Why I Write.....

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…….to entertain. I have no more elevated aspiration than to provide an engaging divertissement  that exercises the reader’s grey matter and grin muscles. I don’t try to eff the ineffable, or create literary Leviathans like Lear. That’s why I write  ‘tales’ – because a tale must entertain before it can do anything else. And that’s why I write my Canterbury series, featuring DI Chaucer, as a respectful nod towards the greatest collection of tales in the English language.

   ……to pass the time in some serious, mind-full fun. Writing is the only work I’ve ever enjoyed, the only work that has never felt like work – even after an 18-hour ‘shift’ in which the characters start behaving badly (ie. un-believably), the story develops more holes than theTitanic and the  mots justes are just mush. For there’s always the other times – when it all comes together, when the ideas sing and the words dance to the rhythm. And there’s no feeling quite like it. Golden hours that pass in seconds. Even when locked in that dark and daunting challenge of the blocked-blank page, you still tingle with the sheer possibility of it all. And this is my return on it all.  (Maybe I should just get out more.)    

……to prove......to myself, that, day in, day out, I am capable of doing all of the above (which is something to do with all that sense of self malarkey) - and that Félix Fénéon – the writer who “aspired only to silence” and who stopped writing because he came to believe “that all writing is compromise, that conception will always trump execution, that ego and politics are everyone’s  coauthors” – was wrong. (Even though I suspect, deep down, he might be right.)         

PS……one reason I don’t write - to make money. Even a cursory skim of this website would probably tell you I don’t have a great deal in common with Dr Johnson (brilliant mind, breakfast-stained waistcoat). I certainly don’t agree with his notion that only a fool writes  for any reason other than to make money. In fact, the only thing I can imagine myself doing just for the money is robbing a bank.  Don’t get me wrong – I’ll take every sou, cent and penny my cat-alogue can drag in - but that’s not why I write.