Why I Write:
written for RLF Forum, posted November 2007
Why do I write? Good bloody question. As I write this sentence I am furious with myself for choosing to go down this path. I have just been given my marching orders from yet another rented digs, I’m waiting on tenterhooks to see if a new agent will take me on. I have a writer’s body (hunched shoulders, flattened arse, pot belly, screen-staring eyes and bad coffee breath). I haven’t managed to read a novel in ages because I read so much student work. I’m still seething from one particular rejection in the summer of my new novel. This well-known editor asked my agent how she was supposed to turn my sales figures around with such a ‘quiet’ book. Why do I write – I don’t know. I must be mad. Someone feel free to stick a gun to my head. Pull the trigger. I wish I was anything else; a baker, a fisherwoman, a noodle maker. A French fry maker. A goat herd. An acrobat. I’d do anything else, really.
Now I’m supposed to write a sort of interesting heartfelt piece about writing for the RLF forum, something personal and funny, moving and maybe even intellectual, like something Margaret Atwood would write. Maybe talk about needing to make my mark on a stone or visit the underworld to ‘negotiate with the dead’. Or maybe I should talk about how I always loved books or admired a wayward aunt (like Jean Rhys). Well I don’t feel very funny or personal or scholarly or romantic right now. I feel cross and down and out. I feel bummed out. But I’ll give it a try.
I started writing at about four years old. I wrote on the walls at home. Bumble bees and flowers. The odd word. Pictures for words. I also wrote all over the furniture, mostly with fluorescent marker pens. My mother had to scrub the walls in my room and the rest of the house once a month. When confronted with this graffiti, I would always strenuously deny I was the writer, not knowing then that I was the only person in the house exactly three feet high, the same height as the graffiti.
When I was at school, we were streamed in the third year. There was the A class, the B class and the C class. You were streamed according to how well you did in the Latin exam at the end of the second year. I got an A in the exam and was strongly encouraged by Mr Martin, my Latin teacher, to take Latin and hence go into the A stream. But the girls who went into that class all looked about forty-five and had crisp ginger hair and blue NHS specs and I didn’t like the look of them at all. So I decided not to do Latin and stayed in the B class. It did piss me off, though, throughout the years, that all the academic school prizes, every year, went to the girls in the Clever Girls Class.
Then, in the fifth form, something amazing happened. One person who was not in the Clever Girls Class won one single prize. As far as I can remember no other person from any other class ever won a prize at our school. That person was me – for English. It’s still the only prize I’ve ever won. I think I write because I’ve been so proud of myself for winning that prize. I also write with an ingrained sense of still not wanting to be in the Clever Girl’s Class. I still don’t like the look or sound of officially clever people. I still don’t want to be streamed.
Also, I write because I have curly hair. I don’t care how mad that sounds. You try living with a massive straw octopus on your head. My hair has blighted my life, also since about the age of four. My hair has always dominated my head, my face, my clothes, my self-image, other’s image of me. It has been all the conflict, internal and external, any writer needs to be getting on with. My hair frizzes, puffs up, inflates with air – just like a mattress. It makes me hot, itchy and sometimes it can make me look like Neil Diamond. Because of my curly hair I only get certain jobs; because of my curly hair I only get certain men. Nice girls have straight hair. Men like and want to marry someone nice. My hair has been enough. It has caused me to be at war with myself.
I also write because I am frequently cross. Furious, annoyed. Mad, pissed off. Bad-haired. I write out of vexation. I write because I want to kick a chair. Often.
I also have a bad habit (also since about the age of four) of staring at walls. Close friends, boyfriends and family members have witnessed my hour-long wall stares. I don’t know if this rings a bell with anyone reading this, if this is a common writerly habit. But I can stare at a wall for ages, thinking, plotting, reworking the tiny disasters which I have endured in the recent past, imagining other outcomes to events which didn’t go as planned, composing clever one-liners which would have won me an argument I lost. My staring-at-walls time is fantasy time. I have been an avid fantasist since childhood, making myself laugh, (weirdly), when I’m on my own in a room, making myself sad or happy, putting together, in my woolly head, snippets of conversations I only half-understood at the time, trying to remember parts of parties I missed through booze or dancing too much. I stare at walls and think and plot and usually start to makes sense of the life I find myself leading. Or else I start to make up stories, wild, ludicrous stories, stories of my other life, my alter-life, the one which the other-Mon lives (the one with straight hair). I then, more often than not, write these stories down on paper.
There, I feel a little better now.
