Identity

Ronnie O’Sullivan was, allegedly, once asked if he ever got bored playing snooker.

“You see,” Ronnie in this particular anecdote replied, “I make a big mess at the break and then it’s just tidying up. I love tidying up.”

If, as I recently suggested, that the majority of writers have some sort of control freakery element to them, is that why they write? Is the part of their mind that demands order also compelling them to sit for hours at a keyboard purging their souls?

(If, indeed, that is what a writer could be said to do.)

I find this something of a myth. Most of the writers I know will do anything other than sit at the keyboard or empty page and put words down. They procrastinate to hideous lengths. It’s not that they don’t want to write. It’s not that they don’t have any ideas. It’s just that there’s often a more fun, far more sociable activity to do than shackling yourself to the desk and looking inside your heart for universal truths.

I am, perhaps, a bit of an exception. I, typically, write for between two and three hours an evening, three or four nights a week and six or seven hours Saturdays and Sundays, most weekends. Of course there are reasons for this. a) I don’t tend to write in my head. I have start putting words down before I can grapple them into some sort of shape and I spend far more time looking at a blank page than many of my contemporaries who it would seem sit down and rattle off a thousand words straight from their imagination. b) If you wanted to, you could easily accuse me of being a bit of a hack writer, only without the financial rewards. So, a bad hack. I can live with that. Just. c) I don’t, actually, have a huge amount else to do at the moment.

I listened to AS Byatt in conversation with Adam Thirwell recently and she said that an old boyfriend had once told her that writing is about power. It is the writer exerting their will over a whole universe that they are fashioning out of nothing. The writer gives birth to everything and therefore we are the masters of the world.

I think I agree with this. These people, these characters I construct, they are mine to do with what I please.

Balzac, allegedly, once looked upon a painting of a house on a hillside with a wisp of smoke escaping from the chimney. He turned to the artist and he asked, ‘how many rooms does the house have?’

‘How many rooms?’ the artist exclaimed, ‘why, I have no idea.’
‘What are they cooking for dinner?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘What is the daughter’s dowry? Was the harvest successful? How many chickens do they keep? What is the son’s favourite food? What does the mother do every midsummer’s eve? Where did the father lose his virginity?’

‘How you can expect me to know all these things?’ The artist was indignant.

Balzac was more so: ‘If you do not know them, if you do not truly understand your subject, what right do you have to paint them?’

The act of writing is more than the words that appear on the page. The writer knows more than they are giving away, but they control the way the information is given to the reader. They create drama.

Control. Creation. Intrinsically linked.

Order.

I have, in the past, been accused of being so much a control freak as to be a bully. As someone so determined to get their own way, to have the world bend to their desires so that I coerce people into doing what I want irregardless. I used to live an ordered life. I liked tidy. I liked my dinner not too late in the evening. I liked to drink coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon; three cups of coffee, five of tea. Every day. I liked to get a Guardian early on a Saturday Morning with my breakfast and work my way methodically through it, starting with the sport and finishing with the review. I was never late. I never missed a train. I never overslept. I went to bed at about the same time every weekday evening. I ate cereal for breakfast during the week and toast at the weekend. I kept my CDs and books in alphabetical order. The grocery lists I wrote would be in the layout of the supermarket to avoid doubling back. I didn’t lose things. If I did ever lose something, then it must have been because someone else moved it. I showered Monday to Saturday and took a bath on a Sunday.

All that has changed. My flat is a dirty tip, subjected to irregular half-arsed cleans. I’m perpetually late. I don’t know where anything is or often where I’m supposed to be. I fail to recognise people in the street. I have to rely on alarms in my mobile to remind me to, well, pretty much anything. I rarely sleep the night through anymore and so consequently oversleep with alarming regularity. Do I care? Actually, I don’t give a monkey toss. The only pattern that exists is that I will spend time at my desk with the word processor open and my fingers anxiously, nervously battering their way around the keyboard.

It is common for authors to suggest that a certain character came alive, took control of the story and demanded that it progress in a certain direction. I don’t believe them. Characters are our creations. We made them. They can do anything we want them to do. If it does not seem believable that they would act in such a way then the fault lies with us. We have made them with an error. We must start again. We are, for all intents and purposes, their God.

Has my need for control has been transplanted out of reality and into the world of my own making or was I just being a bit of a twat before?

This transformation into a shambolic unreliable dishevelled figure is not the only change. I feel as though I am between phases of self. It is arguable that certain authors write to expose the human frailties behind us all, so that society can look upon itself and reflect. Is it, I wonder, also arguable that certain authors write to try and shine that revelatory light upon themselves, that in the invention of others they will discover their own identity?

I have been, am capable of being, many people. I can be the sarcastic git running up the side of a mountain cracking bad jokes the whole way. I can be the besuited businessman capable of selling the right thing to the right person by a stretch of empathy that makes them like me. I can be shy. I can be outgoing. I can banter about football or cricket or anything else I’ve read in a newspaper recently. I can talk about the merits of an artform. I can make people laugh at my self-deprecating wit. I can make people scowl at my squirming arrogance. It feels as though, sometimes, I will say anything to anyone. I can go and listen to a writers’ conversation panel and then go to a wine bar, drink a solitary glass of wine and spend an hour discussing the unknowable point of literature, the nature of the novel and a little over twenty-four hours later I can be largered up in a pub off Old Street offering back up to the guy I just met who’s about to start a fight.

Who am I?