Confessions of a persistent plodder

Slow and steady wins the race.  Yes, this is all about tapping into your inner tortoise.

Last time, I mentioned my teenage years in which I idolised Joyce, Beckett and pretty much anyone else who was ‘difficult’.  In essence, I was an intellectual snob even though I wasn’t nearly intellectual enough myself to make head of tail of it all.

Naturally, as with all teenage boys, my close friendship group shared similar views and tastes.  I was the least clever and least talented of us all.  This is not cue to start up the violins – looking back, honestly, it’s just true.  Of all the guys who could have made a career out of writing, I was the least likely.  I was a tortoise lining-up against a team of highly-trained and super-fit hares.  No chance.  But I kept on plodding.

In my 20s, I worked in Waterstones, then I got a break as a reporter on ‘The Bookseller’ magazine, as a news reporter.  Every day, I was coming home and trying to write because that was still what I really wanted to do in life.  At that point, it was plays.  I’d written a couple at university and they’d been performed, so that was all I really knew about. 

Coming out of the Bookseller office one lunchtime I almost literally bumped into someone I’d known in my student days and he asked if I still writing.  When I said that I was, he revealed that he was looking for something to take up to the Edinburgh Fringe that summer.  Was I interested?  Absolutely!  Now, given a target and a deadline (always useful), I set about writing something tailor-made for that group of actors.  It went up to Edinburgh and became a mini hit.  When it was done again in a very small fringe theatre in London, someone from ‘The Bill’ came to see it and asked if I’d like to write for the series.  And that was how my 20 years in television started.  It was a very large slice of luck – or maybe even more than one slice.

But also, it wasn’t – because all the way from teenage to the moment my first ‘Bill’ episode aired, I’d continued to write something pretty much every day.  I wasn’t brilliant – I never was and never will be brilliant – but I was what I’d call ‘A Persistent Plodder’.  That was me – a true tortoise.  I just kept plodding steadily on and didn’t stop, unlike my more-talented teenage contemporaries – the hares. 

So what’s my advice?  Just keep doing it.  If you were learning a musical instrument, you’d have to practise those tedious scales and arpeggios every day or you’d get nowhere.  Writing is the same – you’re building up your ‘creative muscles’ and turning the writing process from something alien into something entirely comfortable and natural. 

So there we are.  Sermon over.  Be a persistent plodder and just keep writing!