Author: William Gallagher

Come in

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Here’s a thing. If you show up unexpectedly at my front door, I will be delighted. (Bear with me, this is a theoretical exercise. If you actually show up at my door I will be delighted but I also haven’t tidied up, so it’d be that special kind of delight that borders on panic.)

In principle, anyway, you coming to my door uninvited is in all ways a very good and a very great thing that would make me happy. Really delighted: I’m beaming at the thought. And promising myself I’ll hoover. Since it’s you, I might even dust. Could you pick up the corner of that carpet for me?

If, instead, I show up at your door – well, no, that’s just not going to happen. This isn’t you, this is me. I cannot come to your door unexpectedly or without invitation unless I have a really good reason. “Excuse me, are those flames coming from your roof?” My just turning up as me, not with a message or a parcel or a purpose, I cannot do it. It will never happen. No matter how much I enjoy talking to you, I just can’t do that. I don’t know why.

So when I do go to someone’s home, when they have invited me, I find that very special. It doesn’t matter if I’m there for some practical reason like a meeting or because I’m picking you up to give you a lift somewhere. You don’t let someone you dislike into your home – not if you can help it anyway – so I am alert to the fact that you are welcoming me in. I get the compliment and it’s a big thing to me.

I have had meetings in friends’ houses recently and I’ve felt all of this. There’s a project I’m working on where we tend to have day-long meetings at a particular friend’s house. She actually apologised this week, said she knew it was inconvenient for us to schlep over there and I explained she is insane. It is a treat for me. I think it’s a privilege.

There is just something about how we are all the same and we need the same things, we do the same things, we have the same things – we have kitchens, we have loos, we have books – but everywhere is exactly and precisely as different as everybody. What you choose to have in your home. The spoken and unspoken rules, the way that you choose to cook, the spaces where you work seriously and the spaces where you relax. It fashions a specific environment. It’s an exo-skeleton, a body around your body. It’s the contents of your head and your taste and your past made corporeal and physical and made to be right there within touching distance.

Maybe I’m just groping toward the cliché that a home is someone’s castle but I think your home is you.

Appropriately, my mind has just darted off thinking that I must have a very untidy mind.

But anyway, the other night, Angela and I picked up a friend from her narrowboat on the canal and I felt all this even more acutely. It’s a huge boat and I want it, I want writer Elisabeth Charis‘s home exactly the way she has it, but also it’s closed in enough, it is small enough, that all my feelings about being invited in somewhere were concentrated.

Angela said it best: she said the boat hugs you.

There is a cocoon feel even as the boat rocked a little in the wind. You felt distinctly separated from the rest of the world especially as you could see that rest of the world bobbing outside the window. It helped that you could only make out the rest of the world because there was street lighting near the canal. Otherwise, it was dark out there and it was warmly bright inside.

Equally, from the outside as we walked up to it, I wasn’t sure Elisabeth was even in. The boat looked dark to me. It looked like every other narrowboat I’ve seen on canals and now I wonder if they were all occupied, all the time. They look cold and forgotten. Interesting paintwork, yes, but also somehow alone and closed, bumping next to to the towpath. Yet maybe every one of them was this alive and warm on the inside.

All those boats, all these houses on the street, all these homes in the world. Maybe this is just on my mind because we had a good night. Maybe if Angela, Elisabeth and I hadn’t had a fine natter I wouldn’t be thinking about the bubbles we form around ourselves and about the membrane between outside somewhere and inside it.

I do like houses and homes and I do like property TV shows like Grand Designs. And I think I may be being pretty grand here myself, I may be overblowing things yet I feel it: being invited in to someone’s home is special.

Mind you, maybe I’m only thinking about this because Elisabeth is tidier than I am.

Praise on toast

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I had a bit of a rant about the idea of the praise sandwich this week on The Blank Screen news site. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then and also I’ve been discussing it quite a bit. Consequently, I want to rant a bit more. Do you mind?

You might know this under a different term so let me explain what I mean by praise sandwich. It’s when you have criticism to give a writer and you think it’s going to be pretty bad so you begin with something nice and you end with something encouraging.

The idea is that the little writer believes the praise and is thereby cushioned enough to accept your true criticism. That the poor little writer will learn from you, that you can give them the benefit of your knowledge and do so in such a way that they don’t realise how harsh you’ve really had to be.

Give me strength.

You’re already detecting a certain antagonism from me about this idea so let me nip in quickly with this: no, it hasn’t just happened to me. It’s certainly happened over the years and I think I’ve even been taught to use it too. But I read a piece recently by someone who was advocating it and perhaps because it was couched in a lot of talk about being professional, it narked me.

