Sorry to have been silent for two days. I was felled by a virus, and also finishing writing something speculative - by which I mean something that hasn’t been commissioned or paid for up front. I wrote ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ without a contract, at a juncture in my life when I’d just had a big commercial failure in the US with my novel, ‘The Job’, and I knew that I didn’t want to be writing that kind of corporate thriller again (I always classified that novel as ‘an entertainment’ - as Graham Greene often called his less serious novels). The two years during which I wrote ‘Pursuit’ without any knowledge that it would get published was a revelatory experience, and one in which I basically changed my trajectory as a novelist. And it all came about thanks to a previous book that didn’t do well; that was perceived as unsuccessful. A failure is never a pleasant experience when you are in the midst of it. And I’m not going to spout bromides about how it builds character. But seen retrospectively, if you don’t allow it to cripple you, a setback can also force you to look beyond your comfort zone, or to re-evaluate what you think you want. Just as it can also toughen you when it comes to dealing with the fact that life sometimes deals you bad cards. A story from my Dublin days. A play of mine, ‘Send Lawyers, Guns and Money’, was a critical and box office failure when produced at the Abbey Theatre’s second auditorium, the Peacock, in 1986. Two months later I was fired as a columnist at The Irish Times. A few nights later I was meeting a friend for several commiserating pints at a pub frequented by many local journalists. I saw a few writers for assorted papers at the bar as I walked in. I nodded and headed to the table where my friend was sitting. As I walked by this crowd of journos, one of them yelled at me: ‘There goes the great writer’. And his friends all laughed. I didn’t look back, I didn’t fire off a retort. But I was wounded by those words. Two days later I started writing my first book, ‘Beyond the Pyramids’... and it was published the same week I moved to London in 1988. There is no moral to this story. Except the fact that, when you feel like you are in the middle of a very bad season, there is only one response: keep working. And don’t look back at people who are cruel to you. Keep walking forward,
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:23:55 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015