I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those e-readers out there who have downloaded “The Man Who” to their iPhones, iPods, Kindles,… or whatever, and especially to those who have left messages for me on Feedbooks. For anyone writing independently of the mainstream, readers really are our life’s blood because we have no publisher or agent to polish our egos or bolster our bank balances, so to know you’re out there is a vitally important thing. If you’re an e-reader, and you have something to say about a piece of work you’ve read from the cloud, then don’t be shy: say what you liked or what you didn’t. We indy authors listen. I’m not saying we dance to your tune, because we don’t. We write what we like, but we also need to keep our fingers on the pulse and we’d be stupid to ignore you.
If an Indy author’s not writing for money then why is he/she writing? Is it for adulation? Hardly. The psychology of it is complex and any attempt at an answer is going to be simplistic, but I think the knowledge that our work is being read forms a large part of it. We write, you read, you think, you puzzle and you form an opinion of our work, good or bad. Perhaps there’s also a sense of insecurity – that we’re not right in the head for having the thoughts we do, and that if we can share them, and those we share them with appear to gain something from our thoughts, be it pleasure ot the genesis of their own forays into the imaginative realm, then we aren’t as uselessly strange as we perhaps worried we might be.
“The man who ” was born in 1985. Its genesis was a chance encounter with a girl in the library of the Bolton Institute of Technology, as it was known then. At the time I was blundering through the obscure Engineering Council Part 2 course, which I subsequently managed to pass, but only just, and now, twenty five years later, in a post industrial England, “The man who” remains the more enduring reminder of my time there.
The girl in question didn’t register me at all back then. I glanced at her and something about her had my mind, my soul soaking up the details of her like a temporal sponge, a time machine with the ability to transport me back to that moment even from this immense distance. I recall her in vivid detail, pretty much as I describe her in this story, though I’ve no idea if her name was Clarissa or not of course, because I didn’t speak to her.
A romantic anecdote to be sure,… and we all have similar tales to tell. These are the stories behind the stories. A verbatim telling of the years I spent at college would be a bit of a drag, even for the most patient of readers, and it’s the writer’s responsibility to distill from his or her experience the pertinent human detail, and use it to set fire to some idea that will warm the heart or engage the mind of another person.
That simple encounter in the college library was the seed for a story that wasn’t to be written until decades later. As a writer you don’t plan these things. You simply mine the strata of your life’s experience for whatever precious minerals you can find. I once read that a writer is a person who keeps a notebook under their pillow on their wedding night. Only a writer would recognise the truth in that. I’m not saying a writer would produce verbatim an account of their wedding night, but on a subliminal level all experience is dissolved into the great crucible of being, it is transformed into the language of dreams, so that when we sit down to write we do not always recognise from whence our words are derived. A snatch of dialogue in a story I’m currently working on came from an encounter in a discothèque (such a quaint word) back in 1978! I see her face, her words spoken then in innocence above the sound of ABBA’s Dancing Queen, being only now, to me, profound and mysteriously transposed from that 70’s disco to a post apocalyptic lakeside in the Swiss Alps.
Only now do I realise that to write you do not need to have led an extraordinary existence. You need only to have lived, and to have looked at the world through your own eyes, and be able to tell it to us as you see it. Your experience of this world is unique and therefore priceless. If you feel the urge to write the story of your life, then do so and pay no heed to those who might scoff and tell you your life is worthless. All right, the story of your life might not be commercially viable and if you knock at the door of commercial publication, your enthusiasm may in all likelihood go unanswered, but in human terms the simple fact that you felt compelled to set pen to paper, or keyboard to cloud, is ample qualification of your fitness to write, and to tell us your story.
But who will listen?
As little as ten years ago, you were lost, you were a voice in the wilderness, you were an ordinary person bursting with the extraordinariness of your experience, but with no organ, no means of communication, no means of connection with your fellow human beings, your potential readers. It’s different now. Now you have a platform called cyberspace. You can blog, become webmaster of your own domain, or you can self-publish on any number of free-to-upload cyber-emporea. You will never make a living from it, but you will always have a voice. So get connected, get hacking, and tell the world your story.
Your recognition may only come centuries after you’ve gone, but is that not always the way with writers? Most of us are failures while we live. It is posterity that judges us. Posterity that decides. So be it. Welcome to the club.
Keep the faith.
Endure.
Graeme out.
The Rivendale Review 
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