Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

And now Bertie’s Mummy abandoned all hope of resistance. She just covered her face with her hands and began to sob, violently and uncontrollably. She fell forward into PC Moreton’s arms.

PC Moreton hugged her tightly to him, and stroked her hair and kissed her cheek and shushed her, and he promised that everything was going to be all right soon, really it was, he promised. And at one point it seemed to her that he told her how beautiful she was, and how much he loved her. But that could only have been imagination, for it was what she had so much longed to hear these months past.

After that, when the shaking and the sobbing had subsided, and Bertie’s Mummy had returned to being at least a smudgy carbon copy of her normal self, PC Moreton took her into a nearby coffee shop and bought her a large black with an extra shot. Then they sat down at a small table, opposite each other, and PC Moreton held her hand in his while she told him all her troubles.

For every sentence she spoke there was a juddering sob and a generous eyeful of tears. And she told she told him how she couldn’t stop dreaming about the cellar floor and the ropes that bound her and the tape over her mouth. And now she was frightened of the dark and she couldn’t look at strangers and she couldn’t open the front door without peering through the spyhole, and not always then.

Her husband, she said, was a decent man and a brave one, and he had fought hard to defend her from Sid and Dick, but there were two of them and one of him, and they had clubbed him to the ground and then kicked him into submission. He had never touched her for months, even before she was kidnapped, and now they slept in separate rooms.

‘I think he’s gay really,’ she said, ‘but he just hasn’t faced up to it. So I’ve got no one to comfort me, no one to talk to. I feel as if I’m going mad,’ she told PC Moreton. ‘I feel as if one day I’m going to start screaming and tearing my hair out, right here in the High Street, and then they’ll take me away and lock me up again and this time I shall never get out.’

‘No, no, no,’ said PC Moreton. ‘I would never let them do that to you.’ And he held the back of her hand against his cheek and kissed it. ‘Everything will be all right again soon, I promise you. Really it will.’

And so it came about that PC Moreton spent the rest of that Tuesday being kind to Bertie’s Mummy. And he was kind to her every Tuesday, and she to him, for a long time afterwards, with no harm done to anyone.

After a while, with PC Moreton’s help, Bertie’s Mummy stopped being frightened of the dark. Mostly. And she learnt how to answer the front door again, because he put a security chain on it for her.

And then one day her husband asked her if he could have a divorce so that he could marry his friend George in IT. And Bertie’s Mummy said yes he could and welcome, because she was thinking of making other arrangements herself. Which she did, in due course. And it turned out that Bertie liked his new Daddy better than his old one because he played football. And drove a police car.

And from then on, every day when he came home from work, PC Moreton puts his arms around Bertie’s Mummy and held her tight and made her feel safe and happy.

So he really did make it all come right in the end. Just as he had promised.

THE END

A WRITER’S GUIDE TO SUCCESS:

A Serious Look at a Serious Subject

Michael Allen

Copyright 2013 by Michael Allen

***

PART 1: SUCCESS – An introduction to the subject

1.1 Aims

For a while I did toy with the idea of giving this book a flippant subtitle. You know, something along the lines of How a Writer Can Become Rich and Famous and Have Fantastic Orgasms – Maybe; with a Little Bit of Luck Thrown In – Sometimes.

You won’t have to go far on Amazon to find books with titles which are nearly as ridiculous – books which offer to teach writers how to make $50,000 in three weeks on Amazon, how to Twitter your way to social-media fame in four easy lessons, and so on.

But the aims of this book are more realistic, sensible, and down to earth. They are as follows:

(i) To encourage you to think about the possible forms that success can take;

(ii) To enable you to understand how likely – or unlikely – it is that success will come to you at all, or at any rate in your desired quantities;

(iii) And thus to enable you make informed and realistic decisions on what sort of work to write, and how much time and effort to devote to that work.

In other words, this ebook is what the subtitle says: a serious look at a serious subject.

My own aim, as the author of this book, is to help the young and inexperienced writers among you to avoid some of the painful experiences which have been the lot of so many writers who have gone through the process before you.

Roughly ten years ago I wrote a book called The Truth about Writing. The first sentences of that book went as follows: ‘Writing is an activity which can seriously damage your health. It can consume huge amounts of time and energy, and it can lead to frustration, rage, and bitterness.’

All of that is still true – true with knobs on, as we say in England.

This book will help you to think clearly about what you want to achieve as a writer. It will give you a better idea of what you can realistically expect to achieve. And it may, literally, help you to stay healthy and sane.

And it’s all provided for the price of a cup of coffee (depending, of course, on where you buy your coffee).

After the introductory sections (Part 1) the book is divided into four further parts.

Part 2 considers the three principal elements of success, as it is usually defined. They are: money, fame, and literary reputation. In each case I demonstrate that, yes, success in these terms can come to writers: sometimes it arrives almost overnight, and almost by accident. But such exceptions are misleading. Most of the time success does not arrive at all.

Part 3 then considers what it is that drives us to want to become writers in the first place. Let’s face it, at least 50% of the population don’t even read books, let alone try to write them. So why do we start thinking about writing our way to success? Are we slightly mad to even think of it? In this part of the book we look at human psychology in general, and ambition in particular.

Part 4 offers you my analysis of ‘the secret of success’. Here I consider all the various factors which can, in principle, play a part in bringing about success, however you care to define it; and then I present you with a mathematical expression which reduces the facts of the case to a simple equation. This equation reveals a ‘secret’ which is not really a secret, but is nevertheless entirely unrecognised and misunderstood by the vast majority of writers, particularly the young, the inexperienced, and the unpublished.

Part 5 is entitled ‘The price we pay’, but it could usefully be labelled ‘Beware what you wish for’. This penultimate part of the book contains a number of cautionary tales, particularly the true story of two young men who were as successful as it is possible to be in the worlds of publishing, Broadway and Hollywood – and yet their success destroyed their lives.

1.2. About the Author

Before getting down to business, I present at this point the standard piece of biography which is provided throughout my series of writer’s guides.

If you are looking at a book that calls itself a writer’s guide to something or other, you may reasonably wonder just who is the author of said book, and what makes him any sort of authority. All I can do to answer that is tell you a little of my personal history.