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Every so often I hear an astonishing story to illustrate the fact that creative artists and ‘the suits’ may as well be different species. The other day, I happened to catch a radio programme about INXS’s 1987 album Kick. Apparently, after the band had finished recording, their manager played the tapes to the group’s US record label, Atlantic, and the execs were so underwhelmed, they offered the band a million dollars to re-record the album because they ‘couldn’t hear a hit’ on it. INXS refused to change a note and the label capitulated. Kick went on to sell 10 million copies.
It’s an age-old story, only the characters change. The Medici never really appreciated Leonardo da Vinci. Van Gogh didn’t sell a single painting during his lifetime. The Beatles were turned down by every record company in London until they finally found a home in an obscure part of EMI and palmed off with a ‘producer of comedy acts’, one George Martin. J.K Rowling was rejected by every publisher in London, before Bloomsbury were persuaded to go for it and gave her an advance of three thousand pounds for the first Harry Potter. The list goes on: Catch 22 -turned down by everyone, until one brave publisher took it on. Watership Down garnered enough rejection notes to paper a room before its potential was realised.
The reason for all this is simple. Creative people rarely understand business and ‘the suits’ usually have no inkling of Art, but they need each other. Many times it all works out just fine, and great work seems to have a habit of finding a place in the world. But it does make me wonder how much has been lost and will continue to be lost because of the dichotomy between creator and purse-string-holder.
And actually, the bottom line is…creative people and ‘the suits’ really are different species.
Throughout my entire adult life I’ve been a rationalist. I’m right there in the atheist, mechanistic, logical positivist, humanist camp. But just recently, I’ve begun to wonder whether this viewpoint is actually correct. Not that I’ve suddenly become a Green, Christian, Marxist, Vegetarian, Buddhist, you understand.
It’s just that I’ve begun to wonder how much the role of luck plays in everything we do. For example, it strikes me that some people battle their entire lives for recognition and success and never achieve their dreams. Others, with no discernible talent, land on their feet and reach the loftiest heights of wealth and fame.
Now, of course, we can put all this down to how Person A presents their talents in a better way than Person B. We could argue, Person A worked harder than Person B, that they were better looking, more charming, more determined, more in touch with the Zeitgeist. But I’m convinced it’s not as simple as that. I’m beginning to think there might be something in the idea of luck.
A huge amount of scientific energy has been expended upon the notion that we will one day be able to define the universe. Some scientists have even postulated that we’ll wake up one morning to a world in which all the forces of nature are understood and can be described by a single equation, one we could put on a T-shirt. But, there are clues everywhere that the Universe is not a rational place, not a simple, neat and tidy universe, a place that will one day be explained by human ingenuity.
Consider a few clues:
So, what’s my conclusion? The world is random, therefore anything can happen, therefore ‘luck’ (whatever that is) does exist.
I’m sometimes asked at literary festivals and in interviews on TV and radio why I changed tracks from writing non-fiction to fiction.
Well, the simplest answer is that I actually always wanted to be a novelist, and I believed that by breaking into non-fiction as a science writer I could, one day, move sideways into fiction. The truth of the matter however is that publishers are very suspicious of writers who want to change genre, and they resist it at every turn. As recently as the months before my first novel, EQUINOX was sold in dozens of languages at the 2005 Frankfurt, I had publishers telling me to stick to what I knew…to keep writing non-fiction.
The fact that I wrote twenty-six non-fiction books before having my first novel published has proved to be of enormous value. I learned so much in the process – not just about the craft of writing itself, but the sheer volume of knowledge I acquired through years of intense research. That research has been absolutely essential to me as a novelist because I specialise in novels which have historical or scientific content.
However, if I were to be absolutely truthful, there was one single experience that made me determined to leave non-fiction behind me. I was at a book signing in Perth for my then-latest book – a biography of J.R.R Tolkien to tie-in with the release of the wonderful Peter Jackson movies. An elderly lady approached me clutching a copy of my biography, and some sixth sense told me to expect something weird.
“Hello,” the lady said, and smiled.
I smiled back. “Would you like me to …”
She leaned forward and in hushed, reverential tones asked: “Did you really write The Lord of the Rings?”
One of the great thrills of being a writer is receiving finished copies of your latest book. The buzz I get from this never diminishes, even after writing thirty-five books. Aligned with this is the pleasure of receiving translated editions. My record for having one of my books published in foreign languages stands at thirty-three, for my first novel, Equinox, and on my shelves I have some three hundred editions of my books in such unlikely languages as Mongolian and Hebrew.
A running joke I had with a foreign rights agent who used to represent me was that I had checked the translation of the Icelandic edition or the Ukrainian edition and found an error on page 45, paragraph 2. My foreign rights agent knew very well that my linguistic skills are limited to…well, English.
The nicest part about receiving foreign copies is that every country treats the book differently and you never know what to expect. Each has an idiosyncratic cover – some wonderful, some truly hideous. My favourites are editions from Germany, Italy and Scandinavia. But, the idea that: ‘you never know what to expect’ does have its charm limits. The other day, I received a Turkish edition of one of my non-fiction books called The Fruits of War. On the back, the publishers had thoughtfully included an author photo, but it wasn’t a picture of me. Instead, it was a random member of the public, a man much older than me, with a beard, and worst of all by far, he was wearing a really horrible tie.
My brother once told me that he sometimes imagines me working on a book and pictures me putting on a smoking jacket and cravat before spilling a few finely tuned words onto the page each day. Sounds like fun. Machiavelli used to dress up in his finery to write, but that was after he had been exiled from the Medici court and was writing about the days when, as an ambassador, he really did dress up in his finery. I’ve never worn a smoking jacket.
People often wonder how my day goes and they’re usually surprised when I tell them I try to be as disciplined as any other person at work. At the moment, I’m writing the third book in the E-Force Trilogy, called NANO, working flat-out at a rate of fifteen-hundred words a day, everyday, which, I have to admit is a bit much. But it’s all about markers, targets, deadlines. I know I have to meet a certain daily word count or else I won’t make my deadline some way off in the future, a date arrived at by mutual agreement between my publisher and me.
Another FAQ is: Do you find it lonely work? And again, most people are surprised by my reply. The lonely times, I always say, are when I’m having breaks between stretches of writing, because, when I’m in full-flow and the story is coming together, I’m with my characters in their world and they keep me company. And, although some of those characters are despicable and the situations in which they find themselves might be horrible, for me, there’s never a dull moment when they’re around.
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