Living the dream now
I graduated in my MA in Writing for Children in 2000. A year
before I graduated I gave up a job as a Head of Modern Languages in a secondary
school to spend more time on my writing. I immediately took on a temporary contract
and for a while there seemed little change though I did have more time in the evenings
and at the weekends for my own work: I managed to confine my school work to
term-time, 8.00 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. Monday to Friday.
Gradually I took on more individual tuition and less work in
schools.
Just six weeks after I graduated I had ten, yet that’s
right, ten proposals for educational books accepted. That kept me occupied for
a while. I still get royalties from some of those books now.
I’d dreamt up to that point of having that sort of
free-lance life – a combination of teaching and writing and that is what I got.
I extended the dream: I wanted to be respected enough as a
writer to be invited to talk to university students about my work. An earlier dream
had been to be a university lecturer. Now I am a university lecturer, much of
my work consisting of talking about writing and it is okay to write on my employer’s
time. There is no life / work boundary. In this case that is a good thing. And
hand on heart I can say I make my living from writing though the fiction itself
does not bring in enough to live on – yet.
The dream now
I’m still waiting for that break-through novel. I’m not sure
that it’s the one I’m trying to sell at the moment, nor even the one I’m
writing now, or the one planned for after that – even though as always the current
one is an improvement on the one before. They are all of course part of the
process.
It isn’t about block-busting best-sellers for me, though I’m
sure if that happened I’d find a way of using the money. I want to write something
of the quality of David Almond’s Skellig,
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or
Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials BUT
hope that when I do that won’t be the endgame. Sometimes it can be hard to follow
your own good act. Flash fiction is also becoming important to me and that may
successfully follow half a dozen high quality novels.
As an academic I’d like some David Lodge-type recognition. Ah,
shall I also in retirement slip into the theatre at the last moment to watch an
adaption of one of my novels? David Lodge sat almost right next to us at the
Octagon Theatre in Bolton recently.
Keeping the wish-list
simple
We fail to fulfil our dreams when we are not clear about our
goals. I’ve decided to keep my wish-list very simple: I have just three wishes.
All other good things follow naturally. What I’ve described above is the second
part. I’ll gladly tell you about the other two in another context. I can also
say that number one and three are getting there rapidly. I therefore assume
that this goal is on its way to being fulfilled – all the more exciting because
I can’t quite see it. It will take me by surprise one day. My task now, though,
is to keep on writing.