A lot of my characters eat things they shouldn’t.

So far it’s only available from Amazon.com but then those big fat planes make the Atlantic seem so small.

There was another time, the shop lady said it between her smiles, that a cyclist at the crossroads had challenged a dumper truck’s rear wheels. He looked sort of unfinished, there, with his ankles by his ears. His girlfriend kept flowers on the lamp post for a year. There was a note: something simple about red lights, I think. You felt a bit sick every time you walked past it.

When I was eight, I wrote a poem about the biology of a naked woman I saw in the swimming baths. All chlorine and confusion. Mum found it and told me to show more respect. Even though her breasts had more or less landed on my face when she bent down to dry her toes.

Another, that one when my little brother found a man who’d blended himself with his bike. His helmet was inside his face and my brother said there was a noise – a low note – that he figured you made if you combined yourself with your biking equipment. The man died on the road with my brother’s hand in his.

All these things make for little anecdotes, tiny chunks of me. They’re all quite true. I suppose I chose them because they stick. Make little stories by themselves. The gory, the weird, the scary. It’s these stories seem to roll on forever – testing, in some way. A bit like the I’ve-seen-more-than-you game the lads played watching execution videos through 56k modems back when. But in writing, they come out in different ways.

What’s always fascinated me about reading is working out what is real, imagined or somewhere between. Whether characters are drawn from the private or are simply invented. Whether events are inspired or just made up. Whether the writer has gone through that… or whether they know somebody who has. And it’s these moments – especially the darker bits, the hidden white bits — that really stick. These little mysterious born out of chance meetings. Or even just a character dreamt up after staring too long at another passenger.

They say write what you know, don’t they?

I say steal what everyone else knows.

Bear with.

I bought a PlayStation 3 the other week. It’s a diverting machine. Since I got it, I’ve ploughed too many hours into blatting terrorists. 15 maybe. Now, I write pretty quickly – so that’s 15 hours I wasn’t putting 15,000 words down on paper. Screen. (Long hand is a strange practice. How does writing with a single pointed end beat writing with eight pointed fingers?)

The problem being, I’ve loved every minute. Even the American kids calling my mother names. Especially winning – and particularly the levelling up.

So I get to wondering if I don’t write more because writing doesn’t have a levelling up system. After all, it’s two-tier (unpublished/published) till you’re published, when it turns about five-tier (self-published/small press published/major house published/award winning/Dan Brown).

For now, the rewards are scant. The rewards are fleeting. You don’t get a funny logo next to your name, or extra weapons, or recognition, or a place on a leaderboard. And because you’re not levelling up, you’re also kind of anonymous. Swilling about. Which means that, besides ambition, it gets harder to go back to that paper. That keyboard. Harder when you leave it too long. Harder when you get there.

I’m not saying I don’t like writing. Mostly I love it, actually. But when you love something, it doesn’t take much for it to upset you. One sentence out of twenty scans weirdly, and then you’re stropping and stamping and binge-eating cheese. One word of writing stumps you – or maybe one clause – and you wish you could do dying instead.

Your console, unfortunately for writing, is always there. It has FUN and FORGET LIFE on the box. It’s there to fill your eyes and brains with silicon-chip heroin. It doesn’t make you mad, it doesn’t really challenge you and it never unbalances your mood. Having thoroughly researched the novel I just finished, I remember that white supremacists call things like this ‘garrison games’. Distractions. The upshot being your writing becomes the camp fire at 2am. Basically, it’s going out if don’t you lob sticks at it.

You can see the embers. The ash turning out. And the Fear of Doing says, Go on, you whingeing nobber, clear off and kill terrorists. Writing can wait till tomorrow – like writing always does. And so you do. So it does. The pad in your hands, plus a compulsive, numbing feeling. No words apart from what you call those American kids.

Which is why I’ve written this.

Just to check.

We went to Barcelona the year before his album came out. We arrived the same day terrorists failed to blow up London. I was writing clumpy nonsense around then, and he was mastering the last few tracks before the album was pressed. So we got waffled and gabbed about the parallels you can’t ignore – the indulgent solitude of the creative process, that kind of thing. The loneliness and regret at the lost ideas you didn’t jot down. How you’d start something, ebullient, and start hating it three-quarters through. How you don’t want to show anybody any of it… but kind of do. And we’d sit by the marina, by swaying boats and broken glass, with our litres of beer, and dream.

