Confessions of a failed author #2

At 1:58 in the above video, Rowling says, "It's impossible to live without failing at something. Unless you live so cautiously, that you might as well not have lived at all. In which case, you fail by default."

If you look at social media, you seldom - or never - come across people celebrating their failures. You don't see it in friends or family either, because all we want is success, and we want to be around success-stories. But we don't learn from our success. We don't grow from our success. We learn and we grow by learning how to avoid failure, how to build on its vast and impenetrable basements.

Nowhere is failure more personal, I believe, than in the life of a writer. Why? Because a decent writer puts his heart and soul in his work, he exposes it to the world. The rejection of that amounts to (by implication) a rejection by the world of YOU. If a writer dedicated a sizable portion of his life to his craft, and fails, there is the very real imputation that MY LIFE IS A FAILURE.

It's debilitating. It's depressing. But is it any more true than a jilted lover or a rich businessman who base their identities on the romantic other, or on money, as a measure of who and what they are?

I used to have an inner fear that writing was in some ways pathetic, a cop out, a way to avoid living. Yes, it can be that. But it can also be an opportunity to re-frame a narrative. Not only your own narrative, or your nation's narrative, but a narrative of time and place. A narrative of an entire species, of a whole civilized world.

So you think words aren't important? Consider that at the end of everyone's life, from the greatest president, to the lowliest beggar, all that remains of us are words. Often the words of others.  Do they do these lives justice?  Sometimes.
I hope I have with my book on the late Reeva Steenkamp. Right now #88  #87 #54 on Amazon's bestseller list. More often than not, they don't.  When someone dies we dismissively say, "Well, X died doing what he loved." "Or Y is in a better place."  "Or Z passed..."  If X,Y and Z were present to speak for themselves they'd probably say, "You know what - I wish I was still alive, and not dead!  Am I in a better place now that I'm dead?  Really?  Well, do you want to swap?")

The true power of words hit me when I interview people who have achieved big things.  Published a book. Broken a world record.  All that effort - even if it was lived in the world - is still reduced to a narrative.  And if it isn't, it's lost.

So do I still think words aren't important? Are the opening sentences of the bible, a book that has shaped the entirety of human history, and continues to shape peoples lives, unimportant?  Are they even true? Here is something with the humble constitution of paper and intricate type...but it's the stuff that brings people together, others are put to death because of what's in it. Children come into the world because of beliefs that brought these children into being. Children are aborted, because of the shame associated with defying those beliefs. These sentences define our views of the world, and ourselves. That things are created into being. There are no mistakes. They appear immaculate, and perfect. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

I struggle with beginnings in my writing. Because I feel they have to be perfect. I struggle with endings in my life, because they are so imperfect, so unshaped, so unintentioned. It's easy to begin training for an Ironman, to start a novel, or a relationship. Endings are tougher. Because you have to see it all through, the mess, the magic. The meaninglessness. How does one find sense in there, where it seems to far removed from this theory we carry around...of Immaculate Conception... How about Immaculate Closure? Or Immaculate Resolution?

I love this cartoon.  But it's also true, which is why the sting of humor is so deep, and so effective.  Personally I think writers seek an outlet for their voice because they don't feel listened to.  And I think that starts at home.  Some parents don't know they are raising writers, and if they did, I don't doubt they would do something about it.  A failed writer is a difficult thing to do deal with, not only for the parents.  But writing itself is not a act of failure or resignation after all.  It is taking the problem of existence, and using one's own life force, one's own inner spirit, and creatively making it into something else.  That's big.  Sportsmen do it with their bodies, and we admire them for it.  Creative people do it with their minds, and their juices, and when it works it can inspire a generation.  It can change the culture of a species.  And all this comes out of a creative rendering of a private sense of failure, or discontent.  But it is a painstaking process.

It's a lonely craft.  It's slow.  If a Facebook update takes seconds (and often thoughtless seconds), a book can take years, sometimes decades, sometimes an entire life.  Bloodline - which I am busy with now - is already more than 25 years in the making.  I know that because it's my 25 year High School reunion this year.  Do I dare go to that?  My High School years were a low point for me.  My parents started arguing, my mother died at the end of it, and 25 years later my family remains fragmented from the war that was set into motion 25 years ago.  I started writing then and I am still writing.  Bloodline was in hibernation for about 20 of those 25 years.  Last year I found the wherewithal to dig it out.  Of my psyche.  It's been a rewarding journey, but it won't mean anything if it isn't wildly successful.  Because that is what the narrative deserves.  Except that is not how the world works.  If only it worked the way the books do, like this one.  I used to read this as a child.  A beautiful, immaculate world.  Where boys and girls and nature were friends with each other, and it was one grand adventure worth exploring in all its vividness.

In the end the writer has to live two lives.  The life of the narratives he breathes life into.  I have just published two books in a series on the Oscar Pistorius trial.  The Book on Reeva means a lot to me, perhaps because my mother was also a model and actress, and her life was also cruelly stolen from her.  Whether one can blame a 'perpetrator' in her case in another story.  But even in Oscar I see reflections of myself.  I remember my English teacher - bright-eyed - tripping over her own revelation, declaring to me, in front of the class: "You use writing like a ventriloquist uses a puppet.  You're quiet and meek, and your writing is strong and assertive, it has a much deeper, more authoritative voice than you do."

