Please Yourself

In the years that passed after my last book, The Lie of the Land - a kind of under-the-field guide to Britain’s landscapes, I became calcified. I started work on that book with a sample exploration of how chalk was formed. At the time, I had no idea where the sample would eventually slot into the final manuscript but the subject seemed appropriate because I was born in Southern Britain, in the coastal city of Brighton, where the chalk landscapes reach the sea in towering cliffs as white as an American smile. Writing about it felt like home, because chalk provided the scale, had rich detail and its formation was simple to explain.

The rest of the book was, at times, difficult to synthesize from geological memoirs, the academic papers of sedimentary and igneous geologists, and a wet wheelbarrow-load of geomorphology. One yardstick of success, I suppose, is how long the book remains in print after the first flush of launch. It has survived in print for 16 years so, on that measure, I managed to acquit myself.

I enjoyed the process of synthesis so much, I was keen to go on and start describing other pop-science wonders, starting – modestly – with the Universe. The underlying logic was that I could carve out a niche for myself.

That was in 2012 and it turned out to be the wrong move, in the market culture of the time; a naive pivot towards what I thought the market wanted. Early chapters of this new project - putatively titled Written in the Stars - were confident and competently written, but it turned out to be something that I spent too much time on; a lemon that failed to make lemonade.

The publishing industry was contracting. A friend who wrote another kind (the more popular kind) of non-fiction got his agent to hawk him around as a reliable candidate for a two-book deal and hunkered down for the next few years. I panicked and started to try and second-guess a market that had got away from me.

On top of magazine and newspaper work which was regular but insufficient to pay the bills, I took a call from a boutique ad agency and started copywriting. My original qualification in writing was copywriting. I didn't much like it, though it had its perks of plenty of variety and theoretically great pay, but it always felt like the dark side.

I became a fossil of a writer, calcified by the brief, ossified by the business, too petrified to leave. The work was boom and bust, still insufficient to live on and yet all-consuming. Pitching became my job and when there was work, the dynamics bordered on the abusive.

I was haunted by shadows. I lost joy. I lost all confidence. I was diagnosed. I lost interest in almost everything that I had loved. I stopped looking at the world in wonder. There were times that it became obvious to me that it was almost the end.

No doubt, I made the mistake of having a few books published and I started to cast around for more to write. I liked the business model of non-fiction and humour - you proposed a book with a synopsis, a chapter breakdown and a few sample chapters. Your synopsis would not only put forward the idea, it would also talk about comparable books, their readers, why your book was different and what that meant. Most importantly, it would state why the world needed your book and why you were the right person to write it. What can you add to the conversation? How you might add new readers in different demographic brackets and bolster it all with websites, social media presence and all the rest of it.

That was the speculative element you were betting on. Pitching about 10-15% of the effort and creativity to write a whole book and, after you had been around a few publishers, selling the project, getting an advance and then spending the next 6-9 months pummelling out the work.

Without a contract to write and with the gap from mid-list to back-list ever widening, I needed to think again. So I found some work to tide me over and started on a project I had been ruminating on for almost 20 years. If i told you it was a speculative fiction book project, I would be underselling how much speculation is involved: it is a science/fantasy/fiction/humour book I am writing speculatively, without anyone lined up to so much as read it. I do have an agent, one whose email inbox alternates between the physical extremes of black hole and a kind of slingshot orbit mechanism, but I am now convinced he is simply a hallucination borne on the good will wave of a late afternoon drink.

I'm ten chapters into my project and loving the process. That’s mostly because there is no client beyond a putative, imagined reader, but it’s also because I am focussing on the craft and manipulating and coercing language to do my bidding. In short, I am not doing it for a market or a client or even that most amorphous of audiences, an online blogging platform, but myself. Because pleasing myself is now the first step to pleasing others.