There was a pianist playing every night in the wicker bar we sat in. He was virtuoso – a very beautiful player. I mean I’m not built that way but I’d have given him a kiss. He had this big warm grin I still can’t forget. His piano was sun-faded – the colour of a black t-shirt you’ve washed too many times. And since we were the only pair clapping, he got up, walked over and asked if we had any requests. We got Sting and Phil Collins and Dave Brubeck. He got a couple of beers.

Still, you think. Two people on a night isn’t much of an audience. But then you wonder if that’s actually enough – if playing piano for two idiots who love you is enough. Whether it was the creative life he planned, dreamt about. Naturally, you have to ask who he plays for. Whether he plays here because it’s all he’s good for. Whether he only plays because it’s all he’s good at.

And then you see him smiling again, and remember that first and foremost, all money aside, he plays for himself.

It starts with thousands of us. Not ten, or a hundred, nor a creative writing class’s worth. It’s more like a legion, or several, with millions of words between us. It’s not just you at it, either. It’s me, and it’s him down the road, her in the next town — the vicar in his vicarage. It’s your grandparents’ awing memoirs. It’s stuff by vampire fans, fans of boobies, fans of football games of the seventies. Actually, it is all of us, us writers and poets and journalists. Us playwrights and students and columnists.

So they’re long odds, really.

All of us, we have our works in progress and our half-finished drafts, our ideas on envelopes, in phones, the insides of a flash new moleskine. Our final versions, word docs with long tails — passworded PDFs and hardback envelopes stuffed with query letters, three chapters, four wishes and a frigging tonne of stamps.

All of us, you and me, we each have our target postcodes and dreams. We also have the reviews we imagine while showering. The launch party. The mushroom vol-au-vents. That’s a lot of hope combined. And so the odds get a bit longer.

Our millions of words have to filter through a fine-comb funnel. A metre-stacked slush pile, manned by someone who also has to send all those read-receipts because we’re all so neurotic about postmen. And these readers have seen every kind of handwriting from far-flung addresses. They’ve had to deal with unreadable, unreturnable junk and greasy prints on typewritten A4. Queries two days after they’ve received a first query. Millions of words through a fine-comb funnel — and the slush gets deeper, and decisions get easier. The odds get shorter still.

Publishers’ readers, they can only work off their proclivities and taste. You don’t fit the bill, it’s a form letter without a why. So you never know why. And it gets tougher yet because the slush reader’s cynicism has been sharpened on a strop of bad letters and writers’ egos. They want the next big thing, sure: they crave it. It’s not us versus them — it’s an interdependent setup. But lengthy exposition — infodumps — and crappy first paragraphs; cliches and casual racism, these are the things we send to try them. Things that make a ‘no’ easy.

And yes, their nos come easy. They didn’t like the first page, or the sixth when they checked come to that. And nos come from other things. The last book they read was a belter; does yours hold up?

The odds get shorter, and shorter.

And we, me and thee, we sit at home and take it all so personally. It wasn’t even a bad go — it just caught a reader as they rubbed their eyes at 4.15 on a Friday afternoon, when they’ve had a beer for dinner and a suggestive text from home. They don’t want your manuscript, leastways not all of it. And anyway, your title’s silly, and derivative, and there’s another, something brighter, much further down the pile.

Those bloody odds.

But we go on, don’t we? Possibly a bunch of masochists. We query and we scream — we celebrate with our pals and we say, well, I worked damn hard on that last draft –

Even if we always submit and find a typo in the first page.

I write all this because I’ve read slush. Once upon a time, I was that bastard gatekeeper. I know how the jokes go, the shared banter, the blackly cruel remarks. The fright at deranged writers — some of you are — and the If only he’d put that there, or made that a little clearer. While I wasn’t really qualified to judge, I had chance to.

In fact, agents and publishers’ readers use any excuse to say no. It’s a lesson the writer learns hard and fast. It’s where the odds are cut out altogether. The first thing to strip away the skin, the romanticism of writing. The very thing that exposes the gulf between written and read. And that’s how come I know the odds pretty well. That’s how I know it sometimes isn’t enough to be good.

But don’t forget: agents and publishers don’t want to say no.

In the last six years, I called you a lot of naughty things. A bastard and a hack; some kind of pestilence and another sort of joke. I said you were the worst writer I’d read, oh, the worst by far. Happily, I threatened to set your point-of-sale stands on fire. And I told my friends and my family they were chumps for bothering with your latest. And when I moved into my flat, I put a copy of Angels and Demons on my bookshelves, for a laugh, so I could point and go, if that bastard’s there, then so can I be. Sometime.

