Because writing about writing is easier than writing…right?

A snappy title, if I do say so myself.

This idea came to me as I was running earlier today. This is not a common experience recently. I’m seven weeks off of getting married, and am not exactly in the best shape I’ve ever been in. Whilst I don’t expect to move mountains, a more trim look might be better for the photos that will be looked at multiple times in the future. I ran the Brighton Marathon last year, so am not averse to running, but I have had the best part of a year, and several hundred pints, off.

I’ve become very partial to book podcasts whilst I run, or even when I walk down to the train station for any trips up into London. I like The Guardian podcast, as well as The New York Review, with some other smaller ones that I will listen to upon the occasion of an interesting topic that catches my eye. I love the opportunity to listen about books that are by authors who I don’t know, about topics I often don’t really care about. The fact that there is someone out there who has sat down, researched, constructed and published a book is amazing, whether the book is aimed at me or not. If anything, it excites me – I want people to discuss my writing in book clubs; I want the opportunity to discuss the deeper thematic layer to my novel on a podcast with a sultry, intelligent female interviewer (..they all seem to be female – and sultry, for that matter); I want to be able to type my name into Google and not just be directed to the Labour MP- I’d take a 10th page entry, honest!

I am a failing writer though.

The use of the word ‘failing’ is key here. I still try, but just struggle to commit to a project or an idea for long enough to see it through. The closest I came was a completed entry for NANOWRIMO last year, though I decided that my theological understanding was weak enough to not really allow me to fully commit to the story of a man who ends up in Limbo for not believing in God (Limbo represented by a slightly more grey Milton Keynes). False starts, notebooks of ideas, thoughts about scripts, short stories and poetry. Hell, sub-consciously I probably am thinking that these musings and blog postings will be great material for my fourth book, after I’ve outsold E.L. James and we can all look back and laugh at my inconsequential and asinine comments.

I went to Brussels with my other half last year. On this holiday, as well as drinking copious alcohol of a delicious and high-percentage nature, I read Julian Barnes ‘A Sense of an Ending’. It was one of the best books I ever read, and I finished reading it desiring not only to write myself, but to write a letter to Barnes gushing over what he had managed to produce and how creatively wonderful I felt the novel was. The letter was never written (if you want a sense of how it would read – only a better version – Andy Miller’s letter to Michel Houellebecq in ‘A Year of Dangerous Reading’  is what I would have sent, only eminently more eloquent).

Later on in the year, I read George Orwell’s harrowing vision of a dystopian future, ‘1984’. This was in preparation for the potential teaching of a dystopian fiction scheme of work at the school I have subsequently left. Even though I never had the opportunity to actually teach it, it did leave me feeling that it was so lofty, so brilliant, so perceptively imaginative, that I could never ever write anything that was anything close to what Orwell wrote down on that page, so I probably should never bother. Someone did point out to me that not writing something as good as one of the best books of all time wouldn’t be a big issue, but it shows the irrationality of the failed artist – two brilliant books, one making me believe anything is possible, one making me want to curl up into a ball and sit in a dark corner, never to have any other delusions of grandeur.

What is this blog going to be about in the long term? Books, reading, writing and me. I’m currently writing again, but am spending time I could be writing my soon-to-be bestseller (…) to write this – as if this is an acceptable way to distract myself from the difficulty of putting coherent and cogent ideas into a narrative of my creation. I hope you decide to follow my journey.