Why I Write
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed that it is a long time since I published a children’s book. Lately I’ve been working on sorting out my large archive of photographs of Scotland which I’ve taken over the past 50 years and more. I’ve been compiling the images into a book, and putting them into context, because photographs of mountains and islands and lochs and people mean very little unless you know when and why and how they were taken, and who the people are.
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| Ellie on the Isle of Skye, March 2003 |
From the perspective of what I suppose I must call age I feel as though I am viewing my life from a mountaintop, and I see how some of those now distant events cluster closely together, and how there are periods where the ordinary business of life goes on, untroubled by big events.
I decided to stop teaching full-time and try to write children’s books in 1993. Just as I did so, my wife’s, Ellie’s, mother had a stroke which changed her life and ours too—she spent the rest of her life in care homes. Then, in 1994, Ellie was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the very same time she was applying, then in her late 30s, to do a degree at UEA. During the next nine years she finished her degree (with a First) completed an MA (with Distinction) and embarked on a fully funded Phd. Then, in October 2003, she died.
While she was doing all that she was undergoing major surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and I was writing children’s books. All of my children’s books (the ones with my name on the cover, that is) were written between the time Ellie was diagnosed and the time she died, and I think that, during that time, we lived with a kind of furious intensity. It wasn’t competitive, it was just that we were so aware of how little time there might be and, eventually, how little time there actually was. While writing about this time though, I realised that illness and death are not that interesting. Anyone who has seen death will tell you that it is a very ordinary thing that we all do. What is interesting is how people respond to illness and death—what they do about it.
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| Ellie's gravestone in Monk Soham churchyard. It was designed and carved by David Holgate The inscription reads: The world is still beautiful though you are not in it. The line is from a poem by Sorley Maclean and used by permission |
I didn’t stop writing after Ellie’s death; the habit was far too deeply ingrained by then, but the book I wrote next was very dark and I don’t think it was very good either. My agent didn’t like the first material I sent her, but I’d inherited a bit of cash and I could afford to write without a contract (or so I thought) so I finished the book, and in the end my publisher turned it down. Back then, and I don’t know if it’s the same today, if you missed your slot with a publisher it was a case of starting all over again. So I started writing another book that my agent wasn’t very keen on.
I never managed to make that book into something that was publishable and I do wonder, looking back, what exactly was that mysterious ingredient that enabled me, during those outwardly difficult years to write a series of life-affirming, entertaining books. And the funny thing is that when, a few years later, my original publisher approached me to do some ‘fee-based work’ I had absolutely no trouble writing books with other people or under other names. I even enjoyed it.
Nowadays I have no urge to write for publication. Every so often I take the unpublished typescripts out of the drawer and think about whether there’s anything to be done with them. I have other shorter fiction, too, that I know doesn’t quite work. Maybe I could do something with them. Maybe. But it would take time and energy, and even if I did make them publishable (according to me) I’d still be faced with the task of persuading other people to agree with me. I have other things to do, and other kinds of writing to do.
The books I’ve written lately have been for a small audience of family and friends—books about bicycle travels and family history, and now about the two things combined. It’s fun and interesting to do and full of similar challenges to all those earlier books. I love the fact that nowadays you can produce a completely professional-looking book all by yourself in an edition of one. Here, for example, are a few spreads for the book I wrote for my train-obsessed grandson when he was about 5 years old.
I have another blog here where you can read about my books if you want to know more.
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