TV ruined my writing style
There are some writers you’ll always recognise, however small the fragment. For example, there’s something about Dickens, Hardy or Jane Austen that’s just so unmistakably them, whether it’s writing style, setting, characters or subject matter. I’m pretty sure that all three were entirely confident that they had found a creative voice with which they were comfortable and which was true to themselves. How fortunate they were.
I find myself musing about this because I’m about to put out another novel and it’s nothing like anything in the rag-tag collection that has preceded it. Having tackled shy guitarists wanting to make it in the music business, retired accountants obsessed with playing the Blues, jaded thriller writers unexpectedly finding love, vampires (twice) and teachers in a Catholic primary school, the latest offering is about two retired men on a road trip. With this in mind, you would be entirely correct in reaching the conclusion that I do not have a coherent body of work, united by its milieu and purpose. My creative output is more like a stark illustration of Chaos Theory at work.
The new novel, A Sentimental Journey, is essentially a buddy ‘road movie’ about two men in their 70s attempting to recreate the journey they took when liberating Europe after D-Day, nearly fifty years earlier. There’s not a guitar or a vampire in sight. If I ever had a recognisable style or consistent subject matter (both of which I doubt), I’m pretty sure that this was ruined years ago, the day I started my first script for television. Feeble excuse? Maybe, but let me explain.
As a freelance scriptwriter working in series and serial work, I was essentially a writer for hire. As I needed to keep working in order to pay the mortgage, I often had to say yes to all sorts of crazy jobs on series that I knew nothing about and had never watched (and might never have watched if I hadn’t been asked to work on that series). In the job, you have to learn quickly and listen to the brief. In essence, you’re a creative version of someone fixing problems – which makes you more like a plumber than an artist of any kind. It’s a craft. You’re an imitator, an impressionist (of the acting rather than the painterly variety). No producer wants something that’s recognisably you – they want something that’s recognisably an episode of their series. Hence, all sense of your own self, subject matter and style is, and must be, erased. Someone once asked me what I wrote about – a question that Dickens, Hardy and Austen could have answered easily. I couldn’t, because, quite simply, I wrote whatever someone paid me to write (and, by the way, I should point out that I’m forever grateful that I was paid anything at all!).
The result of this was that when I stopped writing for television and thought about trying to write novels, I had no idea what, who, where or why. In short, I had no idea about anything. And the truth is that it’s all still a bit of an experimental work-in-progress. Hence two old guys on a road trip after guitars and vampires. Maybe if I write one about two old vampire guitarists finding love in a Catholic primary school I’ll finally be reaching some consistency, even if that sounds like the worst novel premise of all time. Anyway, excuses over – A Sentimental Journey is out on Amazon in January and my experimentation will go on.