I forgot to be a writer (then remembered)
Getting a taste of your own mortality
My son was born towards the end of 2012, forcing me to acknowledge, perhaps for the first time, that I was going to die.
Prior to that moment, I operated on the glorious assumption that I had an infinite amount of time and could accomplish anything I wanted. A vague notion had lingered in my mind from my teenage years: that I’d live forever, that sci-fi longevity treatments would become a reality during my life-time.
That hubris had resulted in me achieving less. Of dithering and delaying. I’d get round to doing it all later on! When I had more time. Mañana, mañana.
Critically, I’d forgotten that I wanted to be an author.
I admire (and slightly envy) anyone who figures out what they’re going to do from a young age, and who pursue every chance they get. Artists, actors, entrepreneurs who find success in their teens or early twenties. Seizing the moment, sure, but I wonder if it also requires a natural ability to think long-term, and to acknowledge the biggest looming deadline of all:
End of life.
I dabbled for a couple of decades, fiddling around with writing projects that never got finished, short films that never quite lived up to expectations, comics and video games that never got past the planning stages. It always felt like I was being creative in the moment, but I hit my thirties with nothing to show for it.
Never mind, I thought. Plenty of time.
An aspect of having a child that people tell you about but which I hadn’t fully grasped is how little free time and energy you have left. This isn’t a problem: having a kid is the best decision I’ve ever made, and is an absolute joy. But it’s hard, and all-consuming, and suddenly the long days of being able to do whatever I wanted had disappeared.
I realised that I would be short on time for at least a couple of decades. I could put all of my personal projects on hold until I was in my late-fifties, or I could stop faffing about and figure out a way through. This would require streamlining and picking one thing to focus on. What should it be?
And then I remembered: teenage Simon had wanted to be an author. Pre-teen Simon had wanted to write novels and tell stories. It had been my earliest dream, and I’d somehow forgotten that along the way; stumbling into the tech industry and visual effects instead, going from one distraction to another.
Here’s the thing: prose fiction has several attributes that make it perfect for anyone short on time and resources:
You don’t need to wrangle anybody else. It’s just you and the page.
It doesn’t require complex and expensive equipment. You can do it anywhere, at any time, as long as you have a means of writing.
It can be squeezed in and around everything else in your life.
That last point was the biggie. A lot of creative projects require extensive, uninterrupted sessions. Writing can exist in the margins of your day, growing in the gaps between cooking and washing and day job and changing nappies and doing the shopping.
This is also when I had the bright idea to experiment with serial fiction. Having had so many projects languish unfinished in drawers and on hard drives, I thought publishing in serial form might be more immediate. Small, bite-sized chunks of writing each week, rather than a monolithic novel.
Sounded like it might be fun for a small experiment.
It was 2015. I published a new chapter of A Day of Faces every week on Wattpad, and over the course of a year it somehow got tens of thousands of reads. I completed the story, and unexpectedly had a novel, even though I hadn’t set out to create one. By this point I knew serial fiction was for me: it kept me coming back each week, knowing that there were readers waiting for what would happen next.
Since then, I’ve completed two other major serials and am in the closing sections of Tales from the Triverse here on this newsletter.
And, sure, knowing that there are readers out there helps keep me coming back to the page. But it’s not just that, is it?
It’s death.
When my son was born, seeing him so tiny flicked a switch in my brain that brought my own life into view for the first time. I used to be that tiny, but was by then a man in his early-30s. By the time my son was in his early 30s, I would be 63 years old. The timeline of my lifespan became suddenly crystal clear.
It was a startling moment of clarity: I didn’t have much time left.
Relatively speaking, that is. And I’d already lost a couple of decades to fiddling around doing other things.
That’s why I’ve been writing new fiction every single week for the last decade. I’m in a race against my own entropy. Every week I don’t write is one less week I have left before the end. When anyone asks how I’m able to put so much effort into writing this newsletter, the real question is how can I not?
It’s not about something egotistical, like leaving a legacy. Or making a difference. Hopefully people will read my work and it will matter to them, but the driving factor here is to make sure that I don’t disappoint myself. If I died tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or in fifty years, how would I feel about my life? Before 2012 I would most likely have been disappointed, or dodged the question.
Now? I think I’d be OK.
I’m 44 now. I have too many friends who did not make it this far, due to accident or disease. Being alive, keeping going, is an immense privilege, and making the best use of that time is vital. For me, that means writing, and telling stories. Other things come first, of course, such as family and my own health, but whenever there is a gap, a moment of quiet, that’s when I turn to the keyboard.
For me, the birth of my son triggered this new point of view. It doesn’t have to be a child, of course. People come to these realisations via all sorts of routes. Whenever we each hit that total-perspective-vortex moment, I imagine we all wish we’d got there sooner — whether we’re in our 20s, 40s, 60s or 80s.
It’s why, when people ask “how did you get into writing?”, I tend to reply with “it all started when I realised I was going to die.” This is why I write the non-fiction part of this newsletter, the writing tips stuff, where I teach serial fiction. It’s because there might be other people out there in a similar position to where I was in my early-30s, not quite sure how to do what they want to do. Fiddling around, as time leaks away. That’s why this newsletter is called Write More.
There’s a common refrain in science fiction and fantasy: that living forever would actually be awful, because you’d never bother to do anything. With infinite time stretching out before you, what’s the rush? Far better, go those stories, to be mortal, and have the impetus of death to provide motivation. Oh, how the immortals envy our short lives.
When I was younger I always thought that was an incredibly stupid and over-used story trope. Of course it’d be better to live forever! Only an idiot would think otherwise. It’s not like immortals would actually sit around doing nothing until the heat death of the universe. That would be silly.
The irony is that everything I’ve written in this piece is exactly in line with that trope. I only started becoming productive and doing what I wanted to do with my life once I acknowledged that my time here is finite.
Maybe all those sci-fi writers had a point.
I don’t fear death, but I do fear wasting the time that I have between right now and the end, whenever it happens to come.
Same same. Am in my mid-50s, and there are two more novels that I want to get out into the world that haven’t been written yet. I will keep writing after that because I know there are other stories that will,rise up and will need to be written also, but man, the pinch of time really gets me sometimes.
Some people are wired to get things done. That was not me, until I found out what it felt like to have others 'eat my cooking', figuratively speaking. I am 67 years old. Who knows how much time I have left, but I am putting myself out there because it feels so good to share what is inside me.