Innocence Read online

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  How I Became a Writer

  First published in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977)

  A fiction writer is a person who invents stories.

  But how does one start out on a job like this? How does one become a full-time professional fiction writer?

  Charles Dickens found it easy. At the age of twenty-four, he simply sat down and wrote Pickwick Papers, which became an immediate best-seller. But Dickens was a genius, and geniuses are different from the rest of us.

  In this century (it was not always so in the last one), just about every single writer who has finally become successful in the world of fiction has started out in some other job – a schoolteacher, perhaps, or a doctor or a journalist or a lawyer. (Alice in Wonderland was written by a mathematician, and The Wind in the Willows by a civil servant.) The first attempts at writing have therefore always had to be done in spare time, usually at night.

  The reason for this is obvious. When you are adult, it is necessary to earn a living. To earn a living, you must get a job. You must if possible get a job that guarantees you so much money a week. But however much you may want to take up fiction writing as a career, it would be pointless to go along to a publisher and say, ‘I want a job as a fiction writer.’ If you did that, he would tell you to buzz off and write the book first. And even if you brought a finished book to him and he liked it well enough to publish it, he still wouldn’t give you a job. He would give you an advance of perhaps five hundred pounds, which he would get back again later by deducting it from your royalties. (A royalty, by the way, is the money that a writer gets from the publisher for each copy of his book that is sold. The average royalty a writer gets is ten per cent of the price of the book itself in the book shop. Thus, for a book selling at four pounds, the writer would get forty pence. For a paperback selling at fifty pence, he would get five pence.)

  It is very common for a hopeful fiction writer to spend two years of his spare time writing a book which no publisher will publish. For that he gets nothing at all except a sense of frustration.

  If he is fortunate enough to have a book accepted by a publisher, the odds are that as a first novel it will in the end sell only about three thousand copies. That will earn him maybe a thousand pounds. Most novels take at least one year to write, and one thousand pounds a year is not enough to live on these days. So you can see why a budding fiction writer invariably has to start out in another job first of all. If he doesn’t, he will almost certainly starve.

  Here are some of the qualities you should possess or should try to acquire if you wish to become a fiction writer:

  You should have a lively imagination.

  You should be able to write well. By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind. Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift, and you either have it or you don’t.

  You must have stamina. In other words, you must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week and month after month.

  You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.

  You must have strong self-discipline. You are working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to give you the sack if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off if you start slacking.

  It helps a lot if you have a keen sense of humour. This is not essential when writing for grown-ups, but for children, it’s vital.

  You must have a degree of humility. The writer who thinks that his work is marvellous is heading for trouble.

  Let me tell you how I myself slid in through the back door and found myself in the world of fiction.

  At the age of eight, in 1924, I was sent away to boarding-school in a town called Weston-super-Mare, on the south-west coast of England. Those were days of horror, of fierce discipline, of no talking in the dormitories, no running in the corridors, no untidiness of any sort, no this or that or the other, just rules and still more rules that had to be obeyed. And the fear of the dreaded cane hung over us like the fear of death all the time.

  ‘The headmaster wants to see you in his study.’ Words of doom. They sent shivers over the skin of your stomach. But off you went, aged perhaps nine years old, down the long bleak corridors and through an archway that took you into the headmaster’s private area where only horrible things happened and the smell of pipe tobacco hung in the air like incense. You stood outside the awful black door, not daring even to knock. You took deep breaths. If only your mother were here, you told yourself, she would not let this happen. She wasn’t here. You were alone. You lifted a hand and knocked softly, once.

  ‘Come in! Ah yes, it’s Dahl. Well, Dahl, it’s been reported to me that you were talking during prep last night.’

  ‘Please, sir, I broke my nib and I was only asking Jenkins if he had another one to lend me.’

  ‘I will not tolerate talking in prep. You know that very well.’

  Already this giant of a man was crossing to the tall corner cupboard and reaching up to the top of it where he kept his canes.

  ‘Boys who break rules have to be punished.’

  ‘Sir … I … I had a bust nib … I …’

  ‘That is no excuse. I am going to teach you that it does not pay to talk during prep.’

  He took a cane down that was about three feet long with a little curved handle at one end. It was thin and white and very whippy. ‘Bend over and touch your toes. Over there by the window.’

  ‘But, sir …’

  ‘Don’t argue with me, boy. Do as you’re told.’

  I bent over. Then I waited. He always kept you waiting for about ten seconds, and that was when your knees began to shake.

  ‘Bend lower, boy! Touch your toes!’

  I stared at the toecaps of my black shoes and I told myself that any moment now this man was going to bash the cane into me so hard that the whole of my bottom would change colour. The welts were always very long, stretching right across both buttocks, blue-black with brilliant scarlet edges, and when you ran your fingers over them ever so gently afterwards, you could feel the corrugations.

  Swish! … Crack!

  Then came the pain. It was unbelievable, unbearable, excruciating. It was as though someone had laid a white-hot poker across your backside and pressed hard.

  The second stroke would be coming soon and it was as much as you could do to stop putting your hands in the way to ward it off. It was the instinctive reaction. But if you did that, it would break your fingers.

  Swish! … Crack!

  The second one landed right alongside the first and the white-hot poker was pressing deeper and deeper into the skin.

  Swish! … Crack!

  The third stroke was where the pain always reached its peak. It could go no farther. There was no way it could get any worse. Any more strokes after that simply prolonged the agony. You tried not to cry out. Sometimes you couldn’t help it. But whether you were able to remain silent or not, it was impossible to stop the tears. They poured down your cheeks in streams and dripped on to the carpet.

  The important thing was never to flinch upwards or straighten up when you were hit. If you did that, you got an extra one.

  Slowly, deliberately, taking plenty of time, the headmaster delivered three more strokes, making six in all.

  ‘You may go.’ The voice came from a cavern miles away, and you straightened up slowly, agonizingly, and grabbed hold of your burning buttocks with both hands and held them as tight as you could and hopped out of the room on the very tips of your toes.

  That cruel cane ruled our lives. We were caned for talking in the dormitory after lights out, for talking in class, for bad work, for carving our initials on the desk, for climbing over walls, for slovenly appearance, for flicking paper-clips, for forgetting to change into house-shoes in the evenings, for not hanging up our games clothes, an