Because if you actually are a pro, you can smell the praise sandwich from the first bite.

Don’t waste my time with it, don’t insult me with it. If you think you need to give me a praise sandwich, we shouldn’t be working together. We should not be in the same writing group. Good writing groups are so hard to find that I never have. I’ve long since given up trying, though I did have a go with one a few months ago. It wasn’t the right group for me: there was some professional work going on there but not much and at most the writers fed each other praise on toast.

I did the same: I ended up talking encouragingly to a writer who will never get her book published. I could tell her why, I did tell her why, she just didn’t and never will listen to anyone. Hard to know why she was there, really. But then she’s not a pro. She’s a reader, not a writer. Usually criticism is just one’s opinion but in this case my points about her book were as practical and pragmatic and certain as if she’d told me she was entering a poetry contest and the piece she was submitting was a 170,000-word doctoral thesis about trout.

Tell me what good I did her. Tell me what good the praise sandwich I got back was. This was a group that prided itself on being so tough that it could scald the skin off your arms but to me it was kindergarten. It was nap time at kindergarten.

I got some useful stuff out of them. A couple of things I will change in my work. I remember there was one I actually changed right there and then, I made the fix on the copy on my iPad. But the useful wasn’t all that very useful and I had time to make that change because as good a criticism as it was, I got it instantly, accepted it instantly, agreed instantly and thanked the critic instantly, but still had to listen to another five minutes about it. You take in the first minute, thinking there’s going to be something else. Then around the third minute you tune back in because you think it’s fascinating how someone can find this much to say about a character’s job title.

The thing of it all, of course, is that this particular group does not like my work and I don’t like all of theirs. I don’t actually feel they were doing much work and I did like the material I thought was being done seriously. I was just in the wrong group.

You learn from criticism and being with a new group of people ought to be helpful. Fresh eyes, new ideas, all that. But it so often doesn’t happen. Groups form an ecology and as different as each group of people is, they share the same problems for an outsider. It’s like they’re in a bubble and what you see through the iridescent shifting skin of that bubble is different to what they see inside. Inside, this is a world and it has its rules and especially its hierarchies. Both formed over a long time, both now so ingrained that the members don’t see them as artifice but as reality. Their opinion is not their opinion, it is fact.

Whereas what you see as an outsider is chiefly the clock. Uh-huh. Is that really the time? Already?

I think that inside the bubble you are protected and you have your place. I know very many writers who enjoy their writing groups, I know of many groups that I think are run superbly. I’ve a friend who once stopped enthusing about her writing group mid-sentence because she was embarrassed how much it meant to her. It was clearly an important part of her life and I think she felt awkward about that yet I told her the truth: I envied and I still envy her. The support and the friendship, it’s a precious thing for anyone and maybe especially so for writers since we spend so much time alone.

So don’t think I’m against writing groups and do think that this precious envy is why I tried out this particular one that, frankly, I will never name. You can whistle for it, I ain’t squealing.

I just wondered then and was reminded by the piece I read recently about what it’s like just inside the bubble yet not inside the sanctum. I don’t think it can be a happy place. I picture one trying to get further inside, the way we all do in all social groups somehow, and that means accepting the rules, agreeing with them. I remember getting the sense that this group I tried was interviewing me for a position and not seeing at all that I was interviewing them back for whether I wanted to join. I remember thinking that fitting in with them would not mean improving my writing, it would mean learning to write the way they do.

I’m also not squealing about what piece it was that I read. So this is a one-sided argument but then I’m a man with a mouth and two blogs, I’m always one-sided arguing at you.

I just don’t call it being professional.

That was the narking thing. Calling yourself professional because you use the praise sandwich on someone. That tells me you think you have to use this softly-softly approach because the little writer needs help from you. It tells me that you think you’re right and they’re wrong. That you’re professional so you have to give them the six-inch sub and it’s not your fault if they’re so unprofessional that they can’t take it.

Be supportive, don’t be supportive. Criticise, don’t criticise. Praise, don’t praise. It’s completely up to you but don’t take a moral high ground simply by calling yourself professional. Don’t set yourself up as an excoriating critical group and then waste my time with a finger buffet of praise.