Dan Brown, I didn’t like your smug face. The face on you – your multi-million selling, best-award-winning, multi-print-running, round face, with your cute little chin dimple. Or your suit.

Danny-boy, I saw you on the news that time, and I said, I bet you plagiarised from that Jesus textbook, you bloody get. I bet you did. And I sneered at your name, and I added an ‘F’ to the middle of it, which stood for a coarse version of ‘flipping’. And me and my friends, when we talked of your exceptionally well orchestrated marketing campaigns, we all walked round going, DAN FLIPPING BROWN, but ruder. Because, Dan Brown, you were everywhere. Your crown was a frigging massive royalty check.

But Dan Brown, look. I’m just so sorry. I think it’s that I misunderstood you. See, it started with Stephen King. I thought he was a right dick as well. And then I read one of his stories – I forget which – and it was so perfectly taut it had sheen. And I thought, I’ve got it all wrong. I’ve got it all wrong.

Don’t get me too wrong, though. I like all sorts. Takes all sorts, doesn’t it? But Dan Brown, I am sorry. I’m sorry because you write what you write because you know exactly how to write.

I’m sorry because you made my brother, who I’m pretty sure has never read a book in his life, read four of your books in as many weeks.

Also, Dan Brown, I’m sorry because despite jealously hating you, I couldn’t stop reading your multi-chart-riding Angels and Demons. Because even though it’s cheesy, and you do that convenient thing where your main characters suddenly recall facts from nineteen years ago, like the time they were on the toilet and they read about some arcane superstition that’s relevant to the plot hole you’re closing, even though of all of these things, and especially your deranged similes, you know how to shift us across your pages.

I’m sorry because you know exactly what you’re doing. You don’t seriously think that people stare into their own dark souls – or whatever your baddies do – but you know that the image, however clichéd, conveys the message. Because you use clichés to speed your writing – and why not?

Because I realise now that the best writers are the writers understood by everybody. And you’re pretty ace at cliffhangers.

And you have 12 novels in you. That’s what Wikipedia says. 12. That is so many novels, with so many ideas, and so many plot holes to close so inventively with your main character’s ruthless memory.

Bye now.

Matt

There was no way to prove — actually prove, really prove — that that man was me. The story was familiar — I knew I had written it — but that name on the paper still was not me. It was a symbol, a name. It was alien. And then I realised that even if I did become successful at writing, it would never mean a thing to me, because I couldn’t identify myself with that name. It would be soot and ashes. So I didn’t write any more. I was never sure, anyway, that the stories I had in my desk a few days later were mine, though I remembered typing them. There was always that gap of proof. That gap between doing and having done.

– Ray Bradbury: “No Particular Night or Morning” (from The Illustrated Man)

Look: that’s Bradbury nailing what writing’s really about. The doubt you feel; the doubts you share. It’s Bradbury on the middle-point of a novel you started, a short story you sacked off, a poem you thought was going somewhere. For me, it’s that exact reason you stop writing a work in progress. The loathing and the loss of confidence.

But your parents don’t really care that you’re writing. Pay your bills and manufacture some handsome grandchildren — that’s what they care about.

Want to be a writer? All the advice points to writing hard and often. To be a good writer, you have to write hard to get good. Write, write, and write some more.

But you know that.

And your girlfriend, she doesn’t really care how you do it. She wants you to put the laptop down. Wash up and kiss her hair.

So, right, you remember things. You remember how writing’s the practical part — the practiseable part, the verb — then  really what makes the difference between a good writer and a failing one is knowing when you’ve finished.

And me, I don’t ever know. Chances are, you don’t either.

But your friends don’t really care much about your hobby or the sediment it puts in your guts. Their eyes go all glassy, don’t they? Did you notice that? That’s because you’re playing out. You’re having a beer — not telling them about the way your weirdo main character get weirder all the while.

Then there’s the parable about the man who rewrote his novel every year till he died. Never content, he trimmed and pruned and tweaked and shaved. And never, ever, was he happy. He’d send it round Jupiter and back, that bloody manuscript of his, and still he’d hack it to bits. And that’s you, isn’t it? You keep doing that to your novel as well. That’s why you haven’t subbed it for a month or six.

Only your writer friends, well they’re more arsed about their own characters, flailing through their blank pages without a full stop to hang off. They’d sooner their own stuff come out than yours. That’s the beast — you’re the lamb — now clear off. Competition, if you’re going to be honest. Oh give over, you’re thinking now. You love your friends winning book deals.

Well, that’s because you’re lovely. That’s because they’re your friends.

