My first novel was strange and difficult to place, but I managed to get an agent and a publisher for it and it achieved a small amount of recognition. Even though I was in my early thirties, I was quite naive about the industry. I had grown up in the late 90s reading Haruki Murakami, Irvine Welsh, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and I didn’t think I was being experimental. I was just trying to express my story creatively.
It turned out that what felt natural to me was, to other people, a very odd approach, and the final turn into magical realism, which had been the entire point of the main character’s journey, seemed to destroy the value of the psychological realism that came before it for a lot of readers. But a small number of people loved it. I thought I was probably just going to be an author with a committed cult readership so I leaned even further into my process.
The next novel was even stranger. I’d somehow written a love story in which the heroine spends much of the book trying to escape the physical world while the narrator sees helping her do it as proof of his love. It was darker, the dialogue contained more ideas and the magical turn was deeper and more disturbing. I had high hopes of writing a nightmarish portrait of solipsistic romance and obsession, but I never really got to find out if I’d succeeded. The publisher struggled to work out how to position it and, after a lukewarm reception in book-blogging circles, it was swiftly forgotten about.
Then came the numbers
One thing that became increasingly clear after publishing these novels was the machinery that my work disappeared into. I had an agent pitching me to publishers. Then my publisher had to explain the book to a designer, get bloggers and reviewers to read it and then try to win space on bookshelves and tables. They wanted to be able to claim at least some proximity to a recognisable genre, or another author, so that they could explain the work in simple terms, produce the book in a way that made sense and then convince the booksellers that it would appeal to their customers (AKA readers).
After publication, besides getting an occasional Q&A, website piece or podcast invite, or reading comments and reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, I didn’t get much sense of how it was going. Then every six months I would receive a royalty statement and the sales numbers.
After all was said and done, The Blackbird Singularity sold about 3,000 copies and Farzaneh and the Moon sold about 1,000. Prior to their publication, I received an advance of £750 for each book. There were a couple of royalty statements where I was earning out the advance, then a few others that totalled roughly £500 in payments. That meant about £2,000 for four years’ work.
These are not numbers to quit your day job over.
The graveyard of possible Matt Wilvens
My greatest ambition had always been for my creative writing to pay for the freedom to keep writing so having two novels successfully published that nonetheless resulted in financial failure made me think strange things. Like, if I can write and publish decent literary fiction that doesn’t sell, surely I can also write some other kind of fiction that does?
That sent me spinning off into QUITE the writerly identity crisis. I could convince myself that I should be writing just about anything except whatever came out of my unconscious mind with a blank page in front of me.
I tried too many projects to mention, so I’ll restrict the overview to those that I got more than 50,000 words into: a literary family saga; a digital epistolary novel in the vein of “Werther for the social media age”; a Kafkaesque nightmare set in a sentient government building that had automated all bureaucracy; a speculative thriller where a family moves into an AI smart home and is psychologically manipulated by it. There were a couple of attempts at straight commercial thrillers. Even a kung fu crime caper screenplay (this one was actually completed and got to the quarter-finals of the Big Break Screenwriting Competition - but I couldn’t get any agents to read it).
I was never short of ideas or work ethic. I could not stop generating words and words and words. But I kept selecting new projects and writer identities for myself, and each and every one of them ended up seeming absurd.
Every time I got about two-thirds of the way into something I’d think, Yeah, but is this really me? Will people even read this? Do I want to get stuck writing generic stuff like this? If I write in this weird niche will I always have a day job taking up most of my time? I couldn’t settle into any project because I was trying to make each one satisfy both the creative life and the successful one.
The seduction of professional planning
The more I overthought what I should write, the more planning seemed like a solution. Planning made me feel intelligent. Planning gave me the impression that I might be in control. So, of course, I thought: if the problem is producing a commercially recognisable object that I can also stomach writing, perhaps I can plan one.
I can research the market. Construct my premise around hot topics. Build themes on cultural interests. Look for gaps on the shelves. Make diagrams of narrative events. Connect clouds to dotty lines and circles to zigzags that circumnavigate different coloured boxes with important words inside. It all feels like VERY serious work.
More importantly, it allows me to go on and on making decisions indefinitely without ever facing the blank page. And by the time I do face the blank page, if I ever do, I might find myself with 400 words to write that have a very narrow function, a series of must-includes and the sense that not much invention is left. I just have to trawl through the beats and press the letters until it exists.
