By the time I finished writing my first novel, I’d pretty much taught myself how to write a novel. So I was ready to try it for real. That sounds kind of self-deprecating, but it’s actually not so far from the truth. Who can teach you to write a novel? I dont think anyone can. The only way to learn is by sitting down and having a go at it and letting yourself get it wrong, opening yourself up to criticism and advice, submitting your work to publishers and journals, swallowing the rejection letters, elbowing your way onto the reading circuit, crying and chain smoking your hair out. That’s what I did. But I suppose it does help to be a little prepared as well. It’d be kinda hard to write a novel if you hadnt ever read one. You gotta read a lot of books, read the way other writers tell their stories. I tend to latch on to particular writers and then hunt down everything they’ve written and look for the commonalities that bridge their work. I will read until they disappoint me, and then I’ll start on someone new.
“When I’m not writing, then it’s the last goddamn thing I want to do.”
Books have always carried me through. Reading is the one thing I do always, no matter what state my life is in. Whereas writing, on the other hand, comes only when I’m completely backed into a corner. Because when I’m not writing, then it’s the last goddamn thing I want to do. I know I should be writing, but I just dont want to. But the longer I’m away from it, the more unravelled it seems my life becomes. I get restless and dark and I push people away. I take to the bed. I might take a drinking fit. I drive faster on the highway. I might start writing poems. I have even started jogging. And then comes the moment when I realize what an absolute arse I’ve been for the past weeks or months, and I own up to what I am and what I need to be doing, make up my mind to start in writing on a certain date…and the cloud lifts.
I’ve often thought about this restlessness, about what makes people write or paint or sing or take pictures. I guess, at its most obvious, it’s the need to capture how you see the world, the need to convey an opinion, the need to express what is in your head and your heart—where you come from, what you feel. But where does the need originate? It comes from a crisis of communication. I think those with the creative bent are considerably more alienated individuals than more conventionally minded folks. It’s the artist’s twisted attempt to socialize. Writing is a way of announcing that we feel alone and that we dont want to feel alone anymore.
“Writing is a way of announcing that we feel alone and that we dont want to feel alone anymore.”
For me, when I write, I want to recreate how things went down. I want to reinvent what happened in my own terms. I want to alter the memories of those who might have brushed against me when I was not at my best. Put words in a character’s mouth that wouldnt necessarily come out in real life. Renegotiate the conditions of my history. And I like to toss a bit of fiction in there as well.
I started writing Right Away Monday before Down to the Dirt was published. The latter was signed with a publisher already, so I had no idea what to do with myself. All I knew was that I wanted to keep exploring roughly the same themes and types of characters as I had brushed against with my first book. I guess that’s always what the next book is—the attempt to get it right the next time around. That’s the constant state of dissatisfaction that all writers and artists endure. But imagine being satisfied. What a horribly flaccid idea. People come up to me and say how they loved this or that piece I wrote and how I must be delighted with it, and all I can think is how much I’d love to go back and rewrite it.
A big part of publishing your work is also learning to let it go, coming to terms with the fact that it no longer belongs to you but to the reader. That it’s going to be interpreted and misinterpreted or praised or shit on, and there’s nothing you can do or say because it no longer has anything to do with you. I remember seeing copies of my books on the shelves and freaking out because—for whatever personal reason or mood I was in—at that moment I didnt want anyone to read them. I wanted them back. It’s hard sometimes for me to be proud of work that is often perceived as being over-the-top angry or dark or destructive. Couple this with the notion that my work is largely autobiographical and it gets me feeling a little raw and naked.
“I remember seeing copies of my books on the shelves and freaking out because at that moment I didnt want anyone to read them.
But it’s difficult when complete strangers believe that you are one and the same as the characters you write about. We all know how dull and boring and uninspired real life is. Sure, there’s lots of sex and lots of ways to entertain yourself of a Friday night, and of course there are the ones you love, and there’s motorcycling and trouting and birthday parties and opening nights and travel and strange lands with stranger customs, but there’s fuck all to believe in anymore. Our beliefs are fuelled primarily through propaganda. We are told to recycle, compost, boycott, strike back, to not stand for it. We are told to subscribe, conned into believing we can make a difference when we know in our hearts that something else is more accurately true: that there is no God, there is no country, there is no one, big forever love, no soulmate, there are no miracles, no ghosts, no second coming, no one ever really wins the lottery, no one really gets their own TV show, there are no coincidences, you will never get that apology, your lover can never truly come back, nothing will ever really change out there, not for the better, not according to your own terms. Smoking in public is gone and it’s never coming back.