Back in the day, when I was starting out as a writer (well,
not quite, but we’ll come onto that later), I used to stalk other writers. The
ones who won things. The ones who were getting their stories published. The
ones who were, in summary, more successful than I was. I would devour their
blogs to find out where they were scoring hits and why.
Just as I was beginning to clock up a few scores myself, one
of my stalkees suddenly went off air in 2008. There seemed to be no apparent
reason, because he still seemed to be doing pretty well. I used to wonder if he
was OK and if he was, what it was that had caused him to throw in the towel.
Last week, however, his name – or at least the name of a
piece of his that I’d particularly liked – popped up again in a new anthology,
and I went hunting for his blog. Unexpectedly, it was still there and even more
unexpectedly he seemed to have resumed blogging and writing earlier this year.
There was no real explanation for the hiatus.
He isn’t the only writer I know of who has suddenly gone
offline, although he’s probably one of the more successful ones. And I think
this happens more often than we night imagine. You need a considerable degree
of determination and sheer single-minded pigheadedness to succeed as a writer.
I wrote my first story since leaving school (actually, my
first since O level) in 1986. It was an idea I’d had for ages and I thought it
was completely brilliant. I wrote it for a competition run by none other than
Rymans (really!) and because you could enter two stories for the price of one,
I wrote another. The second one was unfortunately complete bollocks, and I knew
it.
Impressively, you got a half-page critique for each story,
which basically confirmed that the second story was indeed bollocks, although
the first one had some promise. However, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t come up
with any ideas for other stories and this basically meant I had one single
story to submit anywhere. Which I duly did, a year later, to the BBC. And when
this inevitably got rejected, I gave up.
In 1993, after a brief flirtation with writing books for my
kids, I wrote another short story, which I submitted to the Ian St James Award
(remember that one?). This one was Highly Commended, the significance of which
completely passed me by. I wasn’t encouraged at all by this – in fact, I was
extremely disappointed that it didn’t win, because I was convinced that it was
utterly, utterly brilliant.
I also joined my local writers’ circle at around this time
and managed to write another story (my fourth!), which won one of their
internal competitions. After a few desultory attempts, I found a home for this
at a magazine called Freelance Informer, which had an acceptance rate somewhere
slightly above 50%, but never mind.
I wrote a few more stories during this period, but I was
painfully aware that they were already dropping in quality and I gave up
fiction altogether around 1995. It wasn’t until ten years later that I found my
way back, when I joined the circle again. Two years after that, I found the
writing communities on the internet and since then I haven’t really looked
back.
I often wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck with
writing stories in either 1987 or 1995. Did I just give up too easily? And how
come I did manage to stick with it in 2005? What kept me going this time?
Certainly, this time around, I found some wonderful support groups to help me
stay sane, both in real life – where the Verulam Writers’ Circle had become a
lot stronger and more fiction-focused – and online.
But maybe it was simply that this time I was ready. And the
other thing, of course, is that even when I wasn’t writing fiction, something
inside me had never really given up and was always looking for the chance to
get going again.
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