As a writer, you have a wonderful excuse to embrace your inner madness, says Peter Sherwood. Just don’t expect to be paid for the privilege
I recently met a girl who said she wanted to write, yet she seemed per fectly sane. It can be a shor tcut to star vation by way of alienation, and if you think you understand rejection and being ignored, you have not tried scribbling for a living. Shunned for years by publishers, at a time when a sympathetic assistant editor’s assistant might bother with rejection slips that piled up with an Everest of bills, most of my dazzling prose disappeared into a black hole.
What does it take to become a writer, she asked solemnly? First step, try to forget about it. Or a creative writing course, or literature degree. Few writers pretend to know what they’re doing; like Nike, they just do it.
All I’m good at (save compassion for children in poverty, and there’s not a lot of money in that) is expressing myself in the written word – and satire. Translating that into a living was absurd and frightening: you can be successful and still exist in squalor, just ask the millions of budding poets scratching to pay the rent. But as Charles Swindoll famously wrote about attitude: “I am convinced that life is 10% of what happens to me, and 90% of how I react to it.”
I plodded on because scrawl was all I had. That, plus lifelong depression and ADHD symptoms: wonderful assets if you’re planning life as a suicidal recluse. From dreary trade magazines (please, kill me now), I fabricated a career in public relations until I got the hang of it, and long before that faked it as a tennis coach in the US, a feat of Pinocchio proportions. I could play and looked good: smooth and technically fine, and provided I’d read all the coaching books (I had) and could hit the ball over the net more times than my students (I could), I was a coach.
Later, with a friend, I compiled a series of 10 alcohol-assisted wacky books that sold well and became a masterclass in monetising schoolboy jokes. Loving the great humourists, I thought maybe I could do that. I did, sort of, nervously sending a couple of articles to the editor of the SCMP. He called to say he wanted one a week, and I should amuse and offend in equal measure. For eight years he never changed a word. I’d found my voice, while learning to avoid using too many adjectives, and words like Brobdingnagian and hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia (yes, it’s a word).
How to start? Okay, if you insist: read and write – a lot. While I’m hardly Hemingway, I do have a ragbag mind, believing in the adage that if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot must be lethal. Another thing: you can’t be literally minded and pedantic and write anything decent, particularly comedy and satire. To quote Python John Cleese: “I’ve known many brilliant people, and none were literally minded.”
And, yes, inject a touch of sublime insanity. Peasant Zorba the Greek said to Basil the intellectual Englishman: “You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else – he never dares cut the rope and be free.”