But come on. Writers don’t write books in teams. We’re selfish, us writers. Taking all that time to peck at the keys; to wake up in the night and wake our partners to write in notepads by lamplight. We’re bastards, some of us. We ask the wrong questions to dig out the truths.

Some of us.

(I like friends getting book deals)

And there’s never enough time, is there? Never enough time. In from work, out of clothes, on to the settee. Making time where there is none. Your brain always on it. In the shower, taking a dump. You can’t stop thinking about that scene; that scene and that death; that plot hole and that cliche.

But your employer doesn’t give two figs about the novel you’re writing.

Nobody really does.

So how do you do it? How do you make anybody care?

It took me till this week to realise. To realise that nobody really gives a shit about your writing till they’ve gone to bed to read it. That’s when they care. And their questions come later. Their attention comes later. Their compliments if you’re lucky.

And till then, well. We’ve got all these blog posts we writers write for each other.

So keep trucking.

*Yet.

Well, I’ve got myself 4,000 words for the trouble. Below, I’ve listed what I think I did better. It’s not a methodology. It’s not life-coaching for writers. But it’s something.

Use Microsoft Notepad, not Microsoft Word

Notepad looks like crap, which is the whole point. For one, you’re never distracted by fonts. You can just write. For two, you don’t care about formatting. You can just write. For three, you can get filthy. Disgust yourself with your writing — write as fast as you can, and spell everything wrong — because nobody’s ever going to see what you’re doing in that terrid little .txt file.

Copy and paste your notes in. Make a mess.

And can I promise something else? You’ll never find a better sentence by right-clicking for the thesaurus.

Write in a font you don’t normally write in

Another thing about fonts. Agents and publishers really like reading Times New Roman, but that doesn’t mean you should write in it. Balls to agents and publishers, actually – Times New Roman is a horrible font. It’s angular and pixel-y and dull. It makes you feel like you’re writing essays, which puts a subconscious pressure on you to use words like ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’. ‘Amongst’ instead of ‘among’. ‘Utilise’ instead of ‘use’. And no, I can’t prove this. But association’s a strong thing.

Me, I used to write everything in Sylfaen. It’s curvy without being unprofessional. Now — mainly because I’ve only just got round to a pirated copy of Word 2007 — I’m writing in Calibri, 11 point, zoomed to 110%. It’s a hot font. If I spoke binary, I would ask to see its knickers.

Start writing when you really can’t (or shouldn’t)

Last week, while I was working, an idea struck me at about 4pm. So I wrote it out into a notepad document, and got paid for doing it. It was twenty minutes – enough to get something down, not enough to get noticed and sacked for the trouble – but it was down all the same. The crucial bit is that I left a sentence unfinished. I emailed it to myself. On the way home, I was properly eager, halfway to running. And when I got home, I picked it up again, and had a paragraph I not only liked, but had started writing on the snide. Have at that, capitalism!

Take walks

Walking is the most boring thing humans do. A genuinely awful habit we’re yet to get around. And sure, you’ve had this advice before. But you’re blocked, so you’ve got to try and confuse yourself into trying something. So how’s about it? Because the fact is, a half-hour walk really can inspire and baffle even the fattest of writers. Really. Get out and pootle. You’ll be busy trying not to get squashed by those tosser estate agents in their Audis, and the first line of your new story will appear in the road, in the shop window, in the tree. On the hills or in your shoelaces.

I won’t lie: walking into and home from work has really helped me clear my head before a big session. And it’s toned my arse besides.

Reward yourself

You know all about Pavlov and his daft bloody dogs. But basic conditioning works. So, if you write a chapter, have a cigarette or a chocolate or another glass of wine. Watch a bit of Eastenders or google your favourite celebrity’s boobs. If you write a smashing line, laugh at yourself — go on — because it’s all right to laugh at how brilliant that line is. And if your partner’s in the room, ignore them completely. It makes snogging better when you’re done.

Remember that it’s all right if you can’t be arsed

Sometimes, watching films and playing games and cooking food seem like the best things your grandparents won the second world war for. It feels good to mong about in your scruffs, shooting terrorists or losing your kecks over vampires. But more than that, more than anything, doing something else gives you a thread to pull. Pull harder, and you’ll find a paragraph.

Last night, I chopped a chilli and fried it off. The fumes caught in my throat. A simile fell from the cooker hood. I wrote it down.

