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John Flynn
The Writing Life"1977:Chuck Ross submitted a freshly typed copy of Jerzy Kosinski's 1969 National Book Award winner, Steps, to fourteen publishers and thirteen agents as an unsolicited manuscript. All twenty-seven failed to recognize it and all twenty-seven rejected it."- The Cynic's Handbook, p.... show more

The Writing Life"1977:Chuck Ross submitted a freshly typed copy of Jerzy Kosinski's 1969 National Book Award winner, Steps, to fourteen publishers and thirteen agents as an unsolicited manuscript. All twenty-seven failed to recognize it and all twenty-seven rejected it."- The Cynic's Handbook, p. 63Apart from a streak of cynicism like that shown by Chuck Ross, what's really required for the writing life? Anybody that's interested will be familiar with the usual advice from how-to books and features: try to write something every day, get an agent and be prepared for all the rejection slips. To my mind, though, it would be much better if all those books and advisers started off with the following quotation. It doesn't matter how pretentious or down-to-earth the writing ambition is. We all think we have something to say and we want the world to hear it."The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is in the foreground of every picture. (...) If he is a writer, he tends to associate only with other writers and with the various parasitic growths which batten on writing. To all these people literature is more or less the central fact of existence. Whereas to vast numbers of reasonably intelligent people it is an unimportant sideline, a relaxation, an escape, a source of information and sometimes an inspiration. But they could do without it far more easily than they could do without coffee or whiskey."- Raymond Chandler If you can stand that much detachment, you then have some questions to ask yourself. For example, would you really like to spend most of your time, when you're out of the house, attending literary lunches and book festivals, seeing the same kinds of faces, hearing the same conversations and answering the same old questions? Would you cope with sitting for hours in bookshops, waiting to sign something, anything? Could you take it if a customer finally came up and you lifted your pen and then the person only asked if the bookshop had a toilet? Even prize-winning scribblers have endured that and worse.Right now I'd like you to try and see the writing life from the point of view of a witness to a couple of literary bigwigs in live action. In this case, I was only present to help a book dealer friend get stuff signed. In 2006, in Listowel in Kerry, the Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee made a rare festival appearance. It was hot enough in the hotel function room already but his first reading - a piece about agri-tourism in an arid region of South Africa - did not encourage the will to live. It was hardly accidental when audience applause filled a gap between sheets of paper, when he was slow to turn a page. Next Coetzee read from his then work in progress ("Diary 2005"). In other words, these were his musings from the year before. He seemed to be preoccupied by George W. Bush, as many people were at the time, I suppose. The next day, in the hotel, John Banville worked the same crowd with some dry self-deprecation. When a woman near the front got up and left without a word he felt obliged to ask, "Was it something I said?" The only time he smiled was when he quoted something he'd written at the age of twelve. I wondered if it was sheer coincidence then, or just a writerly dig, when he mentioned he might have sold the kiddie stuff to the University of Texas in Austin - the place where Coetzee had studied, according to the festival programme. By then it was well into question time and many present were no longer listening. Some of the elderly were dozing in the heat, while the people sitting by the windows had already been diverted by an incident on the racecourse, just across the river, where a horse ambulance had to be called to the scene. Banville is known to ask "Why do we do it?" "Certainly not for the money," is one of his answers but, of all the people there that day, my dealer pal at least was in it for the extra money that the writer's signature would bring. I was there to carry up half the large stack of books. To lessen the bad impression, in other words, but, assuming the writer got paid for his appearance, why would anyone in their right mind have been there otherwise, especially on a hot day? The most sensible answer, to my knowledge, comes from Bret Easton Ellis, who said he only went to such events as an unknown because he wanted to make contacts. Evidently he could stand the bullshit. For getting involved in such stuff is, in the end, a matter of temperament.When does a writer first become an unknown? It's when he or she decides they want to write. In my case, the age was seventeen and the genre was poetry. At eighteen, I got my first rejection slip. It came from the old Irish Press newspaper, in early 1983, the year I started keeping a diary. Later, the most outwardly interesting period of my life came between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, when I wrote diaries about, among other things, my adventures in various jobs in Belfast, Dublin and London. A variety of jobs is good for a writer, as it is good for any person, but the point of such reminiscing is that as late as 2012 I was still fussing with those diaries, thinking there's a novel, a book there, somewhere. I'm still sure there is - it's an e-book now, called Put in More Soup - but that book consists of discrete excerpts from those and other years' diaries, without any rewrites. A Hollywood lawyer called Fred Leopold once said real people as characters in films can have lattes and muffins but cannot say "Let's go and have sex in the bushes" and that's leaving aside the whole issue of conscience about exploiting people that way. You may get positive comments from traditional publishers about your writing about your own life but, unless that life is a horror story and/or a triumph of the human spirit, nobody else will publish it. Then you may be tempted to become your own publisher. After all, it's a long-established practice in the music business, with no stigma of vanity attached. New technology has made even paper book production cheaper - no printer should manage to con you into paying for printing plates any more, for instance - so you shouldn't have to risk your life savings on your masterpiece either, not least because you now have the option of e-books.So, what kind of writer are you? If you manage to restrain your urge to tell your whole life story, you might pick a subject that allows you to express your view of the world in a way that just might possibly be of interest to others. That's why I wrote The Cynic's Handbook, a compilation carefully researched in much the same way as Put in More Soup later was. Eighty-three agents passed on the idea first but I had enough experience not to be dependent on the likes of them.Another key question is, if you are a writer, is that all you are? Now we are getting down to the business of books. According to Samuel Johnson, no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. I first got into self-publishing in 2002 but mention of that year means