This can stop the work being pulled towards something nobody knows how to sell or wants to buy. But obviously I found out that the more I decided what the writing was going to be before I wrote it, the less there was left for me to discover and create. And I found this quite boring.
I was trying to solve two different problems with one book
On the one hand, I had my creative problems: what do I actually want or need to write? What is meaningful to me? What do I want to give to the world? How do I want to express myself?
On the other, I had my commercial problems: how do I make a living from writing? How do I get people to read what I’ve written? How can my writing become something that people want to buy?
For years I’d been skipping between projects trying to magically solve both problems at once. Or I’d solve one more than the other, become dissatisfied, and flip back into the opposite mode, searching for an ideal concept, a perfect overlap, some kind of book that would satisfy me creatively and succeed out in the world.
But the commercial problem and the creative problem are not the same problem.
What certainty produced
The only thing I finished in the last seven years was that wacky screenplay, and that was because I knew exactly what kind of film it was. I knew how long it should be and what would need to happen for it to feel satisfying. I could look at every little scene and think: this needs to happen, that pressure needs to increase, and this character’s motivations need to evolve in this way. Every time I sat down to write, it was very clear what I had to do.
In a way, this was a blessing because I had a demanding full-time job and two small children to look after. It meant I could use a half-hour grasped at the end of the evening productively. If I knew what kind of thing I was writing, I could just give the inevitable scenes a dash of my favourite seasoning and move forward.
By then, though, I wasn’t approaching any new piece of writing with a genuinely blank mind. In my early twenties I could assume there were infinite books ahead of me. The blank page was full of great discoveries and unwritten stories. Now, in my forties, there was a project graveyard. I’d watched myself abandon dozens of things and every new project came burdened with evidence from the deaths of the others.
The problem was the questions I was constantly asking myself. Is this really me? Is this any good? Is this what I’m supposed to be writing? Am I wasting yet another year? Will I finish it? Will anybody buy it if I do?
The weird thing about the screenplay was that none of those questions mattered very much while I was writing it. It was a “money in a suitcase” flick, an ode to 80s genre films and 90s crime cinema, with some nods to my favourite popcorn directors. I just had to get to the point where the heroes either escaped with the money, lost the money or chose to live without it.
Working on something I “just knew” how to write was insulating me from the odd things that appeared when I faced the blank page, and the quagmire of second-guessing that happened after.
The blank page experiment
At various points along this timeline I just said, “fuck it.” My aspirations seemed ridiculous. Despite some evidence that I could write, I had no real reason to believe any particular project was going anywhere. If I had been the kind of person who could quit, I probably would have. Instead, I would occasionally scrap everything and just write something completely fresh and unplanned on a blank page.
The goal was always simple: I would face the fear that the creative act might be meaningless and worthless and weird and do it anyway. No genre, no plan, no rereading, no backward revision. I just had to sit there and make something up. Then, the next day, I had to pick up from exactly where I left off and keep writing.
I reached this point again last week. The interesting thing is that there’s always something to write, and then something else the next day. By day three what I was writing really needed an edit and I was desperate to go back to sort it out but the blank page hadn’t exposed me as some oddball writer incapable of producing anything other people might actually want to read. I invented a man, a dead wife, an old lover, a mysterious phone call and enough emotional pressure to generate a story.
However, this did mark a dangerous moment - one where I might accidentally create yet another project. I had to tread carefully. So, just as it was getting interesting, I stopped.
What’s going to become of me?
When I started writing this article, my plan was to end on an immaculate: “I am now an instinctive, forward-only, unplanned writer. I write whole drafts over the course of 150 days, edit them from start to finish three times and then I’m done. Hear me roar.”
But, of course, the blank-page, forward-only writer was just another temporary theory of myself.
Being loose and creative actually made me want to go back to my sprawling family saga. Why? Because I realised it was the last thing I’d had any real creative fun with. I was enjoying the struggle of writing in third person and figuring out and subverting what was for me a new storytelling method. And I liked how the characters kept surprising me. I smiled as I wrote them. And I smiled imagining readers reading them. There was energy there.
My problem is that I turn myself around so much that I forget the simple pleasure of writing what I like. Planning can work. Genres can work. Improvisation can work. Commercial fiction can work. Even a huge literary family saga can work. What doesn’t work, at least for me, is asking each project to answer the questions: Is this really me? and Will this book succeed?
I don’t know if I’ll finish the family saga this time. I don’t know if it will be any good or whether anybody will want to publish it. Those are real problems, but they are not the problem I need to solve when I sit down to write it.
For now, I just want to write the story.