Keep notes

I use my phone. It’s got Bluetooth so it can interface with my netbook. It’s full of sentences and one-liners and plot points. Now they’re down, they’re out. I can’t wait to get to the point where I use them all. They’re the checkpoints – where you can save your game, and know you’ve achieved everything before. Of course, those with pens will prosper. Luddites.

Read everything by the writer you want to be better than

Then learn to hate them. You won’t be. But that’s only because you’ll be different. You’ll be different because you’ll be too self-conscious about using their phrases, their style and their rhythm.

Read everything else in the world

Shampoo bottles are fascinating reads. Really. Look at that frothy copy, then find typos and feel smug. Tell your friends. Read the little labels you get with flowers – they teach you something. Read about the nutritional values of your chocolate bar. Read the paper. Read websites. Read the first sentences of every single book you own.

Then, go in the bathroom, put a mirror on the floor, take aim, and kick yourself up the backside.

It’s overdue, but I can’t get myself into labour. It won’t crown. It’s kicking my belly but it doesn’t want to play. It’s a distraction; I feel it most of the time. It’ll be the third time. The first time it was diarrhea. The second was a textbook delivery — it was fun and flowing and fairly batshit in places, but I wrote it and it nearly made it to adulthood. Only it didn’t, and we already know that story.

I’m pregnant with a story I want to birth but can’t bring myself to.

I’m thinking too much about what people will think of it; whether it’ll stand up; whether it’ll be so good that I go and kill everything else I wrote just to concentrate on rearing it properly. I knew this kid who spoke about a ‘blinking cursor of doom’ over a white document. That’s fine, but it’s also another way to say you’re lazy — and another to say you’ve given up.

That metaphor was disgusting. Sorry.

Writing and reading about so much copy has taught me that if you write ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ — if you talk to your audience on their terms, not yours — you’ll get a warmer, better, response. But that doesn’t work the same in fiction, and I’m not doing that here. Writing copy has also taught me how to use short sentences, too, and that’s half the problem.

I want everything short, clipped. I want big ideas condensed into few words. People to talk like they’ve had an argument with each other the night before. Nobody listening, everybody interrupting. I was in a lift before and a man got out. He said ‘cheers’, like I’d done something worth thanking. I thought, for what? For standing still next to you and not farting? But that’s how people talk. They do these weird, brilliant things. Instead, I’ve started writing psychopaths who mumble and moan in fewer than ten words. That’s not a paragraph — it’s an aborted idea.

I even wrote 10,000 words of my flashy new story, come to that. But then I deleted it, and its back-ups, and played Xbox some more. Emerging patterns over emerging patterns.

Then again, when I don’t write, I feel really anxious — anxious to try, anxious to fail at least. You get it all day, an itch worth scratching, but oftentimes the commute kills it. And, when I do start, I’m only thinking of my first novel — the one I enjoyed, the one I’m still attached to, the one I’m trying to sell — and how free and simple and fun it felt. Ideas came, I wrote them out. (Sort of. I forget it took two years, with breaks for misery.)

Now, I’m always thinking about what a reader would think. It’s a kind of horrible altruism. I’m thinking about how much you’ll hate that sentence. But does a reader want that? Probably they don’t. They want something to read on their trip to work; to fall asleep to.

First time round, with Colin, that is, I didn’t care what anybody thought till my editor bashed the edges till it was something gilded — something bright and better.

I was published in a newspaper at the arse-end of last year. (It’s a secret). It made me feel ill for two weeks. So I’m a pain, too. Want what I don’t get, fret when I do.

I’ve decided to stop using Twitter because it’s always full of the best advice I’ve ever read about writing — and I can’t apply any of it.

Does that mean I’ve stopped enjoying writing? Maybe. Weird, since I’m salaried to write 9-5 as well — a really lucky sod — and because I should be relentlessly bouncy about that. But maybe that’s the sheen rubbing off. Maybe that’s because business writing is limited to a small pool of catchphrases and reassuring lies about strategy and solutions. Maybe, when words make you money, you shape them differently.

Sometimes, you get to thinking that writing about writing is easier, only the best blogs about writing are by people who write all the time.

Anyway: I emailed my Grandad and bleated like this. I said, ‘motivational speeches welcome’. He emailed back today:

Hugh Walpole, of whom you may or may not have heard, was a prolific novel writer in the first half of last century. Every New Year (might have been Christmas) after celebrating the day with family or whoever he retired to somewhere private, took out pen and paper, and solemnly wrote the title of his next novel and “Chapter One.” He then put it away but always finished the whole work before the next New Year came round.

Or, so it is said.

It was the best way of saying shut up and get on with it. So that’s the plan. What’s yours?