She was saying my writing was my prosthesis.  Making me taller.  And bolder.  Allowing me to pull my own strings and become more of a mensch.  Except I'm not sure if that was true, or the real me, even if that is how it seemed. The real prosthesis I was wearing was an external neck brace, which yes - had rendered me relatively mute.  Like that thing you put on a dog.  A muzzle, to prevent it from barking.  I'd been muzzled.  Not necessarily by the brace or even voluntarily, but by my classmates, who through the ridiculous apparatus attached to my face, had fun turning me into their Piñata.

How often do we do that, though?  Hit things with sticks and hope we'll get sweets?  Is writing (hitting keys with fingers) the writer's attempt to get sweets?  Or is it something deeper.  Giving a voice to the unvoiced.  A voice to the need to survive.  To overcome the attrition of life, and living.  The most that a writer can ask is to succeed at living and at writing.  The least is to succeed at one, or the other.  The tragedy, is to fail at both.  I haven't, but if I have, there's still work to do.  For me, and for you. 

JKR vs NVDL

The last Harry Potter book is 607 pages, and I admit, I loved reading the book. It's not that Rowling is a good writer as much as she weaves amazingly imaginative stories (there is a difference). That said, Deathly Hallows ends on an extremely cheesy, lame note. I'll give you a hint: Harry's son is called Albus Severus...

Other than that, there are some breathtaking images Rowling imbues in this fabulous tale. I have been coming home from work and diving into this book each day for a week. I am quite sad that that option is no longer availed to me. It's going to be a MASSIVE challenge to turn the last book - so much wheat, so much chaff - into a movie.

But as I say, what surprises me often is that this most popular writer of our time is definitely not the BEST writer. It's her imagination. The same could be said, perhaps, of the likes of George Lucas and many others.

What struck me towards the last third of Harry Potter was a bizarre sense - and I don't mean this in an arrogant way, I mean it in the sense of...sniffing at one's inner potential, one's own potential to be a great (or at least popular) novelist - that I was onto something as a 16 year old, something that may have pipped Harry to the post, may have ultimately become (or outdone) the Harry Potter Franchise.

Inspired by HIGHLANDER, a book called Centennial, Star Wars and various other fragments, I began to weave a tale set in the Scottish Highlands. The idea was really to find an excuse for modern individuals to go and live in a castle, and then to unleash all those chivalrous, medieval themes. The princess, the knight, the sword, the king, the abstract qualities of good and evil, and other deep mythological themes.

The working title of this epic was VERSATILE FLYING SECRETS, though being more than twice as old (and twice as smart) as I was when I was writing it, at 16,17 and 18, perhaps a better title would have been CHRISTOPHER ULYSSES AND THE FORGOTTEN CASTLE. My version of Harry Potter was the character, Christopher Ulysses, a platinum haired, lithe young man who inherits a castle (and all the spooks and historical accouterments contained therein).

The writing of the novel took two years. I remember completing the final sentence about an hour before my matric final science exam (for which I received an E). In the book I also killed off the central characters mother. This was an unexpectedly poignant event, and a profound experience. Two or three months later my own mother died.

It is interesting that when we create a hero we must create a villain. Is life like that? Every Superman needs a Lex Luthor (to prove his worth), Batman needs a Joker, Hitler needs a Churchill, God needs Satan. But in reality, the two are the same, the two are one, the one cannot live without the other. This too, is a metaphor.
My Voldemort was Ogilvie Skye, an absentee landlord who used all manner of evil to procure land. With Venner Field he involved himself personally. The story culminates in a slaughter, just as Harry Potter's story does. But my story is much darker, more mythical and perhaps more terrifying (in two words: less fun) than Harry Potter. The question is, which is more imaginative. For Skye's kingdom I sketched a black and blue (cold) world, where the fields were filled with blue grass, and the walls were black and glistening like bloody wounds in the dark.

I used Lucas' light sabre as Skye's weapon. It was a solid beam of light, in the hands of a Dark Lord. Christopher Ulysses (grey eyes, platinum hair), a 17 year old, attempts to lead a fugitive fleet of granddads and geeks, each leader pushing people into the fray. Skye's army are armed with modern automatic weapons, Ulysses troops are armed with good intentions, tartan kilts, swords and shields. It is the story of the world becoming undone (and undoing itself). Our traditions destroyed against our ambitions, and vice versa. The young massacring the old, plastic undoing thread etc etc. In the end, Ulysses loses a hand to the sabre, but propels Skye into the open oven of a blast furnace. Whilst this battle is underway, the Highlands rage with civilians apparently gone made. Swords battle pistols and rifles. It is a comical, mythical Armageddon, all engaged in war. All coming to grief, except a chosen few.

I remember losing the entire manuscript whilst stationed at an Air Force base outside Pretoria. I posted up reward posters. I finally found it, with some leftovers of a bag of person possessions swiped from my KAS. The manuscript then faded into obscurity. Perhaps it is time to resurrect it. Or perhaps, sleeping dogs should be all lowed to remain that way.