a digression about protecting one's interests. It was then that I had to act on the upshot of one of many false dawns. There is never any shortage of what Samuel Beckett called "discourteous bastards who won't let you know where you stand" so let's talk for a while about silence.In 2000 I submitted a play script to a Tony-Award-winning theatre company in Ireland. Then one of the company's representatives asked to meet me in Dublin, in April 2001. At this meeting the chap described the script as like a middle-class version of British TV's The Royle Family and he said they wanted to do it later that year. At the same time, though, my driving instructor - he was an actor - warned me not to expect too much from that quarter and he was right. In March 2002 I got back in touch."You may rest assured of the lasting impression made by the lack of courtesy shown me by you and your company. I'd ask for my script back only I couldn't see the point, given that an e-mail costs less than the price of a stamp and I haven't received even that minimum after almost a year. Such casual, arrogant rudeness may seem to cost little or nothing when dealing with someone who is unknown and without the influence that can command prudent good manners. That would be a short-sighted view. Whatever fortunes rise and fall in the future, the fact that I was misled and shabbily treated will remain uppermost in my mind."In the end the excuse was they hadn't the money and so I didn't make my dramatic writing début there. I finally got another play called Happy Nights professionally produced, in both senses of the word, by another Irish company in 2007. Based on a real-life break-in at Samuel Beckett's country cottage in 1961, when thieves stole his wine and even his old underpants, this short play imagined two tramps burgling their creator's house. John Hurt showed up and he liked it but nothing grew out of it afterwards. But what really could have come of it, theatrically or financially? Of sixteen new plays by established writers that were put on in London's West End in 2005, only two made any money. At other times, the silence can be sinister as well as discourteous. In late 2007 I submitted a proposal for a TV history documentary, backed by extensive research, to an Irish production company that took it up with enthusiasm. For a year or so I thought I was in the loop. Then silence descended again, due to funding issues, I thought, until I discovered by accident that the thing had been commissioned and was in production. Legal advisers were then called in and happily the project soon got put back on the rails, contractually. Plus I got paid, even if I had to pay a lawyer out of that. The legal lesson was that copyright isn't just about plagiarism, it also covers adaptation, and it was nice to win one for a change.Anyway, let's get back to self-publishing: in 2002 I had a couple of partners - another story - and we were all in it for the money. By the way, if possible you should avoid collaborators who don't contribute to improving your material. Otherwise, the only partners worth having for paper books are your printer, your wholesaler and your media contacts, if any. Wholesalers are useful for getting your book to places you cannot get to yourself but don't rely on them to flag your product to booksellers. If a wholesaler takes it on, your book will appear on a list of titles and it's up to the shops to spot it and ask "Um, what's this?"The original idea - not mine - was to write a series of history books about the Irish in America, with each volume covering a different Irish county. I wrote the text for four of these books in what we called the Journeys in America series. These covered Dublin, Cork, Waterford and Clare. Two of them - the Cork and Waterford books -made a modest profit, selling over 2,000 copies between them, while the other two were an expensive waste of time despite some good reviews, such as in the Irish Times, where "innovative and useful" was the verdict.Our venture, High Table Publishing, was conscientious about administrative matters - such as getting a tax number and registering a business name - but we lacked experience in the book trade. There are many books about Dublin and the population of that city doesn't care too much about its history in the first place, so printing 2,000 copies of Dublin Journeys in America was an exercise in cultural futility. Less than 250 were sold and I ended up depositing many of them in charity shops in the city, just to shift some boxes.When it came to writing about Clare, geography came into play. I left Dublin for Waterford on the south coast in 2004 and found I could even sell my books in supermarkets there, and in Cork, but Clare turned out to be simply too far away. Our wholesaler (Eason) had in the meantime lost interest. After a while it wasn't a new title any more and it certainly wasn't Harry Potter. We had also found out the shops at Clare's many heritage sites were a state-owned brick wall so the Clare book was doomed, logistically. Three-quarters of 1,000 copies still sit in their boxes. Nonetheless if you're still confident and determined and you go ahead with your idea, don't be mean with free copies to the media. It's a hit-and-miss approach but it's unavoidable. Otherwise, you will probably know enough about the world already to assume a degree of critical stupidity. It's less likely that you will fail to assume critical fairness but remember that the critic almost certainly hasn't picked up your book as a fan. It is work, to be done in a hurry, and it is your tough luck if you get a smart-arse on top of that. When it came out, the then deputy editor of the Irish Independent called The Cynic's Handbook "smart, funny and illuminating" and, as of now, sales are neither good nor bad. Still, The Cynic's Handbook too will make a modest profit. In the meantime I'll continue to get out of the house and make a living and maintain the discipline of writing things that other people can understand.Aside from the appearance here of the Gothic novel The Vampires of Parson's Street, after the manuscript seemed to regain its freshness in the wake of the economic crash, the most recent project has been Fiddlers Cross, a film about a new banker in town, making his name, scorching the earth around distressed loans. After another busy day working the guillotine for his employers, he heads down to a local pub to unwind. It's a tough job but someone has to do it, someone with ambition, and now he needs something stronger than fishing. Silence descends when he walks in past the creaking door. Then, through a random act of kindness from a fellow stranger, with whom he finds he shares a love of angling, our banker turns up a further business opportunity. It will involve a touch of moonlighting but, if he plays his cards right, he's in for a major bonus. First he needs to borrow some cash that's just resting in the vault and that no one will miss between two working days. Starring Gerry O'Brien of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, King Arthur, The Tudors and Father Ted, this short film is the work of first-time director Michael McMahon, with whom I wrote the script. It won first prize in the Best Screenplay category at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2014.John Flynn, November 2014
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