 16. In the years since I've edited magazines, written thousands of record reviews, been a publicist, freelanced, and now I'm almost 90 I write a Substack and cobble together the occasional press release or artist's bio. Your post was so inspiring and true... Gave up smoking years ago, stopped drinking alcohol a year and a half back, and I'm too old to have (much) sex. Thank God for coffee and music.. . and I wish I could pay for all the Substacks I read, including yours. But, as John Lee Hooker famously said when he was 88, "It's too late to quit now!"