★ And In The End

What fol­lows is a very per­sonal post, for which I do not apo­lo­gise. It is likely to be the last post I make to this blog (though per­haps not; see below). I hope that it will not be sen­ti­mental. That said, it will be hon­est. I will write about some­thing that has been very import­ant to me since I was a wee scamp.

A long time ago — when I was an under­gradu­ate, fif­teen years back — I read an inter­view with Stephen King in which he described the moment his novel, Carrie, was picked up by New England Library. He was liv­ing in a trailer and had so little money that the tele­phone was dis­con­nec­ted. The ori­ginal news about the pub­lic­a­tion of Carrie came via tele­gram. King wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He went into town and found the only thing he could he ima­gine she wanted: a hair dryer.

Fifteen years ago, read­ing the inter­view with King, I already had two nov­els under my belt. They were awful. Since then, I’ve writ­ten four more. These last — Déjà Vu, Proper Job, Flashback and The Amber Rooms — are quite good. Déjà Vu has been pub­lished and the other three have been with my agent, John Jarrold, for some years. Four, I think. A long time.

Someone wrote — King again, I think — that a writer is a per­son who will write no mat­ter what. In other words, if you lock them up in a cell without pen or pen­cil, they’ll write on the wall in their own blood. I didn’t believe that when I read it and I don’t believe it now. Even Stephen King comes to a point when the blood dries up. Writers are people. We — they — would want to play foot­ball if they were foot­ballers, not sit on the subs bench; they would want to have a work­shop, tools, and cus­tom­ers if they made fur­niture for a liv­ing; writers want to be read.

Fifteen years is a fair crack of the whip. As of now, I am no longer a writer of fiction.

For my part, I can­not write fic­tion these days. There are too many words unpub­lished behind me. To write a novel is to com­mit years of your life. Nobody wants to com­mit them in vain. They will do this, of course, in the begin­ning, with a cer­tain faith that if the end product is any good, then it will be pub­lished. Right now I do believe the books I’ve writ­ten are good. I believe that sec­tions, ele­ments, moments of them are very good. My agent is an excel­lent one and he would not be wast­ing his time with me oth­er­wise. The real­ity is that the pub­lish­ing industry is small. Only so many doors are open to a writer of sci­ence fic­tion thrillers, and, when you’ve been round the doors once, it’s the same people open­ing them next time.

What is to be gained by retire­ment? Why not take a break? These are ques­tions that my agent — who has been very sup­port­ive of my decision — has asked.

Since writ­ing the first draft of The Amber Rooms, I’ve felt a deep­en­ing dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the craft of writ­ing. This dis­il­lu­sion­ment is almost cer­tainly super­fi­cial. Much as I hate to write this, the feel­ing is prob­ably based on some­thing akin to jeal­ousy. It is not jeal­ousy per se. Rather, it is the feel­ing expressed by the sen­tence ‘I could do bet­ter than that’. Not an easy thing to admit. But with each instance of shoddy, clichéd, or gen­er­ally below par pub­lished writ­ing that I read, my faith that my own long years of effort will ever count for some­thing (that is: read­ers) dimin­ishes to the point where I am barely pick­ing up a book. The pro­cess has become pain­ful. As a child, books were like fuel, crack cocaine, and world trav­el­ling rolled into one. My writ­ing has taken me to the point where I am in danger of pois­on­ing the well from which, it seems, the greater part of my mind has sprung. Given a choice between the two — lit­er­at­ure and the stuff on my hard drive — I choose literature.

My fifteen-year crack at a writ­ing career has had other con­sequences. We all know what it’s like to be served at a super­mar­ket by a sulky teen­ager who might well work in Lidl but, you know: it isn’t what she *does*. Her mind is on greater things. So too has my mind been on greater things. Not all of it, not all the time, and I’ve tried not to be too rude. But many sac­ri­fices have been made by me and the people who love me in order that I have the time and space to write. There is a cost to this; they deserve the bene­fit of see­ing that the cost was not wasted and, as far as I can see, this is not going to happen.