Writers need help and we need influence and we need criticism. I can’t point to any group I’ve ever tried that got me what I need but I can point to countless people who have. Some of them I’d call mentors, all of them I’d call friends now, every one of them I’d call professional. One of them phoned me up laughing down the line about how bad a scene I’d written was. He’s now sick of me using that as an example of a favourite moment in my writing but it is. He didn’t open by saying “Well, I think you typed this marvellously…”, he went straight in to the criticism. And he got me laughing about it too.

This wasn’t because I’m rhino-skinned and it was only partly because I am a professional writer, I am a writer by profession. It was more that I knew he and I would fix that scene, I knew that we both wanted the material to be the best it could be. I loved that he just could just laugh at me because I love that he knew he could. He wasn’t precious, I wasn’t precious, this was art but it was also a job and we got on with it.

So, please, I’m asking you, give me some credit for being a pro and do not use the praise sandwich on me. The praise sandwich is baloney.

UPDATE 12:10:
Writer and group-runner Andy Killeen has commented here yet WordPress is blocking a link he refers to. Here’s where he wanted you to go and now I’m off there myself to see whether he agrees with me or not. It’s going to be an interesting piece whichever way he stands.

Get up

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The following takes place between smugness and embarrassment. Paragraphs happen in real time.

Listen, I have a thing. I have this accidental new gig talking about productivity – it’s a dull word but getting yourself more time to write or compose, it’s worth the odd dull word – and one crucially important aspect is to do with finding your best times to work. In an ideal world, with no day job or kids, there will be a time of day that just suits you the best. Maybe you’re a late night writer, for instance. You just are or you just aren’t.

My point is to look for that time, experiment around until you know when it is and then always do your best to keep that period clear. It’s simple and obvious enough, you get it.

Only, as an example, I generally tell people that I found my best time for writing is when I get up at 5am. The sole thing I stress and underline more than the fact that this is just an example, I am not recommending you do 5am too, is that I stress and underline and weep about how I loathe it. Getting up to write at 5am is all kinds of stupid and it is a damned curse that it’s when I happen to function the best. I would like put this functioning best capability to functioningly sleeping. And similarly, if you write best at midnight, I envy and applaud you. That’s when this should be done. That’s when real writing happens. Going to bed before midnight should be illegal.

But.

I’ve changed my mind.

Not about how stupid it is to get up at 5am and not one pixel about how stupid I am for doing it.

But it’s no longer just an example.

I’m afraid it’s a recommendation.

I fell off the productivity wagon a little while ago, coming off the back of a big book project. Plus I had a lot of evening speaking engagements and it was both crucial that I didn’t fall asleep in them and also knackering that I was doing them at all. Also, plus, and, lots of excuses. It has always been that the weekday 5am is inviolate except for when travel makes it impossible or other things in my schedule make it unwise.

Whatever the excuses and the number of excuses, the result was that I had a couple of weeks where it wasn’t practical to get up at 5am.

Yet I didn’t feel all that more rested and refreshed.

I felt rather bad, actually, and things were just not working out. A few rejections, a lot of very poor writing from me. I do a weekly email newsletter for my productivity site, The Blank Screen, and in it there is always a brief section that tells you what I’ve been writing lately. It is there to hopefully keep prodding you into doing your own writing, it is there to certainly prod me. And the last few have been feeble. Practically nothing going on. And so the newsletter that used to be a nice prod for me started to become a bit of a cattle prod in my side. Just for that section, I enjoy the newsletter. But lately not that section. (I’d like you to see the newsletter, it’s good. Do sign yourself up here.)

I don’t think I consciously connected the problems to the lack of 5am starts but about a week ago, I felt so overwhelmed with what was going on and what wasn’t being done, that I made myself get up at this stupid o’clock again. Not because it’s my best time but just that I needed the number of hours it gives you when you start that early and you don’t finish until late.

And since then I’ve pitched more successfully than I have in months. My new book is about 10,000 words further on. I thought of a new business, started it, announced it, got my first paying clients. We are now fully in the smugness section and I do apologise but there is embarrassment coming, honest. So yes, I can see I got up early and I can point to specific things that have gone well because of it. But I think the truth is that it’s me who has made them go well, not the clock. But the clock has got me some extra hours in the morning, it’s got them before the phones start ringing, it’s given me a head start every day and by 9am I feel I’ve done loads – because I’ve done loads.

So that’s it. It is 5am, Monday to Friday for me now, forever. Always.

Cue embarrassment.

Except today.

