The writer in public

Writers are not good at reality.

They have a problem with it. If they didn't have a problem with it why would they spend their lives inventing alternate realities? And by reality I mean public reality, the reality that takes place outside their lonely attics. The reality they have to live in more and more. The reality they encounter in agent meetings, at book festivals and library events and literary schmoozathons.

Last week I talked about how we are using the Internet more and more to promote ourselves and how that is a good thing. But that is only half of the story for the 21^st century writer. The other half is that we are now part of the deal. I mean, we can't just hide under our books the way woodlice hide under plantpots. Someone has lifted up that plantpot and exposed us to the light and we are scuttling about like crazy.

As a species, writers are famously shy. My favourite poet, Emily Dickinson, could only speak to visitors from behind her closed door. Thackeray once crossed the country to visit Charlotte Brontë and couldn't get more than a monosyllable out of her. And J D Salinger lived for forty years in almost total seclusion.

Yes, writers are weird. A writer is someone who, almost by definition, takes 80,000 words to say something. Talking casually about our work - even to agents and publishers - makes us feel awkward.

Yet for me, over the decade I have been writing, there have been more and more occasions where I have been expected to meet people, and even talk to them. And then, when a book comes out, there are times I have to do the very worst thing of all - Read In Public (RIP, as I call it).

Nowadays there is a whole sub-culture where otherwise sane-looking people go and pay money to sit in tents and watch writers - you heard me, writers - perform live. Obviously I use the word perform in the now archaic sense, meaning sitting on a chair and mumbling something about Hilary Mantel into a clip-on microphone while simultaneously failing to open a bottle of spring water.

And not just that!

Some of us have to do radio and TV from time to time. You might have heard me being asked odd questions about the gender implications of The Hungry Caterpillar by John Humphreys on the radio. And one or two of you might have seen me on BBC Breakfast recently. I have no idea what I was doing there, but I was drawn into a discussion of Roger Daltrey's honed abs and ended up blurting out to ten million people that I liked country music - Emily Dickinson would have combusted.  

I do such things because it is good exposure, but do I enjoy being exposed? Of course not. I am a woodlouse. A woodlouse who used to have a panic attack going to the corner shop.

When I was lucky enough to be on the TV Book Club the price I had to pay was to sit in my own house in an interrogation chair under bright lights having to make words come out of my mole-covered face and listen to my own voice, a voice that sounded pompous and nervous all at once, while a woman kept on coming in with a tickle-brush to powder over my sweating face.

I was once on Blue Peter to accept an award for a kids book I'd written and they had to film the handshake five different times, because I am so socially handicapped I can't even shake hands in a way that looks natural.

Now, why am I telling you all this? Good question! Well, since you are asking, when my next book The Humans comes out in May there is going to be a launch in association with Booktrust where I have to read in public, and about a squillion other events at festivals and bookshops and libraries and fish and chip shops (probably).

It is not just me. Lots of writers are doing events this year. The modern writer is expected to be a very public person. There are now, in the UK, 465,724 literary festivals taking place every year. Writers are suddenly very busy being very public.

And I have been worried about this. But two weeks ago a revelation happened.

I was talking to a group of university students about writing and, for the very first time, I actually got it. I enjoyed it. I understood that actually we writers are a little bit different not just in bad ways but some interesting ways and people are almost as intrigued at what comes out of our mouths as what comes out of our pens.

And though there are more meek Emily Dickinsons than Dickensian extroverts among us, if we get over ourselves, we can realise it is actually a part of the same process.

Whether we do it in books or blogs or festival tents we are in the business of communication. We write because we care about other people, about what they think and how they think. Writing a book is a public act. Maybe the most public act. It is an attempt to expose our souls. It is a passionate contribution to the great conversation that is human life.

So yes, ignore the rest of this blog. At the deep, quantum level writers - even the shy ones - have always been public people. Maybe we are the most truly public people of all. And if you want to see me at an event later this Spring I can honestly say, for the first time, that I would genuinely like to see you there.