How Do We Keep Going?

Rekindling the joy of storytelling

For many of us, writing fiction can seem like a thankless task. We spend months, years, crafting our stories – then our work goes out into the world and is largely ignored.

Of course, this isn’t every writer’s experience. There are bestselling novelists who gain a great deal of attention. Others publish online and have a dedicated readership.

But for the vast majority, no matter how hard we toil, or how powerful our stories might be, our efforts go mostly unnoticed.

At least, that’s how it currently feels to me. My latest novel, Dark Fire, was published a month ago. Since then there has been no flood of reviews; no fanfare or plaudits. Just...silence.

And I’m one of the luckier ones. I’ve got a book deal, and an agent, and a top publisher with a marketing department. Thousands of other writers, lacking those advantages, have even less chance of getting their work seen.

All of which begs the question: with so little encouragement, how do we keep going?

Perhaps we’ve all got our private tactics. Something that has worked for me is to remind myself, with the aid of keepsakes, why I started writing in the first place.

Of course the why is complex. There are all sorts of egotistical reasons that might have led me down this path. The desire for applause and riches can never be discounted.

But I’m fairly sure, when I get right down to it, that the true driving force behind my becoming a writer was my love of stories.

As a boy, I read countless comics. There was no feeling in the world like returning from school to find the latest edition of 2000AD waiting on the kitchen table. Taking it to my room and losing myself in the adventures of Judge Dread or Rogue Trooper.

I was a huge fan too of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I read and played my way through Creature of Havoc over and over, along with Citadel of Chaos and Armies of Death and all the rest.

Decades later, I still have my musty copies of the Fighting Fantasy books, along with many of my old comics. They live near my writing desk. I keep them for nostalgia, certainly, and for the love of the people who gave them to me.

But they also serve an ongoing purpose. Whenever I feel dispirited and discouraged, as I have done recently, I flick through the pages of a Strontium Dog comic, or read a passage from The Trolltooth Wars.

Thrill Power!! My nan, who ran a newsagents, kept 2000AD aside for me for years. I’ve never received a better gift

Doing so, even now, still causes a shiver of excitement. It’s the same thrill I remember from waking up to Saturday morning cartoons, or discovering a new Transformers annual. 

Back then, my love of storytelling was unadulterated. I knew nothing of publishing, or sales. There was none of the greed or fear of failure attached. To my boyhood self, stories were freedom and wonder and endless possibility.

That wide-eyed boy still exists, somewhere deep inside me. Going back to those first, most-loved stories brings him to the surface. Sometimes I sit with him for a while, imagining him in my mind’s eye, basking in his open, joyful curiosity.

As with so much in life, and particularly anything creative, it’s a question of quietening the thinking, and turning up the volume on the feeling. According to my thinking mind, there are countless reasons why I should hesitate to ever write another word: the world doesn’t need more stories; it doesn’t need my stories; my efforts are doomed to failure.

I’ve never been much of a collector, much less a hoarder - except when it comes to books. These Fighting Fantasy books have been with me most of my life

But I refuse to live in such a miserable rational world. I’d rather listen to my heart, which insists on something very different. It isn’t easily put into words. It can only really be felt.

And I do feel it, as I flick through the pages of 2000AD, or Fighting Fantasy. I feel it as an invisible thread tugging me back to my desk, insisting I sit down and start crafting another story of my own.

I feel it as a glimmer of hope that somewhere, someday, a reader will pick up one of my books and immerse themselves in it with pure wonder – the same wonder I felt reading those first stories all those years ago.

How about you? How do you keep going?

P.S. I’m not the only one who reaches back to childhood stories to lift their spirits. I read this recently from fantasy writer

Faenon

and it struck a chord…

On The Utter Precariousness Of All Writing, Everywhere, Ever

P.P.S. Don’t forget to pick up a copy of Dark Fire. It’s the second instalment of the Blind Bowman trilogy, which the Guardian compared with A Game of Thrones, and bestselling author Jackie Morris called: “Haunting. Breathless. Wild. Magic.”