Fortuna

I stood at the bottom of the steps leading up St Catherine's Hill. I'd just run up and walked down and now I was contemplating running up again. There are 330 steps and they get steeper the higher you go. Of course I wasn't fit enough to run them again. Then I remembered I wasn't fit enough the first time. It isn't your legs and your lungs that get you up there - it's your mind.

So tonight I ran. I ran to feel my heart beat, to feel my blood race, to breathe. I ran too far, too fast. Fast enough, perhaps, to even lose my mind. For that moment in time I was my own limiting factor. It felt like pure, unstoppable escapism.

Tomorrow I will ache, tomorrow my persistent cough will worsen. Tomorrow I will remember the previous damage - the black knee, the bruised foot - and will regret it. Tomorrow I will be slow and I will think.

In all likelihood I will consider what happiness looks like to an average runner, an average lover, an average mother, an average employee, and how it might best be achieved.

On Saturday night a friend, who has recently had her first baby, told me it won't make sense for her to return to work. I used to work with her, so I know her talent and have watched her painstakingly build her career over the years. We talked it over, trying (and failing) to make sense of this surprising turn of events.

Perhaps this is why today I have been beset by that familiar feeling that what matters is not the taking part but the sense of winning. And that you have to be a loser before you can be a winner. Sometimes it seems as if we spend our lives wilfully knocking things down in order to build ourselves back up.

I got to the top of the steps. I took in the view. And I turned and walked down again.

Manic obsessive

Something has been bothering me this past week. Yet again I am beset by that morale-sapping anxiety of not having made much of myself. It tends to sneak up in January, when the year lies stretched out in front of you like a crisp white page waiting for the next chapter of the story to be written. That familiar internal conflict arises: on the one hand a sense of aggrandisement that allows you to imagine yourself achieving self-realisation and leaving a valuable legacy in the world, and on the other hand a bitchy self-sniping about your own limitations that forces you to conclude that writing a novel, or composing a symphony, or discovering a cure for the common cold, or growing a beard, is work best left to humanity's more talented pool.

I'm talking about success, but not the sort measured by happy homes, good friends and getting through a week without recourse to prescribed medication. No, I'm talking about old-fashioned, traditional success, measured in terms of fame, fortune and 'reaching the top'.

Getting there, of course, has less to do with innate talent than with knowing what you want and being sufficiently committed to get it. But it has now dawned on me that there is another ingredient still more relevant in the recipe for success: obsession. Think of anyone you know who is a shining star in their area of operation and I will bet you that they are a total obsessive...

...which brings me to the nub of the matter. A man who is obsessive is, frankly, just a normal man. The well-known 'men and their sheds' scenario: women have hobbies, men have obsessions. Men do obsession naturally and they do it brilliantly (a psychologist would probably say that as hunters men are biologically designed to focus on the target without distraction). But an obsessive woman is distinctly noteworthy, as in 'God woman, you're obsessed!'. So I ask you, who wants to work with an obsessive woman, or date an obsessive woman? They're way too weird. I mean, 'just get some perspective!'.

Typically, a woman will allow herself to do the thing she really wants to do only after she has done everything she has to do. Take this blog for example, which is only ever written after the children are both asleep, my paid work has been dispatched, dinner has been shopped for, cooked and eaten, everyone has the things they need for the next day, and all social engagements have been fulfilled. Compare and contrast Mr London Street who is my very favourite male blogger. I have no idea where or when he writes, but I notice that in 2010 he wrote 178 posts and I wrote 11. My energies, I fear - like those of a cave woman foraging all over the place while keeping an eye on the children - are simply too diffuse to ever amount to much.

So are men pre-destined to be more successful than women? Perhaps my New Year's Resolution should be to get a bit more obsessive. But now I come to think of obsessive women I have known, it didn't end well. Helluva story though...

Just write (now)

Because I’m so impossibly slow at posting, it has now been nearly a month since I was working at the 30th Winchester Writers' conference. This is the problem you see. I'd love to write, but life keeps getting in the way. The original writer's block. In my case, I'm usually too busy editing other people's books (which is what I've been doing more or less day and night this week).

Terry Pratchett gave the plenary address at the conference, which he entitled 'Why are You Listening to Me When You Should Be at Home Writing?' Deliberately provocative you might think. Oddly enough, in his speech he didn't refer to the title he'd given it, and he didn't try to convince us that we'd all be better writers for listening to the wisdom of a multi-million copy, bestselling author. Rather, it seemed to me that the question was a genuine piece of advice: don’t prevaricate, just write.

It’s hardly an original suggestion. Every other week someone or other seems to complain (as if for the very first time) that creative writing can't be taught, and that universities offering creative writing courses are somehow sapping our originality. Instead we should just get on and write 1,000 words each morning before we switch on the radio or speak to another soul.

At Winchester, people came to me - and to many other editors, agents, writers and publishers - to get advice on how to improve their chances of publication. Some would say that they were looking for a magic solution. On the whole I expect they received sound advice, but three things became apparent.

Firstly, many people who attend writers' conferences are more interested in being published than they are in writing. It is common to have the desire to publish a particular book. It is far rarer to meet someone who loves writing, does so profusely, and will keep doing so for their whole lives, published or unpublished.

