non-fiction

My favourite football team*

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*I have no favourite football team. I would struggle to name a football team. Not true: if invited, I would very quickly name a team something like “Overpaid”.

But next week I am spending a day in a school for the first time since before the pandemic, and the subject is non-fiction. At some point before lunch I am going to point out to approximately 30 pupils from something 5 schools, that they have never heard of me before. That they are unlikely to ever hear of me again.

Yet they also now know how to find out something about me.

The thing I will ask them to find out about me over lunch is what my favourite football team is. I can think of two ways for them to find out and this is one of them. The other is to ask me. I am so hoping that someone will just ask me.

Being invited into a school is a privilege that I take extremely seriously. It’s on my mind a lot and if I’m saying much of this in order to have something the pupils can find online with a little effort, I’m also saying it to you because I am an idiot.

There I will be, next Tuesday, telling writers that you can always ask anyone, anything. That it is supremely easy to just ask them. And here I was last Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, telling someone else that since they wanted a particular thing from someone, they should ask.

I hope it was last Tuesday because that’s a nice balance of Tuesdays and because yesterday comes between them. And yes.

Yesterday, I had to ask someone for something. And I found it very hard.

Fair broke my arms trying to type when the stakes were so unnaturally high. I say unnatural because whatever the reason it was all so charged for me, it isn’t for them.

Maybe that’s what I should really be telling people next week. Whoever you’re asking is far less concerned, far less bothered, far less interested in the fact you’re asking, than you think. For good or bad reasons, for whatever reason, your mountain is not theirs.

So, I know this again and again, ask.

There’s a producer I want to contact and I’ve only got a US postal address for his company. I’m wondering whether I should just write a letter.

And now, talking to you, I realise there is nothing to stop my doing it but me, no one to say I can’t but me.

Also, it occurs to me that with my handwriting, I should probably type.

Speaking and not speaking

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Earlier this week I was working on a friend’s book: part proofreading, part commenting, part editing. It was a joy because the book is just so very, very good. But it’s also a joy because it’s her first one and yet it’s got none of the stilted caution of a new writer. It’s got none of the hesitancy.

It does have some of the padding, but you can fix that.

What this writer has is the benefit of knowing her subject extremely well and having run workshops on it. At her best, this isn’t text on a page, it’s her talking to you, working with you, just as I presume she does in workshops.

Actually it’s a business non-fiction title and I first met her because she was advising me on aspects of my work. So sometimes I’ll be reading a section and I can see her as she was a couple of years ago, sitting opposite me across a coffee shop table and telling me these same things.

When you and I are done talking today, I’m off to have a coffee with her again and to enthuse about her book.

But there is something else I’ll do. There’s something else I’ve realised. This skill of writing like you’re talking is superb but it also has to be a con. You must look like you’re doing it, you must look like this is all flowing naturally and conversationally, when really it isn’t.

Really it needs to be structured. It can’t actually be like speech because when we talk to someone, our sentences run on for hours. Those sentences make complete sense but when they’re written down, they lose that and become long or confusing.

I’m telling you what I think you already know and I’m telling myself what I think I’ve long realised but working on this book brought it back to me very strongly. This writer has more verve and skill than I did in my first writings and I hope I’ll convey that to her. Because the next step of moving from conversational to only apparently conversational is going to take a lot of work.

She can do it or I wouldn’t be saying this to you before going to meet her.

Plus I’ve already told her the truth by text. “You know how people give you criticism in shit sandwiches?” I texted her. “This book is two slices of excellent with a filling of superb.”

I utterly relished doing this work and I am so looking forward to talking to her about it. I’m just also conscious that I’ve made about seven hundred comments on the manuscript. I think I’ll talk a lot before I show her that bit.