Author, novellist, scribbler…

I LOVE TIM POWERS!

Blimey that sentence happened more emphatically than I’d planned.  I was going to just sneak it in sideways, but… um… well.  It happened there.  Just like that.  Ah well.

A little context: a few weeks ago, I was a panelist on a discussion about ‘Secret Histories’ at Blackwells in London, and Tim Powers – one of the true giants of fantasy in the last 20 years – was there and I have awe.  I mean, I would have had awe even if he hadn’t turned out to be absolutely lovely, but now I have literary awe plus the shocking realisation that he’s human.  I mean, a fully rounded, absolutely sane human.

And before the eyebrows start waggling at this sentence, let me clarify a vital point about writers: we suck. We make actors look normal, and that’s saying something.

It’s not merely that writers spend their days locked in darkened rooms with just the voices in their heads.  It’s not simply that we don’t get out enough, that our social circles are limited to old school friends and ex-editors; or that the highlight of the social calendar is going to some other bugger’s launch party where we all smile and clap and say oh, you’ve sold how many copies?  How nice for you… while grinding our teeth to little stumps inside our mouths.  It’s not just that the vast majority of us are teetering on the edge of poverty, while all around e-piracy increases, contracts grow harsher and the book market stumbles.  Nor, indeed, is it that strangers, on finding out our trade, almost immediately say: ‘oh, really?  And are you published?  I haven’t heard of you…’

Oh no.

It’s a combination of all of the above.

A deadly, insipid combination that gently erodes the humanity of your average writer until all that’s left is a twisted shell of resentments and neediness with a smile plastered across the face.  So we invent ways to make ourselves feel better.  Some – I shall name no names – devise fiendish equations whereby they can track their rate of sales, their average remuneration from each sale, the discount rate attached to the sale and finally, based on all this data, how long, in hours and minutes, at the present rate, it’ll take before they’ve earned out and can start making royalties.  Others keep graphs, tracking week-by-week sales of books in the US, UK and overseas markets through that infallible source of data, amazon.  Some brave souls seek out every review of their works ever, googling their own name day after day.  Yet more promote themselves on the lecture circuit, or – like me! – keep blogs, ranging from the insufferably waffly (tada!) through to the ruthlessly focused on Stuff Almost Written and Awards Nearly Won.

And when the question, ‘so what do you do?’ comes up, we reveal a massive part of ourselves by our choice of answer.

“I’m a novelist,” someone replies.  And how much hangs on this choice of words!  Because a novelist isn’t a writer.  A novelist is an artist, labouring every hour of every day over great tomes, thousand-page volumes of highest fiction, the sweat running down their brow from beneath their jauntily angled beret.  Equally, an author isn’t a novelist.  An author is a pro, a professional, a jack-of-all-trades, who sits down, doubtlessly on their 1930s manual typewriter, steaming coffee by their side, cigarette burning gently down in the ash tray, to write terse prose about love, loss and the human condition.

Or perhaps you take the plunge – perhaps you say, ‘I’m a writer’ and immediately it’s known, without anyone having to ask, that you’re lonely, unemployed, desperate to be published, trying to claw your way through a merciless world with tales of semi-autobiography disguised as metaphor.  I sometimes tell people that I’m a writer, precisely to watch that thought process happen.  I enjoy watching it; it appeals to the technician inside my soul.

But sometimes – very rarely – I’ll meet someone who’s a scribbler, and my heart soars.

Because a scribbler isn’t a novelist, with its connotations of raw absinthe and spiritual torment.  A scribbler isn’t an author, hands soaked in ink and soul soaring with polemic imagery.  A scribbler isn’t even a writer, desperate for the contract that hasn’t yet arrived.  A scribbler is someone who… scribbles.  Because it’s fun, isn’t it?  Because they like scribbling.  And if someone pays for the scribbles then that’s amazing, that’s brilliant, but you’ll probably keep on scribbling anyway, and sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s good, and that’s okay.  That’s just the way the world goes.

I love scribblers.  Scribblers tend to be sane.  And sure, the world at large attaches different artistic merits to the concept of ‘author, novelist, writer, scribbler’, but I don’t.  I attach different measures of sanity to those words.  I hope that I am a decent scribbler – I write what pleases me, can write to another’s brief if I need to, don’t worry too much about my genre or medium, and always enjoy my work.  If it’s published, that’s a perk, but I’m not adverse to killing 30,000 words in the cause of passing the time.  I suspect I’m a bad author – author in the professional sense, of self-promotion and ruthless examination of my own sales figures.  And I don’t mind at all.  Scribblers tend not to mind much, you see, as we know that down that particular rabbit hole, there’s probably not a magic potion for getting you back.

And I think – I suspect – I hope! – that Tim Powers is also a scribbler.  Utterly free from pretension or self-doubt, gleefully engaged in what he does and with a generosity towards others that evades most authors desperate for a sell, I can now safely declare that that is what I would like to be like, in the unlikely event that I ever grow up…