Secondly, you just can't get away from the need for a brilliant idea. If you're writing a novel, you need great characterization; if you're writing non-fiction, you need a stellar proposition. As Lorella Belli put it, 'writing is like singing: we can all do it, but to be successful you've got to be good enough for other people to spend money reading or listening to you.' Just about everyone I’ve ever met has a book idea that they think is a corker, and people will always point out that if Wayne Rooney can write a book, then surely so can they. (Actually only the very weak-brained make this argument. It’s perfectly apparent to anyone with an iota of sense that Wayne Rooney does not spend his time writing (happily enough), but is paid a staggering amount to be published because he’s famous.)

Where was I? Oh yes. Thirdly, I'm better at dishing out advice than I am at following it myself. (This is nearly always the case with people who dish out advice - why else would books with titles like 'How to Write a Bestseller' always have an author one has never heard of?) This blog, for example, has no clear proposition. But that's the glorious thing about blogging, you're not asking anyone to pay to read you, so I say it’s fair enough to write what you damn well like.

If on the other hand, you are lucky enough to be paid to share your random preoccupations, then you are probably a bona fide ‘Me Columnist’, which is how The Independent terms ‘Self-obsessed witterers who occupy prominent corners of the national press to tell us about their doings’. To be honest, those columns are usually the only reason I buy a weekend paper.

Well, if I'm ever to write anything, I need to start by repressing the editor within. And I need to get over the fact that writing takes up time which could be spent earning money. This is where I think writing conferences and degree courses have real value – they seem to legitimise time spent scribbling.

Deep down I suspect the main reason for writer’s block is familiar to all of us, writers or not. It is the fear of failing at the thing one’s dreams are made of. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. A sense that our expectations so often triumph over experience. So I wonder: how often are all best wishes no more than fictions?

The Thing About Publishers

I’m still digressing, and doubtless regressing, but here goes.

I just love the business (some would venture profession) of publishing. On the one hand, you have those fresh-faced editorial assistants, with a humungous passion for books and a deeply Romantic notion of the author as solitary creative genius. On the other, you have a few ginormous egos in charge of a powerful marketing and publicity machine, ruthlessly operating under the belief that where we used to have artists living in garrets, we now have promotable celebrities. (Or that even when you come across genuine talent too big to ignore, it can always be made bigger with some help.)

Science long since gave up on the idea of individual genius. In that plain-speaking, objective way it has about it, it seems to have concluded that many heads are better than one. Today, the individuals that shine out like rare gems are ‘entrepreneurs’, not inventors. With ever-increasing specialisation and technological complexity, individual scientists are no longer famed for new discoveries made – it’s all a matter of collaboration.

Well, never was there an industry more slavishly in pursuit of individualism than publishing. So much so that vanity publishing is a term that deserves a broader remit. The literati is full of extraordinary egos: author, agents, salesmen, editors alike all believing in the individual genius (always their own and occasionally their authors’ too). And it strikes me that this has a powerful attraction in our recessionary times. The thought that individuals have unique and irreplaceable talents, offers soul-filling comfort of the rarest kind. With every P45 that’s handed out, another applicant for Britain’s Got Talent is born.

The Thing About Mothers

Here’s a thing: why do we never ask even our closest friends whether their mothers worked? One friend’s mother – Mother Marjorie as we know her – is the wellspring of constant motherly wisdom to all of her daughter’s friends, not to mention the source of rallying pre-party expressions such as ‘tut tut, eleven o’clock and not a sausage pricked!’

It’s a weird thing, but I have no idea whether most of my friends’ mothers ever went out to work (apart from those I grew up with). We just don't ask our friends what their mothers did in the way we might enquire about their fathers – to them and to us the role of mother always seems enough. Simply by existing, our mothers matter to us. Simply by being, we are of mind-blowing importance to our children.

The problem for women today is that we’re educated for the workplace, not for motherhood. Motherhood flies in the face of all we have learned, because it is not about doing, but about being; it is not another project, but a whole way of life. Annoyingly, it’s a way of life that totally undermines and overturns all our former values and assumptions.

Motherhood is a great leveller, but it’s also full of different possibilities. Feminism might have given us choices, but it failed to solve the contradictions they posed. I’m fairly sure feminism would work better if it were designed for men. Men wouldn’t attempt all this multi-tasking and run themselves ragged trying to ‘have it all’. No, men would make a simple choice about whether to outsource the parenting role or the bread-winning role and respect each other’s different decisions. They certainly wouldn’t spend endless amounts of emotional energy on the feelings of guilt and envy and incompetence that mothers do.

In an incomparable expression of writerly genius, Helen Simpson once wrote of 'the deep romance and boredom' of motherhood. Having a child is like having the most intense, addictive, emotionally turbulent love affair of your life. And it's also like having a job where the rewards are great, but the day to day work is as tedious as hell. A bit like banking perhaps (one does get the occasional bonus even when times are hard).

So it’s no wonder that motherhood often doesn’t seem enough to us when we are faced with the mind-numbing tedium of it. But as mothers, we owe ourselves a daily reminder that we are insurmountably important, that our role is totally unique and impossible to delegate, and that even if we’re one day forgotten for everything else we’ve done, we’ll still be remembered for being someone’s mum. To our children at least, that is enough.