Novel approach for writers

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Agatha Christie can inspire any writer

When I read last week that Alex Garland, author of The Beach, is suffering from what sounds like a nasty case of writer's block, the key word in the account seemed to me to be " millionaire", as in "millionaire author, Alex Garland".

And my sanguineness on this point was increased on seeing the list of other writers mentioned alongside Garland as having been afflicted by block - Tom Wolfe, Douglas Adams and Tom Sharpe - because they seemed to be in a suspiciously similar financial bracket when their difficulties occurred.

You have to be able to afford to be blocked because, if you are a writer, not writing is a very expensive business - and it becomes more so by the hour. Therefore, it tends not to happen on Grub Street. I myself have written three novels and averaged 2,000 words of journalism a week for 15 years without ever experiencing the kind of bank balances where a block becomes a serious possibility.

If ever I do suffer a slight hesitation between switching on my laptop and beginning to pound the keys, I am gripped with the panic you feel when you're in the cinema and the film gets stuck, and a smoking blue hole begins to be burned into the reel.

The prospect of catastrophe is very palpable, because there am I, frozen still, and all around me money-consuming entities such as my children, the childminder, the man who comes to do our garden, are continuing to move. Writer's block would only be acceptable in my own case if the people who send me bills, or otherwise absorb my money became blocked at precisely the same moment.

And in this thought lies a possible cure for any blocked writer. They ought to adopt the mind-set of the hack. I would recommend, for example, that Alan Bennett, who has recently been producing some of the smallest books I have ever seen, and who has been quoted lately to the effect that he can't get going on a new project, should look at the Journals of Arnold Bennett who, on 1 January 1901, recorded that in the previous year he had written three plays, a 70,000-word novel (The Grand Babylon Hotel), the draft of a second 80,000-word novel, six short stories, 196 articles and a preface, all this while editing Woman magazine.

This is a typical entry, for the man tended to weigh his output rather than agonise too much over it, yet I suspect this was a kind of defence mechanism, and his work is highly rated by many. I certainly enjoy his writing but then I like to keep company with such prodigious authors.

I like to have on hand some of the works of Agatha Christie (roughly 80 novels), PG Wodehouse (120 or so), or Trollope (47 novels and other works besides), who, if he finished one novel within his day's writing

time, would immediately start another. He didn't hang about, Trollope. Remember that besides his writing he had the Post Office to run - not a post office, which the relatively prolific George Orwell once undertook - but the Post Office. Or, then again, there's Winston Churchill who won not only the Second World War but also the Nobel Prize for literature, and still wondered, late in life, whether he had used his time wisely.

Just thinking about these people is an antidote to neurosis, to that costive, epicene, conventionally literary mind-set which is given to analysing and dissecting the creative process until it ceases to exit.

When, by contrast, I look at the small group of undernourished books by JD Salinger that are huddled on my shelves, I get the creeps, and the longer Salinger goes on without producing another, and the more tortured he looks in those snatched photographs, the less inclined I am to reread them. Beautiful though his books are, they seem, in retrospect, to have been just too hard won.

ASECOND, related tip for the blocked author: ally your production of words to non-literary considerations. Tom Stoppard used to line up cigarettes on the arm of his chair, and write dialogue until he'd smoked them all. The afore-mentioned Arnold Bennett wrote, on one level, because he had this thing about buying yachts. I myself am always aware that writing is the one cast-iron reason I have for not looking after my children.

In any event, I'm sure that Alex Garland will write again. Whereas good poets are almost guaranteed to become blocked - Larkin said that the sadness involved was manageable, being roughly equal to what he felt on starting to go bald - it's a rare condition among novelists. They're swimming too much in the tide of life.

What does the blocked novelist do with all the weird scenes he observes in the street, all the tantalising bits of conversations he hears in bars? Does he develop the capacity, like some giant snake, to digest and then dissolve to nothing these slices of life? And what, precisely, is it that disappears: the itch or the desire to scratch it?

It also seems incredible that the blocked novelist can be content to see banished from his life the one great consolation of the writer's existence: namely that when something really bad happens - which is most of the time, after all - you don't have to put it down to experience like everyone else. Instead you can put it in a book.

• Andrew Martin's latest novel, The Necropolis Railway, is published by Faber and Faber.

 

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