“Show me a good loser,” said Gary Lineker, after a a bad loser interview with an angry Jürgen Klopp, “And I’ll show you a loser.” As an all round terrible sportsman, especially now that I am far too old to play most sports, I still agree with the point he made. When playing – a generous term in my case – football, my weekend was utterly ruined if my team lost, even if, had I been slightly more aware, the defeat would have been down to poor performing players, like – well, you get the drift. I hated it when the team I supported lost, too, but never as much as when I was on the pitch, giving the ball away to the opposition and committing unnecessary fouls. I’ve certainly felt like a loser in almost everything about my life, including and especially writing. A brilliant tweet has restored some kind of sanity to my unsound mind.
Greg Norminton, who refers to himself as “award losing author” said this:
“The reality of the writing life is that it is almost entirely made up of disappointment. The only joy you get is creative. It is in the doing of the work. How the work is received is outside our control. So don’t hope for success. Just hope to write well.”
Yes, I thought; this.
I’ve been writing all my life, pretty well, and very seriously since 2014, and several decades of writing for the Bristol Rovers programme, The Pirate, writing literally thousands of blogs as well as self-publishing a terrible book about Corfu I think it’s fair to say I never made it. But I am not alone. Hardly anyone ‘makes it’ in writing these days, maybe most people never did. And even Norminton himself, a wonderfully talented writer among other things, suggests he never made it either.
Witness this comment from his website: “I finished a fourth novel, Serious Things, which was published to great acclaim and derisory sales in 2008.” Well, that’s illuminating and not in a good way. Norminton is clearly a smart and talented writer but even he cannot sell more than a relative handful of books. Almost certainly many more than I sold, but still not enough to earn a living as a full time writer or even a part time writer for that matter. Educated at an elite boarding school, Wellington College, he’s also an Oxford alumnus. He acknowledges that although he has reservations about private schools, he admits to his “good fortune in having benefitted from a fine one.” Whether he would have enjoyed the same career without the benefits, as he puts it, is immaterial and a matter of pure conjecture. The fact is that he’s done very well and, being me, I like to celebrate deserved success rather than to become all bitter and twisted about it (mostly). Having said that, he’s still not on the bestselling books list, just like me.
But his tweet intrigues and resonates with me, not least because it’s true. I love sitting here in my Man Cave, letting the words flow into something resembling a blogpost, or more pages for that difficult second book. It’s only when I check my website for stats, or Amazon to see how many more books I’ve sold, that the disappointment kicks in. And even then, it doesn’t last too long because, at least so far, there’s always another idea round the corner. Somehow, when I am writing, I don’t come over all “What is the fucking point of this? Hardly anyone is reading the blog and even fewer people are buying me a coffee.” That, I hope, is because I love what I do and while the idea is always that others, in a dream world, millions of others, would like it, too; it is, as they say in the book of clichés, what it is.
So, his last sentence is probably the most important: “Just hope to write well.” And that is what I try to do each and every day. Sometimes, like this piece yesterday, I am really happy with my work (The Guardian to whom I submitted wasn’t, but never mind – and I do see it as my work, as well as my passion – and others not so. I suppose I should have a better filter and only publish what I consider to be the good stuff, but sometimes I get a note from a reader saying, “I really enjoyed that piece you did” when I still thinking I could have done better. Quality, they say, is more important than quantity but try telling me that.
I’ve had a lovely morning creating this blog for us. If you enjoyed reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it, then I enjoyed this morning twice as much as you. Either way, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Sadly, neither is my writing career, but I suppose I can’t control that. Thanks for being there. If it wasn’t for you, it would only be me reading it.
By the way, I’m not an award losing writer. You need first to be nominated for an award to lose one.
