Peaceable Land 10 - What I'm Thrusting At

My statement of literary intent.

Some wisdom…

Lately I was freed of much worry by a neat and simple truth. It wasn’t Hakuna Matata, though that’s good too. 

You might have had this, or something like it. A friend confides their ambitions in music but the Spotify profile they show you has their face blurred. They’ve hidden themself from their efforts. Being seen to try while potentially sucking is horrible. For a long time I fantasised of unlikely successes where friends only learnt of my efforts after they were vindicated. 

Eventually, however, I found my neat and simple truth, and it has sustained me since. 

Thrusting is best done nakedly!

On the strength of which principle, and because ten issues is long enough without doing so, I today shall lay out my intent and ambitions.

The novels…

My first novel, Sharp Scratches, I began at 21 and finished at 24. A young man sees a crowd and declares to it that he will find love that year. Why the crowd? He might care more for fame than love. Or he might be cloaking a tender hope in a coarser lust. It could be either; really it’s both, and the two impulses throb against each other for 74,000 words, or 300ish pages. At the end I hope readers will feel older, as if the beginning was a long time ago.

For a large audience you want a publisher. For a publisher you need an agent. The first agent I spoke to advised getting magazine bylines. Now I have some in the NS and will be able to get more. You send agents a ‘covering page’ – synopsis, influences, etc. After I write that I can seek an agent.

Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content.
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
- Shakespeare, Macbeth

Oh you say you have forgotten but you're fibbing, go on, tell me I'm wrong.
- Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Probably by now my concern with how much we can choose ourselves is manifest. My second novel will turn on that ‘doubtful joy’ too. I am at work on it for an hour or a thousand words six days a week. It’s more technical. I want a first draft by the end of this year, and it finished by the end of 2026. 

But let’s focus on the first one first. Next week I’ll have a guest post here and devote all my non-fiction non-job literary energies to the covering page. Since you know I’ve thought about it, I’ll tell you I want reviews to call it ‘a spermily self-conscious and self-consciously spermy bildungsroman’, ‘the last male sex book’, and ‘a clear word on testosterone in an age more confused by it than any other’. Something along those lines.

A tip…

Here is a way to write well. I discovered it this Tuesday on Waterloo Bridge. My bus was evacuated because a madman was stood blocking it. I asked what he was playing at. He shouted at me, then offered me the first punch, then walked off. 

I’m ashamed to tell you it, but I trembled a bit once the punching chat started. Not enough for him to notice, I think, and I would’ve won a fight, but still. I’m unused to adrenaline. And I’m unused to its effects! Within fifteen minutes on the bus I had knocked out my review of the play I’d just seen. To the wordcount and ‘clean’, as editors say, as fuck. I had planned to spend the next morning on it. Instead it was done like that, and it went out with almost no changes. Here.

Please…

That’s all. Please help me with those novels in any way you can. Otherwise I might go out seeking violence to help me, and that could end poorly.

GM