Residential 2: Apprenticeship

Novelist and playwright Nell Leyshon gave a talk at the residential. She told the story of how she got started writing, how as she puts it, she served her apprenticeship. Nell cut her writing teeth as her baby was cutting real ones. She just did it; she wrote with a baby on her knee. She wrote novels and stories and kept working at them until they were good. She describes her apprenticeship as the 'long, lonely time.' I think we all know what she means. No one asks you or even particularly wants to you start writing stories. It feels pretentious, presumptuous; anyone who starts out writing has ideas above their station. What the hell gets into us? It can't just be a simple craving for status and recognition. If that's all you have, you'll soon give up, because you ain't going to get it until you've paid your dues. There has to be something more to sustain you through the long, lonely time. A need to communicate? The joy of imagining? The pride of a job well done?

Sometimes I give myself the mountain-climbing lecture. It's like this: if you want to climb mountains, you have to enjoy the climb. Mountain-tops are cold, barren, inhospitable places; the goal can't be simply to reach the top. You have to be in it for the climb itself too. It's hard, sometimes scary, and no one can climb it for you. So, getting to the top is the goal, but there's no point doing it unless you like climbing.

I forget why the mountain climbing lecture helps. Somehow it does.

Nell had her break when she sent a radio play into BBC Writer's Room. It was good, and they took her onto a scheme with a commission at the end. Good old Writer's Room. Then she sent a story in to a competition, and it made it into a prestigious Picador anthology, and on the back of that, her first novel was published. Needless to say, her 'first' novel was actually her third or fourth.

So that's it. If you want to be a writer, you have to serve your apprenticeship. The more you write, the more you can write. And, if you really work at it, you can get good enough that people will want to come with you, and it's not so lonely anymore.