Last night I was at the Royal Television Society’s awards gala dinner in the Midlands and I think I must’ve passive drunk because my head is a jackhammer on a spin cycle. Also, I got to bed around 1am. And it’s going to be a late night with a lot of driving tonight. So yes, the excuses are back and I’m embarrassed. But I’ve got the buzz of the week’s work behind me, I’ve got a buzz from last night, actually, and I know that next week is going to be full of 5am starts so I am hoping that sheer momentum will carry me over today’s jackhammer lie-in.

I’d suggest we chat at 5am some time soon but we should be working, shouldn’t we?

Writers, retreat!

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I may have got the punctuation and the emphasis wrong there. What’s my job again? I’d like to borrow you for a moment here to talk about two things, the first of which being that clearly writers should never retreat. Clearly. Not without a very good excuse and a chocolate biscuit.

But the second thing is that there is a writers’ retreat this weekend and you can make it. It’s an online retreat called Inkspill – I keep saying this to people, but I love that name – and it’s also free. I’d be mentioning this to you by way of being a service and for once telling you something useful instead of just my usual self-aggrandising ego-laden pondering, except that I’m a contributor to the Inkspill retrate. So this is still an S-AELP. I came so close.

Inkspill is here on A Writers’ Fountain, the blog of poet Nina Lewis. She’s organising the weekend and it’s a series of blogs and videos to do with writing and a bit to do with writers. Chiefly writing. You’ll be writing during this, so you will.

I am one of the writers but you’ve also got Charlie Jordan and Heather Wastie, both of whom I’m looking forward to stealing from – I mean, learning about.

My section has an intro video which makes little sense unless you’re on the Inkspill retreat and unless you know what my section of the programme is. Without that knowledge, which I seem to be keeping from you, the intro video just looks strange. I’m okay with looking strange. Do pop off to Inkspill to find out what’s going on and when. But for now, let’s look at me being strange.

I’m overselling the strange. And I am conscious that I sound like one of those people reality TV crews get bouncing up to the camera and saying “you should film me, I’m kraaazy” and they’re not. Don’t expect me to be very strange in this video, it’s not like I wear a hat, but as well as the mystery of what in the hell I am talking about, I do give you a writing exercise. It’s one of my favourites, too.

Writing prompts vs writing promptly

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It’s probably a vestige of starting in journalism where you knew what you had to write and you knew you had to get on with it. But it has taken me so long to warm to the idea of a writing prompt that actually, I still haven’t. Not quite. I see the appeal a bit more than I did yet the notion someone can say “Write about… happy daisies” still feels a bit wet.

I can’t shake the feeling that a prompt is necessarily random and trivial. That if I were ever to write about happy daisies it should be because something in them makes me shake and I must get it out, not because a stranger glanced at a Van Gogh painting.

What’s slightly embarrassing is that I’ve used prompts, I’ve set them for people.

What’s mortifying is that people have set them for me and I’ve written some of my best material because of them.

Maeve Clarke, an author I worked for and then with at Writing West Midlands’ Young Writers scheme, once set her group of 8 to 12-year-olds this prompt: write a fairytale. I was helping out at that session and I joined in. I wrote a fairy tale. In about a quarter of an hour, having never typed a single word that could ever be construed as fairytale-like, I’d written 900 words of The Prince and the Spinning Wheel’s Angular Momentum. And you see that’s a link? I was so pleased with that wildly out-of-my-wheelhouse story that I posted it here on Self Distract.

The disadvantage of posting it, though, is that I can now see the date: November 2012. It’s two years since I had proof both that a writing prompt could spin me off into new and satisfyingly unsafe areas – and that when prompted, I can’t half write promptly. Nine hundred words in a quarter of an hour. That tale fell out of me, didn’t it?

Maybe I can’t really account for why it’s taken me two years to properly accept that writing prompts can work, but there is a reason I’m telling you all this today. Last night, I invited my family to an event in which I will be reading a story. I’ve been a writer for my entire adult life and I’ve never invited them anywhere before. To be fair, I can’t bring guests to a Doctor Who recording. And even in the past year when I’ve been doing a huge number of talks, every one of them has been either closed or far away. But now my own family is spending money to come see me. I’m not scared.

I am, but I have help. The event is Seven Minute Tales and it features six authors reading extracts from stories we’ve written to order. I’ve seen two of my fellow authors’ tales so I know my family will have a good night. Plus I burn to read mine and the fact that we have to stand there in front of a room of people and read is dwarfed by the fact that we only get to read extracts to them where I burn to read the whole thing. I know, as all of us in the event know, that seven minutes works out to about half the story if we’re lucky.

