If there is one skill needed to succeed in life it must be the ability never to allow disappointment or rejection to stop you from trying again. Everyone has to face those twin demons from time to time, but if you choose to follow a profession like writing then you are going to be coming up against them most days.
To find the energy and patience to write a full-length book you have to believe in it wholeheartedly, you must be filled with optimism and enthusiasm, despite the fact that everyone knows the odds against any book being a success, or even finding a publisher and an audience, are enormous. The more you love the story and the more time you dedicate to perfecting it, the more disappointed you are likely to feel if it is rejected. You know you shouldn’t take the rejection personally, but inevitably you do. Each rejection takes another small bite out of your soul; wounds which even the greatest triumphs will never quite heal.
In my last two years at school I was fortunate to have a tutor, Dave Horlock, who was only 10 years older than me, although 26 seemed enormously ancient to me at the time. He became famous within the school for producing spectacular school plays to what seemed to us to be almost professional standards. He became a friend as well as a tutor, introducing me to the wonders of Oscar Wilde (I was already spending much of my time doing imitation Aubrey Beardsley posters in the art room, so it wasn’t a hard sell) and Lord Byron, and tasking me first with the creation of the sets and scenery for his productions and then giving me acting roles after seeing me perform as a bored ‘Bottom’ in a classroom dramatisation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He helped me pass many long evenings in conversation when I probably should have been working for my exams, having escaped across the quadrangle from my study and climbed the stone spiral staircase to his rooms in the turret of one of the Gormenghast-like towers, collapsing onto the sofa with his dog.
There must have been something in the sea air that swirled around those towers and quadrangles, which encouraged daydreamers to try writing. Evelyn Waugh was there during the First World War (and published Decline and Fall, a deadly satire of the teaching world, when he was 25). Jan Morris was there at the end of the thirties (although known as James Morris then), and went on to become one of the world’s greatest travel writers. Tom Sharpe arrived there around 1940 and became famous for his comedic novels, particularly the university-based Porterhouse Blue. Sir Tim Rice, the lyricist, arrived in the mid-fifties, followed by the playwright David Hare around 1960, who has written about his time there in a play called South Downs. Fellow playwright and screenwriter, Christopher Hampton, would have been there at much the same time as Hare.
The first I knew that Dave Horlock had other plans than being a school teacher all his life was when he announced that he was leaving at the end of term in order to become a professional director at a well-known provincial theatre company. I was devastated to lose a friend who had made the long school evenings interesting, particularly as I had been looking forward to doing one more production with him before I too left. He admitted that his only regret about leaving so suddenly was that he wouldn’t be able to stage the play that he had been planning.
‘What were you planning?’ I asked.
‘Hamlet,’ he replied. ‘I was going to ask you to play the lead.’
‘You were going to ask me to play Hamlet?’
A tidal wave of disappointment swept away any possible pride or excitement at the thought that he had been going to offer me such an opportunity. A near miss, after all, is as good as a failure, and there are always going to be more near misses in life than there are going to be bullseyes. Over the following years I would experience that same feeling many times whenever an agent would fail to ring back when promised or an editor who had raved about a manuscript had to break the news that they couldn’t persuade anyone in their sales team to share their enthusiasm, or a book which I was certain the public would love sank without a trace within weeks of publication.
For most writers, just like actors and artists, it takes us many years before we can support ourselves from our chosen craft, and even once we are established we continue to be hit by disappointments and rejections more often than not. Most people find the odds too daunting and fall by the wayside as the years go by. Those who succeed are the ones who just keep going, refusing to give up, always trying new ideas, always creating new material, always believing that there is no other way to live.
There will always be shooting stars, people who hit lucky first time and soar much higher and faster than everyone else. They are the people who get written about in the media most often, but the reason they get into the media is because they are unusual. Those moments of good luck, or divine inspiration, will happen to nearly everyone eventually, if they just keep going. ‘Every dog,’ as the saying goes, ‘has its day.’ And if they never happen? Well, you will still have had an interesting time chasing them along the way.