It is said that everyone has at least one novel in them. Each one of us has the ability or knowledge to write or create at least one book. Apparently.
Have you ever tried? When I waste hours in my commute and sleep-walk through my day at work, as I day-dream, snooze or experience the most fantastically vivid dreams when asleep, I will then say to myself ‘That would be a great book’. My own little master piece. My chance at giving Stephen King or Clare Macintosh a run for their money. Full of macabre twists or supernatural plots, thrillers to make the reader’s toes curl up, a page-turning paperback that cannot be put down.
Then I sit in front of a computer and turn into a vacant fool, my brain as empty as the blank screen that stares mockingly back at me. Where do I start? What is it even about? Do I write in the first person? Am I in the here-and-now or telling a past event? Where’s my cup of tea? Why am I suddenly hungry? What’s on Netflix right now? Oh, look, I always wanted to watch that! I’ll try that again later.
The next day; Screen. Blink. Tea. Netflix. Repeat.
There are a multitude of reasons why writers write; the transfer of knowledge and wisdom, to instruct and teach, the recording of ideas good and bad. The desire to be artistic, the absolute yearning to tell that story. A cathartic desire to off-load a head full of problems (a virtual/paper psychiatrist that listens to and absorbs everything but doesn’t question or challenge. A problem shared/halved and all that).
But I think there is a simpler reason people want to write a book – any book on any subject – and that is a secret, fundamental desire to leave a little of themselves behind for when they are gone. Leaving behind a tangible, tactile and highly personal set of words for others to read and be affected by, is an attempt to not be forgotten, an attempt at a little immortality. Why do you think the biggest words on the front cover of most books is often the author’s name and not the title? Yes, famous authors have a fan base that followers will read based purely on the author not the subject, but it’s also to appease the writer’s ego. We cherish books, share them, revere them. There is something sacred about a book and it is hard to throw one away, which is why charity shops are full of them. Bodies get buried or cremated but books with the author’s name in massive shiny font on the cover, get passed about from home to home, person to person, time to time. REMEMBER ME!
This is why most first-time writers are older I think. There are incredibly talented young writers but for many the enemy of creating the written work is time, in finding enough of the blasted, elusive stuff. But as the end of one’s life creeps closer and the days ahead number fewer than the days left behind, we start to wonder what we will leave behind that stops us being forgotten. A legacy. Whatever our belief or not in the existence of an afterlife, theist or atheist, I believe there’s a desire to cling to this world and make a difference to other human beings. In the 2016 re-boot of WestWorld, Anthony Hopkin’s character Dr Robert Ford quoted ‘Mozart and Chopin never died. They simply became music.’ I would argue that this is the same wish for writers becoming their words.
I have my own view on what will happen to me after I die. I’ll cover that in another blog at a later time, but I believe whatever our legacy or impact on this planet or our importance or significance now on planet earth, as human beings we are all just stories in the end.
DadPlod 