You’ll get six half-stories, six tales where you will end up wanting more. Fortunately, if you buy a ticket for the event, you also get a copy of the book collecting them all. So I suppose you don’t have to wait long to find out what happens next. But I want to tell you.

I want to read it to you. I am that pleased with my tale and it is something I would never and I think could never have written without one hell of a prompt. And without having to write it quite promptly.

This is what I call a real prompt. I was commissioned by Roz Goddard of the West Midlands Readers’ Network to create a story for a particular group. Six authors were assigned to six reading groups: the groups had to apply to the scheme and the authors were asked to pair up with them. I don’t know yet where everybody went but the authors are Yasmin Ali, Liam Brown, Charlie Hill, Catherine O’Flynn, Kate Long and I. It’s pretty good company to be in.

I got a reading group in the village of Combrook, which to my navigationally-challenged mind is near Stratford. I bet the group would say Stratford’s miles away, what am I talking about, but that’s the rough direction I pointed the car at.

The job was to meet with this reading group and have a natter about fiction. Talk about what they like in reading, talk about them and talk about their village. Then I was supposed to go away and write about 2,200 words of a new short story for them.

I tell you now, you would want to live in Combrook. And you would want to join this book group. And if you did, you would be agog and delighted at the torrent of tales they could give you about the village. There is too much to ever get into a story but then that wasn’t the brief, I wasn’t meant to document the village or recount a real tale, I was really to create fiction that this group would like.

Talking with some of my colleagues, I know we all came away with huge long lists of points and elements and facts and preferences. One author, I think, managed to get the entire list into the tale and that’s rather amazing. Another cherry-picked two or three elements and crafted a story I think is the best of the ones I’ve read.

And then there was me.

I recorded the session plus I made several thousand words of notes and I didn’t use any of them.

All this glorious material, all these delightful people, and I ignored everything.

Because.

During the email exchanges before the meeting, just sorting out when I’d go and how near Stratford they are, the group mentioned the very smallest of facts. This village of Combrook, as small as it is, actually has two reading groups.

I drove away late that night with masses, simply masses of detail and information and history and yet all the way home that one fact of the two groups kept banging at my head. You’re not supposed to actually write about your group. This project has been running for years and every author, every year, has conjured up the most astonishing range of stories and settings and tones. None of them has ever written a syllable about the group they visited.

But bang, bang, shove, the village has two groups.

It go so I decided fine, write this story about two rival reading groups and get it done, get it out of my head, then throw it away and do my job properly. Write it, forget it, and start thinking what my real story should be.

I never did. All those notes, forgotten. That audio recording of the session, never listened to. Because I have never before had a story that was more in charge of me than I was of it. I get really passionate about my Doctor Who scripts and if I can’t do one because my idea is too close to something else, it physically hurts me. (Writers will tell you that nothing is wasted, that you will always find a home for an idea if it’s good enough. But this is Doctor Who. It’s not like you can take a rejected idea and pitch it to Hollyoaks.)

But this was more than that. The banging in my head, I feel ridiculous telling you that so I’m not going to admit that my hands shook at the keyboard. You didn’t hear that, I didn’t say it.

The story came out of me very quickly, though it then took a long time to get right. Fortunately, my sense of time is as bad as my sense of navigation: I misunderstood the deadline and I think part of the shaking was to do with how I thought I had much less time to write than I had. I did have this writing prompt about the two groups and I thought I had to write it promptly.

Whereas right now I know I have to write a disclaimer. This is an easy disclaimer because it’s entirely true but it’s also an important one because I liked the Combrook group a lot. Nothing in my story really happened and, most importantly of all, there is not one single character or even facet of a character that I based on anyone in the group.

But a few days ago, I went back to Combrook and I read them the story: “The Book Groups”.

If it hadn’t gone down so well with them, I might not be telling you this so happily and I definitely wouldn’t have told my family at all. But it did and right now I am very proud of it. I’m a writer, the pride will alternate with doubt, but today I’m seizing the pride and I’m being a bit brave about it.

Because I want to invite you to the event.

You’d have to pay, I’m not that generous, and you’d have to get to Birmingham, I’m not on tour. But if you can get to the Library of Birmingham for 6pm on Wednesday 26 November this year, you will hear six stories read promptly.

Details and online booking here or on 0121-245 4455. Tickets are a fiver and are genuinely selling out fast. I half hoped I could boast to my family about it but it’d be full before they booked. No such luck.

And when it’s done, when the book is out, I’ll post The Book Groups here. That’s not scary either.

