Yesterday we had a wonderful day in Bristol. The weather was good and, more importantly, I had one of those strong intuitive feelings that I should be there. Over the years I have learned that such promptings are usually worth following.
Françoise had her own reasons for going. She wanted to buy some new shoes and find materials for her painting. My particular attraction was the Bristol New Writers Festival at the Bristol Folk House in Park Street. The event had the encouraging title So You Want to Be a Writer? and promised contributions from publishing professionals, writers and artists, together with representatives of the Society of Authors. As someone who has recently published two books, I was interested to hear what the professionals had to say.
The Bristol Folk House itself was an unexpected pleasure. From Park Street the entrance gives very little indication of what lies behind it. It reminded me slightly of the TARDIS in Doctor Who: you enter through what appears to be a relatively modest opening from the street and suddenly discover a surprisingly large complex behind it. There are numerous meeting rooms, a main hall, a restaurant or café, an outdoor seating area and, generally, a very agreeable atmosphere. Quite apart from the event we had come to attend, I immediately felt that this was somewhere worth knowing about.
On arrival we were told that the event was full.
I did not believe this for one second.
Anyone who has organised public events knows that if fifty people book, the chances of precisely fifty people turning up are extremely small. Illness intervenes, trains are late, people forget, the weather changes and some simply change their minds. We therefore decided not to disappear meekly down Park Street but to stay around and see what happened.
Sure enough, we eventually got in.
There were three speakers who were very obviously familiar with the publishing world, and by the time proceedings began I would estimate that about sixty people were present. There was clearly considerable interest in the subject.
Unfortunately, this was where things began to unravel.
The first curious feature was that the stage lighting had not been switched on. The people we had supposedly come to see were sitting in comparative gloom. This might have been suitable for a séance, but it was less appropriate for a writers’ festival.
Then came the sound.
The speakers tended to mumble into their microphones and, worse still, spoke extraordinarily quickly. There is a strange assumption among some public speakers that the more words they can fit into a minute, the greater the quantity of information they are communicating. In reality, the opposite is often true. If an audience has to struggle simply to distinguish one sentence from the next, much of the value is lost.
Eventually I felt obliged to ask someone if the speakers could be encouraged to slow down.
There was another elementary problem. Although the panel had microphones, there appeared to be no microphone available for the audience. Questions were therefore being asked from various parts of the room which most of us could not hear. We would hear an answer without knowing what question had produced it. For an event based substantially around communication, this seemed a fairly serious omission.
About forty minutes into what had been advertised as a two-hour event, matters became stranger still. We were informed that there would be a pause and that some of the chairs were going to be removed. Why the chairs needed removing was never entirely clear to me. Presumably some different format was intended for the second half.
We waited.
And waited.
After about half an hour, nothing much appeared to be happening. Whatever programme had originally been envisaged seemed to have dissolved. The event had not so much formally ended as quietly collapsed from within.
Before that happened, however, I had managed to make one contribution of my own.
I stood up and said that I thought many potential writers sabotage themselves before they have even begun. They sit down thinking, “I am going to write a book.”
That is an enormous psychological burden.
A book might contain 60,000 or 80,000 words. Faced with that mountain, it is very easy never to take the first step.
My approach is quite different. You don’t write a book. You write the first sentence.
Once you have written the first sentence, something curious happens: a second sentence suggests itself. The second leads to a third. Eventually you have a paragraph. Paragraphs become pages and pages become chapters. Before you quite realise what has happened, something resembling a book has appeared.
For me, writing is fundamentally an organic process. If there is genuinely a book inside you, there comes a point when it almost begins to write itself. The writer becomes partly the creator and partly the assistant to the process.
My observation was acknowledged from the platform, but one of the speakers responded that it was equally important to find an agent.
At that point I realised that we were approaching writing from almost opposite ends of the telescope.
For the professional publishing world, the questions may be: Who is the agent? Who is the publisher? What is the market? Where does the book fit?
My questions are more basic: What wants to be said? Why does it want to be said? And can I get out of the way sufficiently to allow it to emerge?
Of course agents and publishers have their place, particularly for someone seeking conventional commercial publication. But an agent cannot write your first sentence for you. Before worrying about the machinery surrounding a book, there has to be a book—or at least the beginnings of one.
Once it became apparent that the formal event had effectively run out of steam, I decided to make the best of the situation in the way I normally do: by talking to people.
This proved considerably more rewarding.
I spoke with several would-be writers, encouraged them and told them something about my own experience of having published two books. These one-to-one conversations were far more satisfying than much of the formal programme because people could talk about what they actually wanted to do rather than listen passively to general advice.
One particularly memorable encounter was with a woman who had suffered a stroke. The experience had precipitated a major change of direction in her life. Before the stroke she had performed on stage; afterwards she began to place her energies elsewhere.
The stroke had left three fingers on her left hand permanently bent, but otherwise she appeared to have recovered remarkably well. What interested me was not so much the medical event itself as what she had done with it. Something that could simply have been regarded as a misfortune had forced a reassessment of how she wanted to spend the next part of her life.
That conversation alone probably justified following my intuition and going to Bristol.
So, despite what I can only describe as dreadful organisation, I was pleased that we went. There is perhaps a lesson here. An event does not necessarily have to fulfil its advertised purpose in order to be worthwhile. Sometimes the official programme is merely the excuse for bringing together a group of people who would otherwise never have met.
The organisers may have lost control of their meeting, but that did not mean we had to lose control of our day.
We made our own event out of it.
I also came away with a reminder concerning my own writing. The last comparable writers’ gathering I attended was, I think, a couple of years ago in Frome. Perhaps my understanding of writing is due for a little renewal and updating—not necessarily because I agree with everything the contemporary publishing world tells me, but because it is useful occasionally to discover how other people now approach the craft.
And one recommendation remains completely unaffected by the organisational shortcomings of this particular event: the Bristol Folk House in Park Street is well worth discovering. It is an intriguing, welcoming building with much more going on behind its modest entrance than one would ever guess from the street.
Rather like writing a book, perhaps.
You enter through a very small opening and discover an unexpectedly large world behind it.