This post is not meant to be a dol­lop of ‘poor Ian’ schmaltz. I had enough of that in one glance when I bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook around the turn of the cen­tury. As I gave it to the middle-aged, friendly cash­ier in Exeter Waterstone’s, she sighed at the cover and said, ‘Aw, you want to be a writer,’ as though I were Grandpa announ­cing my wish to take tiffin with the Maharajah. The empir­ical evid­ence sug­gests that very few people who write fic­tion ser­i­ously ever ‘make it’ in the accep­ted sense. We only hear the stor­ies of the suc­cesses. But in these days of Web 2.0, and blogs, the pro­cess is more public.

A col­league said some­thing to me a couple of weeks back. We had read psy­cho­logy at the same uni­ver­sity, though his was the year below mine. This col­league is now a world-renowned researcher and someone I look up to. I remarked that I was glad he had made such a suc­cess of it. He looked at me, blinked, and said, “Well, I’m sur­prised it turned out like this. You were always the golden boy.”

That startled me. Then I recalled sit­ting in Dave Earle’s advanced stat­ist­ics class and skim­ming over page after page of equa­tions, barely tak­ing them in, because I didn’t really *do* psy­cho­logy. I was a writer. Meanwhile, there were hard-working friends who had not made it onto the MSc or, if they had, could not afford to take up a place. I was sit­ting pretty with a full-time com­pet­it­ive schol­ar­ship keep­ing me in pen and ink, not to men­tion another schol­ar­ship lined up to carry me through my PhD — and as the Chi-square con­trasts flowed before my eyes, I was more con­cerned with the open­ing para­graph to Déjà Vu. In my defence, I did work hard on the book, and the book was good.

Several years later, how­ever, it’s time to *do* psychology.

So now we come to the end of this post, and this blog. It is likely that I’ll con­tinue to tinker with my extant manu­scripts (not least to incor­por­ate some notes kindly provided by writer friends). When these are com­plete, I’ll make them avail­able as print-on-demand books, prob­ably via Lulu, and then archive the site.

Stephen King made me want to be a writer. Or, rather, his book The Stand had such an effect on me that the half-formed idea of writ­ing books for liv­ing became what I *did* for the next fif­teen or so years. When asked what I wanted to do as an adult, I would, instead of shrug­ging in a mor­ose teen­agery way, say, ‘A writer,’ and the response would be a nod of approval; no doubt it doesn’t hurt to encour­age this ambi­tion in a young man, par­tic­u­larly when good English is such a trans­fer­rable skill. The model of Stephen King was the one I aspired to: he wrote a thou­sand words a day, rain or shine, and pro­duced vivid, good qual­ity, character-driven stor­ies that I loved. At the end of each book, he would write his name, his loc­a­tion (usu­ally Maine, USA), and dates between which he had writ­ten the book. I looked at those dates and thought ‘That’s what I’ll be doing’ and I rel­ished the pro­spect of those years.

In 2005, I read a short, hand­some review of Déjà Vu in The Guardian as my friends in the Rashleigh pub at Charlestown har­bour slapped me on the back. The theme of the even­ing was that this review marked a mile­stone on the way to some great, lit­er­ary city. Outwardly, I whole­heartedly agreed. But I also knew there was a good chance that I was hold­ing the high-water mark of what would serve as a my lit­er­ary career. It did; that felt OK at the time, and, in the end, it’s still OK.

Thanks, Aliya, the UKA Press, UK Authors, Ken, Neil, the Exeter Writers’ Group, Debra, Scott, and, of course, my agent John Jarrold. John has been tire­less and fault­less in his efforts to get my work under the right noses. A top man. And not to for­get my part­ner, Britta: she put up with all man­ner of con­sequences while I spent time cre­at­ing altern­at­ive real­it­ies. I never did get her that hair dryer.

Ian Hocking
This Writing Life
Canterbury, UK
2003–2010