Pride cometh before Autumn

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I have a problem with the word pride. As one of the things you shout when a large number of lions are rushing toward you, fine. It’s also fine when it’s about you.

I completely get the idea of having pride in one’s work and more than getting it, I also get it: I have that pride in what I do. It rarely lasts, I am a writer after all, but at the moment I deliver it to you, I am proud of it – or I wouldn’t deliver it to you. That’s all fine as well. And I would especially hope that you know this kind of pride too.

For that matter, I would hope that you quite often feel proud of yourself. It’s you. Of course you should.

My problem is when I feel it about other people.

It’s not that I think it’s necessarily a bad thing to be proud of someone else, it just feels odd. What right do I have to be proud of someone else?

As I write, this Autumn’s Birmingham Literature Festival is nearing its end and it has been a very good year for it. Last year I actually did an event in the Festival and I still think this year’s is better. I’ve also had an interesting perspective on it because while I have done nothing and have attended lots, I’ve been half- or quarter- or a fifth- involved in bits. The Writers’ Guild has had a couple of events and I’m on the Guild’s committee so I had a fingernail in organising them.

The most I did was get a speaker to the Festival. There isn’t a pixel of the Festival that I could claim pride for myself but going to so much of it and having these tiny peeks behind the curtains, I am proud of the Birmingham Literature Festival. Proud that it happens in my city, proud that it is in the Library of Birmingham.

Thoroughly, delightedly proud of how successful it’s been. After I did my doings with that speaker, I left the green room to go find Angela. The queue for this event was so long and so full of people I’ve come to know in part through simply having gone to the Festival a lot, that it took me twenty minutes to get to her. Walking down that line, I got into four conversations. “Really got to go,” I’d say, then walk down ten paces and “Oh! Hello!”.

That was a Writers’ Guild and Birmingham Literature Festival event: the Guild’s Tim Stimpson interviewed Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Full house. Queue snaking along the length of the Library and having to double back at one end. I did feel proud but the word I said at the time was just “Cor”.

I don’t think you can be in Birmingham and not be proud of this Festival. I’ve worked with many of the people doing it, I’ve had this tiny glimpse backstage, I’m a fan.

But.

There were many, many events where I at least vaguely knew the performers. That’s a funny thing to explain: I don’t know the poet Liz Berry at all but after you’ve seen her perform, you feel like you do. Tremendously, startlingly powerful poetry from someone so personable that if you ran into her with a friend, you’d introduce Berry to your pal like you’ve known her for years.

I want to introduce people to you, I want to list people that I actually do know and who were on full form in this Festival. But there are just so many. I do love that there are so many that I fear forgetting one. I don’t love that I’m going to chicken out. I’m not proud of that.

Only…

There was this one event. The launch of a book called A Midlands Odyssey: it’s a transplantation, a transformation of Homer’s Odyssey into tales of the Midlands. I could’ve just bought the book, and I did, but I wanted to see Elisabeth Charis, who produced it. I wanted to see Jonathan Davidson, one of its editors. Charlie Hill wrote one of the tales, Lindsey Davies whom I’ve met before did another, Elisabeth wrote a tale too. It’s published by Nine Arches Press and I really like the company’s editor, Jane Commane.

But then the first person who got up to read was the author Yasmin Ali.

I knew she was nervous because she’d told me. But in that theatre, under those lights, she strode up to read an extract from her piece and she looked like she did it every day. Read with style, got great laughs, if it had been you reading, you’d have been very proud of yourself.

And I told her afterwards, I told her truthfully: I’m proud of her.

But I don’t understand what right I have to be proud. I had nothing to do with her event or her story or her book or her. I didn’t have a damn thing to do with anything, but what I felt was pride.

Yet nuts to the word and the oddity of feeling it, if you went to the Festival or you are connected to Birmingham, you feel proud too.

If you didn’t go or you’re not connected to the city, then get yourself a sliver of a taste of a pixel of a moment of the whole event on BBC Radio 4. This coming Sunday’s (12 October, 16:30) Poetry Please was recorded there and features four Midlands poets – Liz Berry, Jacqui Rowe, Bohdan Pieseki and Stephen Morrison-Burke. And then in the following week’s edition you can hear me. I get to request a poem that always makes me weep. Please listen and picture poet Jo Bell squeezing my arm as I wept through the reading.

I’m fine with how I’m clearly not a hard, tough man. Possibly even a bit proud of it.

Time Gentlemen Please

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I was ready to see myself. To turn this corner, wait by this door, to see my younger self come through as I had before. The reality of standing there wasn’t all that much different from the years of imagining it. A simple toilet door.

