The writer’s rocky path
“You’re going to be a writer,” said Tracey with the unshakable authority of a 15-year-old predicting the brilliant future of her best friend. And why not? At that very moment I was lying on the floor of her bedroom with a copy of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth open in front of me. Once I had learned to read my head was seldom out of a book. In fact, the entire Sharp family were never happier than when seated, feet up, in a comfortable armchair, a steaming cup of tea at hand, ready to crack the spine of a new novel. Books are central to our way of life. Once a friend showed me a beautiful new handbag, bought at Barney’s in New York, in a smooth conical design of honey-colored leather. “But you can’t get a book in there,” I blurted out instinctively. Leaving the house, even on a short journey, say a trip into town, without something to read was like going out without your shoes on, unthinkable.
The problem, however, with the equation set up by my teenage friend—passionate reader equals writer—is that the former does not lead naturally to the latter. While the classical music lover knows that years of practice are required to play an instrument and the ardent soccer fan is restricted to playing big-league games in his dreams, as most people are able to write so the would-be novelist requires only something to write with and on, in order to launch their literary career. What could be easier? Anybody who has ever been inspired to put pen to paper, or these days fingers to the keyboard, will recognize that pre-writing euphoria. On the other hand most will also be familiar with the first post-writing frustration.
For years before starting to write I had nourished myself mainly on a diet of Jilly Cooper novels. I did, and still do, love her romantic and humorous tales of life in the British upper class—she is a kind of latter-day Nancy Mitford. “There was the Hon. Basil Baddingham, a notorious roué with patent leather hair and a laughing swarthy face,” Of course I also read Joan Didion and Susan Sontag and this was, in literary terms, where I wanted to go, no question, but Cooper was my constant paperback companion. What I did not realize was how much of her style I had inadvertently internalized over the years, the vocabulary, the cadences, so that when I finally sat down to write my first article, a tribute to veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, poor Martha emerged from my piece like a badly abused Mills and Boon heroine. This was fifth-rate writing of the worst kind.
I vowed to read only “good” writers in future and reminded myself of the words of German author Heinrich Böll, “I wanted to write early on but the words came late.” So I spent the next years slumped on the sofa immersed in Thomas Mann and the Times Literary Supplement and waited. Predictably nothing happened. Unfortunately, these were also the years when rabid individualism and phony self-empowerment were all the rage, as if success in life was no more than a button on our psychological dashboard, which once found and pressed would send us hurtling towards stardom. Somewhere the value of hard graft had fallen by the wayside. Embarrassingly, it was my ex-husband who pointed out, in derisive tones, that a writer was somebody who sat down and wrote, and who generally wrote a lot before being short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and he knows what he’s talking about—he’s a writer himself.
Well, I began to write, making many hideous mistakes, taking on work that I was completely unsuited to, often smoothing crumpled earlier attempts from the paper Mont Blanc under my desk in the hope that they were somehow less bad than on first reading them. Then finally producing pieces that I was not too ashamed to submit to editors and which were, though somewhat altered, published. And now I am an editor myself, reading pieces by people who have taken the long route to writing and others who are clearly on a breathless sprint towards publication. I am interested in it all, curious to read other people’s take on the world and happy to know that I have a talented and dedicated team of coworkers with whom I can put together what I hope is an enjoyable and readable magazine. And on the bad days I will remember what Joan Didion wrote about being an editor: “I liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine. I liked all the minutiae of the proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazine went to press, sitting and reading and waiting for the copy desk to call.”
