Na de Brand, een Nog Kleine Stem

According to a recent BML report, people are paying less and less for books. This is bad because until you’re famous enough to charge thousands of pounds to go and speak in front of an audience, the way that authors make enough money to keep writing is by people spending money on the books they’ve already written. The less the bookseller makes, the less they’ll want to pay the publisher and the less the publisher will be able to pay authors.   

This is especially scary as I’ve only just got my head round the fact someone is paying me for my writing at all.

This week a cheque arrived in the post. Cheques are always exciting, but especially so this time as this was from the Dutch language deal for my first novel (which Babelfish reckons will be called Na de Brand, een Nog Kleine Stem).

But the moment you get paid is also a strange one. It takes away immediately the memory of how difficult the thing was to write, and you just think, my god, if I could churn out three or four times as much as I do, I’d have it made.

This week, for example, I finally submitted a 1500 word article about being ill as a child that I was asked to write in December. I rewrote my 1500 words seven or eight times from scratch, and each time was left with a voice that sounded like a vague fifty-year-old man of some breeding, talking about the history of a family generation he’d never met. In part I’m sure this was down to the fact I was reading Fathers and Sons, Alexander Waugh’s very enjoyable book about his family history.

I kept writing sentences like ‘The truth of the matter was, I had become rather unwell’ and I started to imagine myself as a four-year-old in a frock coat with my nose in the air. It’s hard not to play into some romantic idea of childhood sickness, like the boy in the wheel chair in the secret garden - pale faced and with a blanket over his poor shrivelled legs, a frightfully creative little chap. Of course this isn’t what it was really like but that’s the problem about writing articles, rather than fiction. You can’t just make it up. 

Because of this, it doesn’t seem to matter what the subject is, for me writing articles always feels incredibly difficult, perhaps this is because generally they tend to want a much more personal slant than I am comfortable giving. I write fiction because I want to imagine some otherness, I want a break from thinking about my own life (which perfectly nice as it is, can’t compare to a made up one), I want to imagine how other people get by in other situations, so it always feels a bit loud-mouthed to start banging on about my own life.

Eventually I found a way of telling the story of when I was ill, and I’m starting to see that writing things like this article and also like this blog, can be useful in reminding myself that when the cheque does arrive, it’s not because I copied 1500 words out of the phone book, but because I sweated and worried over the writing. And I suppose that’s why people pay you to do it in the end – it’s hard.