This side of the door, my side of the door, the gents. Empty then, now empty again but for me.

That side, well. Back then, back when I was first here, when I was that young and it was this same night, I thought it was a glorious time. I’d say that I had been thinking only of rushing back out and being with my new friends. But in truth I hadn’t thought at all. Too excited.

Too full of her.

Now would be different. My younger self will come through that door any moment and I am going to stop me. Just put my hand on his chest and say “Please”. I wondered if my younger self would understand, I wanted to be clever enough to understand, but it doesn’t matter. If I confuse him, if I scare him, it doesn’t matter. Just delay him here for one minute. Stop me going out when he went out before.

Just one minute. A few seconds.

Maybe you can always time travel when you know this, when you know to the minute, to the second when and where it all went wrong. So badly wrong. Outside this room, through that door. The things said and not said. The things I’ve done that I couldn’t ever undo.

Until now.

Now I can undo them, now I can stop me ever doing them. Just a quiet word with myself and if I listen, great. If I don’t, fine. Delay me and everything will be fine.

I was ready to see myself.

The door moved. The outside door was being opened, my younger self was out there opening it and I was in here seeing how the air and the vibration bumped the inner door. I felt a pressure on my chest, nerves and excitement and a little fear pushing in on me.

Right where I planned to place my hand on him.

I looked down.

My hand was on my chest.

Because I was standing next to me.

I looked older. Substantially older. And not very well. But the me staring at me from a cubicle doorway had the same expression I was planning to use. Serious. Calming. Sober. Strong.

He looked at me as the gents door swung open and I came in.

“Please,” said the me in the cubicle.

He moved his hand from my chest to my arm. It was still only a little touch, a little pressure, but it was commanding and I stepped inside with him.

He closed the cubicle door. Raised a finger to his lips.

And we waited for me to leave. Exactly as I had before.

ENDS

Easier said than done

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This is easier to say than to do so I’m just going to say it. And perhaps you can do it. Let me know how you get on.

It’s just this: writing should hurt.

That’s what I think we get wrong, especially when we’re starting. I mean especially when we’re starting out, but also when we’re starting a new piece.

I was talking with a friend whose draft novel I’ve read and found myself saying this: there was nothing in the book that she had worried about me reading. As fun as it was, as enjoyable as it was, I feel this means she can go further, can go deeper. I don’t know whether she will and in fact I don’t know whether she should since the novel works as it is. Yet I know she can and I think it would be richer if she does. She’s got it in her so her book could have it too.

Tell a lie. She was concerned about one thing. There’s a deeply attractive character in it named Will and she wanted to make sure I knew there wasn’t one single pixel of him that was based on me. Thanks so much. You can over-stress these things, you know.

I wouldn’t have believed he was me, I wouldn’t have thought about it, wouldn’t have occurred to my noggin. Whereas I did notice that there was no pain in there, no exposed nerve endings, not of hers anyway. Her characters, yes.

Writing something should hurt you. When you write, you should be cutting yourself open and at most cauterising the wound. When you send that writing to someone, there should be something in it that you are worried about them seeing. Something new and very personal to you, something you don’t talk about, that you maybe avoid thinking about.

Now, as a reader sometimes I am just not in the mood to be put through a car wash and as a writer there haven’t been many Radio Times articles where I’ve bled over the page. Well, I have literally bled over the keyboard from effort getting something right, sure, but not from revealing something of myself in them. Not intentionally, anyway.

Drama and fiction need more blood. It is a curious thing yet the more personal, the more harshly deep you go, the further into yourself you search, the closer you get to your audience.

So excuse me, I’m off to search. I will spend some time reaching into the most hidden version of me, my very worst self, my very foulest being where I think things that scare and repulse me, where I want to visit now yet I truly do not want to be forever.

And then I’ll fashion all that into a lightweight romantic comedy.

The spoken word

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I’m a writer. It’s possible that I’ve mentioned this before. But something over two years ago – I actually cannot remember the date – I returned permanently to Birmingham and something under two years ago, I talked on stage.

For that one I was being interviewed at PowWow LitFest by Steph Vidal-Hall in September 2012. I’ve been interviewed quite a bit since then and I’ve also been the interviewer many times. Produced a few events. Run a lot of workshops. Presented a great deal. Book talks. Author talks.

Being a writer, I wrote all this down. I have a list in Evernote. It’s got LitFest as number 1.

Tomorrow is September 2014 and I’m in Burton upon Trent to run a Young Writers’ Group session for Writing West Midlands – and that is number 100.

