Why I write
Enid Blyton made many children of my generation readers. She also made me a writer: I wanted to be her. This may have had something to do with living on a working class street (I was the first to go to Grammar School from off that street). I liked the sound and look of Blyton’s house in Beaconsfield, ‘Green Hedges’ (I would now find it suburban, even twee). But, as a kid, I imagined myself writing, like her, on a typewriter (which we didn’t have) next to windows letting onto a garden. She was very clever with publicity pictures which certainly affected one impressionable, aspiring young lad. Aged about 13, I moved on from Enid and adventures to Agatha Christie and bodies (I read ‘A Murder is Announced’ – a terrific title) and my desire to be a writer grew stronger. I must have had some sense of a person writing books (not plays, at that time): ‘the writer’, ‘the author’. Perhaps my notions amounted to no more than the physical process of writing: typewriter, table, optional window onto garden. I wanted to be that person tapping on those keys. Years later, I adapted a Christie short story for television and, though I didn’t enjoy the experience of writing to a producer’s guidelines, the residuals from the film have provided me with what amounts to a small pension. So it’s a posthumous thank you to the Queen of Crime. Now, I live quite close to the hotel where Christie wrote ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ and just up the hill from me, overlooking the Channel, Dickens knocked out a chunk of ‘Little Dorrit,’ distracted in the rented house by his children running up and down the wooden stairs. When I was at Junior School an essay of mine on Brer Rabbit was read out to the class. I was 8 or so. It came as a surprise. Over the years I got used to this form of being singled out. Once I had to write an essay as a punishment by an art teacher, who should have known better than to set a ‘creative’ essay as punishment, and even this punishment-exercise was read out. I would have been a fool not to have realised I had some talent. So maybe I write (or started writing) because I realised, cannily, I was playing to a strength. I liked the attention, of course, and, at that schoolboy level, occasionally seeing my name in print. I still do – though have moved beyond the motive of vanity, I hope. I don’t under-rate at all the desire to see my name in lights as a powerful initial motivating factor in this matter of why I write. But the glamour fades, as it should.
In what I call (laughingly) mid-career, I almost lost the desire to write. The terms of trade had turned against me in television – the days of the single play/film were over as weekly staples. I was lost and very unhappy for a time. Was it worth carrying on? I wasn’t writing very well – mainly because I was writing what other people wanted (or thought they wanted). I sold my flat (bought with television money) and went a long wander. I read a great deal and kept my hand in as a writer – but un-commissioned, just trying to find my voice again. And then, rather romantically, under a fig tree in South Western France ten or eleven years ago, I started writing freely. I knew I’d got it back. I’d been straining too hard, perhaps trying to be an ‘important’ writer. A broadcast radio play was the result, the first of many. I now write because I love it, simple as that - mainly radio plays, unglamorous. I can think of nothing else I would prefer to do most days. I enjoy getting up in a morning – as this morning, typing this - with ‘nowt else’ (as we said on our street) on the agenda. Blyton would write a book a week. It would unroll in her mind like a film. If she were interrupted she would put it down, never to return to it. It’s not quite as easy as that for me and I certainly wouldn’t throw half a play away because of some disturbance in the process. But what was once hard work has become, oddly, easier. Whatever mixed motives got me into this game, I now write because I want to.
In what I call (laughingly) mid-career, I almost lost the desire to write. The terms of trade had turned against me in television – the days of the single play/film were over as weekly staples. I was lost and very unhappy for a time. Was it worth carrying on? I wasn’t writing very well – mainly because I was writing what other people wanted (or thought they wanted). I sold my flat (bought with television money) and went a long wander. I read a great deal and kept my hand in as a writer – but un-commissioned, just trying to find my voice again. And then, rather romantically, under a fig tree in South Western France ten or eleven years ago, I started writing freely. I knew I’d got it back. I’d been straining too hard, perhaps trying to be an ‘important’ writer. A broadcast radio play was the result, the first of many. I now write because I love it, simple as that - mainly radio plays, unglamorous. I can think of nothing else I would prefer to do most days. I enjoy getting up in a morning – as this morning, typing this - with ‘nowt else’ (as we said on our street) on the agenda. Blyton would write a book a week. It would unroll in her mind like a film. If she were interrupted she would put it down, never to return to it. It’s not quite as easy as that for me and I certainly wouldn’t throw half a play away because of some disturbance in the process. But what was once hard work has become, oddly, easier. Whatever mixed motives got me into this game, I now write because I want to.