Moving the Goalposts

I used to have a blog called “A Success-Shaped Hole Called Failure.” The idea behind the name of the blog - which by the way didn’t publish anything of note - was that having a defined ambition gave you a very precise definition of failure. People who have no particular ambition can still feel an amorphous condensation of failure dampen their days but someone who wants to be a top class goal keeper knows exactly what failure looks like. It looks like not being a top class goal keeper. There are criteria proposed by which you can be judged. The rest of your life can be fantastic but even the good things will take on the cast of consolation as you consider the core failure, the dream not realized, the goal not achieved.

For me it was simple. I wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t a career path, or a hankering, it was what the Catholics call a vocation. God had told me, “You are going to be a writer.” When I was at Our Lady’s Primary School in Dalton-in-Furness, I wrote a comic book and the headmaster allowed me to used the copying machine to print it. It wasn’t a photocopier. There was a drum and ink and you had to wind a handle to set the whole thing turning. On the front page I’d drawn a cartoon ghost saying “My name’s Spooky, and you can buy me, for only 2 P.” The headmaster put the kibosh on money changing hands and told me to just give the comics away which angered me not because I had any dreams of building a Murdoch like media empire, but because it spoiled the integrity of that front page. Spooky sounded ridiculous.

I honestly have no access to what was going through my head before or after. I don’t know what on Earth my parents thought of this, or what the teachers did. I might be misremembering the whole thing, but I don’t think I am. All I know is I never stopped writing. My interest in computers was so I could get a printer. The printers weren’t great so I got typewriters. I hand-wrote a novel when I was eighteen. I wrote poems and short stories. I watched films which had writers as their main characters, thinking of them as heroes - Barton Fink, Jack Torrance - even when they obviously weren’t meant to be - Barton Fink, Jack Torrance. I loved writers who were self-consciously writers like the Beats. The Beats were my first non-science fiction buddies.

At University, I got immersed in writing essays and in reading everything by everybody. My ambition was (and I’m not even joking) to be whatever this age’s equivalent to Shakespeare would be. I wanted that level of attainment. I hammered out more novels on my typewriter. Then I used the computers at university to write another couple. Only one of them was sent out. A crime novel, it provoked a two sided single spaced reader’s report which could’ve been summed up in two words: “Shit sandwich.”

I began writing book reviews for a local listings magazine and I belonged to a group of performance poets which was almost exactly as bad as it sounds. My academic work taught me how to write in a way that nothing else did. It taught me structure, discipline, focus. That is Professor Everest did, my PhD supervisor. It was often painful, but it worked somehow. The only drawback was that it led me into the cul-de-sac of academia. Nice and leafy and all that, but it can lead you to conferences where during breaks between panels you stand around making jokes about the Aphra Behn.

It wasn’t until I got to Italy that I realized that I wasn’t cut out to be an academic. My ambition was to be writer. I’d already written about five novels. I wrote another eleven or twelve. I lost count. I had an agent, which was a huge advance, and the quality of my rejection letters were superb. But it was about this time that I started the “A Success Shaped Hole Called Failure” blog. I was beginning to see that I wasn’t going to make it. Many great editors had read my work. Many of them had responded positively and liked it. But no one (except for my long-suffering agent) fell in love with it. I had also become more aware of how publishing worked. Of how editors had very few opportunities to say yes, and when they did their reputations were very much on the line. A small publishing house was betting its very existence every time they published a book. I wasn’t a comedian, or game-show host. I was a novelist who aspired to the literary end of the spectrum. It was a crowded end of the spectrum and there was nothing that distinguished me from the crowd. I began to suspect that perhaps I was simply not good enough. I began to ask myself would I read me?

I finally got a book published. “9 Times Tables and Other Tales” was an anthology of short stories and was published by a digital and on demand publisher. This meant no book reviews and no shops carrying it. It didn’t feel like a real book. I designed the cover myself and called it “9 Times Tables” so it would appear at the front of any alphabetical listings. There wasn’t even a story with that title in the collection. Later another publisher took on a novel that I should have called “Peterloo,” but instead had renamed “Blood Is on the Grass.” (I got it in my head that it sounded like Porta-loo.) This was again a digital or print on demand publisher and I couldn’t take on promotion as I was in Italy.

Whenever these books came out, I was seized by embarrassment. They weren’t vanity or self-publishing efforts, but somehow it felt like they weren’t legitimate. I didn’t like the quality of the paper or the look of the books. Now, I know there are many people on social networks devoted to providing mutual support for writers and insisting that if you sit down and write that makes you a writer and to hell with the naysayers. But that was never my ambition. I could do that since I was six. I wanted to be a great writer. Mentioned in the same breath as Shakespeare you may recall. And I don’t think Bill would’ve been impressed by my e-book exclusive deal. Those weren’t real books and I still wasn’t a real writer. I was moving the goalposts, yes. But also no.

Finally, becoming a writer crept up on me. I was writing a lot of journalism. Film reviews, features, interviews, while also plugging away at short stories, novels and adding film scripts to my rosta. One of the scripts was optioned. Then came a deal to write a book. A biography of my favorite living filmmaker. Now I’m in the midst of a number of writing projects with the cautious confidence that they’ll find readers - the yang to the writer’s yin. This was the first time that it occurred to me that I’d achieved my ambition. I was what I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do. Whether or not people respond and how they respond, that part I have very little control over. At some point someone will mention my name in the same breath as Shakespeare if only it’s you, dear reader, saying “Did John Bleasdale really compare himself to Shakespeare?”