After the first 9, I started counting how many people heard me. That’s sometimes necessarily approximate and I’ve no way at all of even guessing the answer when I’ve been on radio or television. Or when I’ve done teleseminars for other companies. That’s quite eerie, speaking into the void. So this can’t be accurate at all, but I’ve at least spoken to 1,754 people.

Funny thing, though: I still think of this as writing. It’s the same job of communicating an idea. (Or hopefully lots of ideas: you’re spending money here, I’ve got to give you good value.) I go about it the same way in obviously planning and structuring but less obviously in reaching into myself as deeply as I can to find something new and something that might be worth your listening to.

So it’s writing, which I’ve done all my life, and by tomorrow I’ll have spoken 100 times to something like 1,754 people and still it’s scarier than writing to you like this. You’re nice.

Actually, I think the 1,754 people were nice too.

But that only helps from the moment I begin speaking. From that instant and throughout the talk, most certainly afterwards nattering with people, everything is great. Usually.

Up to that instant, not so much.

I’ve only vomited once with nerves and that was before this 100 started. During the 100 I’ve come close only two times so that’s pretty good: near-retching 2% of the time.

Funnily enough, I’ve been wretched 2% of the time.

Clearly I’m not saying I’m fantastic the rest of the time but those two stand out as bad. I should say that these two weren’t same as the two near-vomit ones and actually I’m being a little unfair. One of them, number 80 (Royal Television Society mini-summit at BBC Nottingham, 17 people on 26 June 2014) I was merely rubbish.

But for the other, number 3 (Mee Club spoken word cabaret, before records of exact dates and audiences began), I stank.

It wasn’t for a lack of effort. I just hadn’t got the material right, despite a lot of work and a lot of time. The material only came together that afternoon and I didn’t physically have enough hours left to get it right.

Cat Weatherill ran that evening and let me atone very shortly afterwards with number 5 (Tell Me on a Sunday, also before counting began). I was much, much better then.

So I have Cat to thank for that opportunity to redeem myself. I have Steph to thank for making me sound great on stage that very first time, I have 1,754 people to thank for at the very least pretending to listen very well.

But I’m a writer, okay? I just talk about it a lot.

Scotland Decides: iPhone 6 or 6 Plus?

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Yes, yes, Scotland’s vote over whether to stay in the UK is overwhelming me, it’s occupied me a lot lately and quite a bit for 18 months or so. But a schism in the UK and the potential loss to the union of one of the finest nations in the in the world, that happens every day.

Plus I’m not Scottish nor am I in Scotland so I can’t actually do anything.

Whereas having two iPhone models to pick from, that’s new. Plus if I think very hard about it, I can make a decision and do something about that.

Look, I have nothing to add to the Scotland debate yet I can’t let this moment pass without acknowledging how important is. How important it is in every way but also how important it is to me.

Wait, I do think this one thing that I’ve not heard in the debates. The UK’s sudden promises of new powers and extra autonomy for Scotland sounds to me exactly like a bloke saying “I’ll be better, things will be different now”. You know that’s never true and I’m afraid neither is what’s being said about new powers: if Scotland decides to stay in the UK, that’s a done deal, we’ll get back to you about those new powers. Right. Sure.

Already you think I’m pro Scotland leaving.

And I don’t know.

My automatic, natural, default position is that we are all better off together. It kills me, though, that “better together” is the line for the No side that wants Scotland to stay in the union. It kills me because while I don’t generally think about being English, there are things in that campaign that make me wish I weren’t.

Being in England, it’s only very recently that I’ve got to see much detail about the debate. (I think that’s very bad, I think that’s made it sound like we’ve had a week talking about it instead of all these months. But at least it’s a big thing on the news now.)

I hope I’m wrong, then, but of the bits I’ve managed to hear over the whole campaign, everything from the No side has seemed to be patronising, fearmongering and – I’m struggling to remember a specific thing here so let me throw in the word allegedly – allegedly just an out and out lie.

That’s not something to make you proud.

That is something to make you want to run away.

But wanting to run away is an emotional response: if I were able to vote in this and I did so based on how furious the No campaign makes me feel, would that be right? We can’t know what will happen if Scotland leaves – or if we can, neither side has been very convincingly informative – so it’s hard to be coldly logical or analytical. I’m not sure that I would entirely want to be coldly logical or analytical: this isn’t a maths problem.

It’s not like, for instance, a 4.7in iPhone screen versus a 5.5in one. That’s a toughie.