I Think There May Be A Point.

I read something today so simple and so human and so true that it restored my faith. It restored my faith in everything - in writing, in people, in showing up. In getting out of bed in the morning. (Because, as someone said to me yesterday, there is always the terrible, dangerous, luring question, ‘What’s the point?’)

I found the point in something utterly pure. It’s a plain story about plain people. When I say plain I mean - no dashing trips to poetic Paris, or hurrying off to photograph war zones, or travelling to distant coasts on glamour-yachts.

I suddenly realise that I have to reach now, to think of what a non-plain life might be. I once would have had a tremendous gallimaufry of La Coupole and the Volpi ball and choppy trips in gleaming Rivas and something to do with Noel Coward and Josephine Baker and the island of Capri. People would be drinking negronis and reminiscing about the days of the Algonquin Round Table and reading the poems of Rupert Brooke. (And probably looking like Rupert Brooke.)

Now, I live a plain life myself and those charismatic glamours don’t mean much to me. They were the things that fascinated me when I was young.

Anyway, the story I loved so much this morning was plain - in its language, in the world it described, in its people. There was no fuss and no shenanigans and no hullabaloo. There was just what mattered, and what mattered went straight to my human heart and I thought: I would like to write like that.

I was still feeling all my atoms being rearranged by the beauty and truth of those short pages when I read something quite different. This was by a hugely clever and successful person, whose mind I admire, about how there is no point writing books any more and that writing will never pay the rent and that writing dreams are fool-dreams.

It was a most excellent dose of reality, like having a bucket of cold water poured over your head, and it had the same galvanising effect.

This man was right in some ways, but then he would have been right if he’d written this in 1932. It’s not to do with AI or the internet or the death of magazines or the fact that the children aren’t getting the reading habit and the grown-ups are too tired to remember what that habit was. The book has always been in trouble. The writer has always struggled. (There’s a reason that the poet in the garret is an enduring stereotype.)

The writers before the computer age not only didn’t make much money, but most of them drank too much and smashed up all their relationships and went mad. Even if they stayed sane, they still had to find a patron or a day job. Trollope stopped his writing on the dot of eight-thirty each morning and went and invented the postbox. (Well, not quite, but close enough, and that thought always makes me laugh.) Dickens was a lunatic self-promoter. Scott Fitzgerald died - of an almost literally broken heart - without ever knowing that he had written the great American novel, because the critics greeted The Great Gatsby with either the faintest of faint praise or outright rudeness.

I don’t know where the idea of Writer As Success Story crept in. Was it the advent of the movies, when you could sell your book to a producer for millions, or write a script that would never even see the screen for more than most book-writers would earn in two years? Or was it the rollocking eighties, when whacking out the airport novel felt like printing money and the publishers were so flush and excited with all the big bangs that they’d sign up your granny for a six figure advance?

In fact, only about seven writers in the world make a lot of money and most of them are called Stephen King. Even if you have a massive success, you won’t necessarily be guaranteed another one. And you can get gorgeous reviews and still only sell eight copies.

So the ruthless, realistic, no bullshit person is right to pour his cold water on the nonsense writer-dreams. And yet, he’s also not right.

There is a point. I do think there may be a point.

It’s nothing to do with numbers. It’s not to do with going viral or gathering fame or having your name in lights. It’s certainly not to do with being remembered after you are dead. (I solve this problem by planting trees. They will last long after I am gone and that’s my legacy and that’s what I care about.)

It’s to do with a young woman in a sunny field, in the hot summer of 1914.

This young woman does not exist. She is a vivid figment of my imagination. I can see her, as the storm clouds of war gather over her sunshiny days. All the men will have to go away, on crowded boats, across the Channel to France. Her brothers, uncles, father, cousins, sweethearts; the boys she went to school with; the young men who help her with the horses and the cattle and the sheep - all of them will go, and many of them will not come back.

She will look after the land, and the horses, and the animals. Maybe she’s so close to the coast that she can hear the guns, in the night. (Although, for some reason, she lives - in my fiction-mind - in the West Country, so perhaps she is too far away. Perhaps it is the silence that haunts her, in the hours before dawn.)

I wish that she had written her story down.

She didn’t do it because she was a woman and she was young and she hadn’t been to university and she probably didn’t have much formal schooling and nobody would have encouraged her and she would have told herself that all she knew was this land and these horses. Who was she, to tell her story?

She would have believed my ruthlessly realistic fellow, and said that there was no point in having writing dreams.

How I wish she had left us a record. I want to know what she saw, and feared, and yearned for. I want to have a glimpse into that lost life.

So I say yes: let us write it down. It won’t make money and it won’t find fame and it won’t transform your material life. (Your spiritual life is a whole other matter.) You’ll have to have a proper job, like we all do, to pay the bills. But if you can write something straight and filled with truth and brave and plain and shimmering with humanity, you could rearrange someone’s atoms, exactly like the few pages I read this morning did for me.

Just think of that, for a moment.

Surely that is worth something?

I say, yes. Yes. It is worth something, after all that.

You - you and me and all of us - simply have to work out what really matters and what our hearts long for and what we shall look back on with gladness when we are on our death-beds. I shall be waving my old hand about, saying, ‘And one more thing.’ I shall certainly wish I had written one more book and read one more book and invented one more story.

It’s knowing, in the end, what means the most to you. And then doing more of that, no matter what anyone says about it.