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

What can be done in relation to multinational businesses, and huge universities, can also be done on an individual basis. And I suggest to you that this exercise is particularly relevant to writers.

About forty years ago, I was present in a meeting when a world-famous architect revealed, just in passing, that every year he reviewed his own personal goals in life, simply to check whether he was doing what he really wanted to do, and if so how far he was achieving his aims and ambitions.

What a funny thing to do, I thought. (I was younger then.) But the more I thought about it, and learnt about it, the more sense this made to me.

Here’s how it works.

Once a year, usually on my birthday, I write down a quick summary of my three most important goals in life generally. My number one goal this year, mundanely enough, is ‘To stay in good mental and physical health.’

Then I write down two more sentences which, equally briefly, summarise the next two most important goals in my life. I could, if I wished, extend this list to 22 more goals, or 32, but as far as I am concerned three major goals is enough to occupy my attention and energies.

Next, I write down the activities which I need to undertake to achieve each of my three goals.

For example, to remain in good physical and mental shape I aim to (i) walk a mile each day, (ii) go to the gym once a week, (iii) go dancing once a week. That, coupled with close attention to my diet, copes with the physical side of things. In order to keep my mind and brain in good working order, I write books (like this one), do crosswords and other puzzles.

And so on.

Decide a goal. Decide what action you need to take to achieve it. Get on with it. That’s the general idea.

I can only say that I have found this process extremely useful in my own life. For one thing, you may find, when you come to think about it, that writing doesn’t actually rate very highly in your overall scheme of things. Similarly, you may find that something you hadn’t consciously valued very highly might turn out to be vitally important to you – such as forming closer links with your family, or working for a higher degree.

The point is, you need to get to know yourself as well as possible, so that you can avoid waking up one morning five years from now and saying to yourself, Well, that was a bloody silly idea. What a waste of time!

There is little point, at last in my opinion, in setting goals which are unrealistic. I would not recommend, as a goal, ‘To write a novel which reaches the number 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.’ Because, like becoming a US Senator, that’s something that does happen, but not very often.

On the other hand, ‘To finish the novel I am currently working on, and to write one more complete novel in the next 12 months’ is something that might be capable of achievement if you put your mind to it.

And then of course you’ve got to list the actions that you need to take in order to achieve such a goal. And one such action might be, ‘To spend at least four hours a week on writing.’

That four hours a week target may strike you as too low. But if you are doing a full-time day job, I suggest that it’s a sensible figure.

For twenty years I kept detailed records of the amount of time I spent on writing, and over that twenty-year period, I averaged just over four hours a week on writing. Some weeks nothing, some weeks 10 hours. But the average was four.

If you can do better, fine.

PART 5: Final thoughts

I think I have pretty much said everything useful that I have to say on the subject of career planning for writers – specifically writers of fiction.

It is, however, worth adding that I have found writing to be a lifelong interest. I haven’t always achieved my ambitions, and the traditional world of publishing, while I was in it, often proved to be frustrating and tiresome. But throughout my writing career I always managed to have fun; and despite whole years at a time when I was not free to write, I always came back to it in the end.

And now, at the end of this book, and at the risk of sounding horribly pompous, I want to try to explain why it is that I have consistently found writing fiction to be rewarding. What follows is a slightly modified reprint of a chapter in my 2003 book The Truth about Writing

5.1 The morality of the novel

To young readers, the morality of the novel may seem an odd topic. For a start, one seldom sees, these days, any sort of discussion of morality in the arts; it seems to be far too tricky a subject. This is probably the result of moral/value relativism – or some such. I seem to have heard something about this topic once or twice.

In any event, anyone who brings up the topic of the morality of fiction is likely to be considered a suitable target for derision or hostility; so, naturally, most people avoid it. Not, I hasten to say, that I am in any hurry to start such a discussion myself. But there are a few points which might usefully be placed on record.

To begin with, a little historical perspective will not be out of place.

In the nineteenth century, novels, like actresses, were often assumed to be wicked by definition. The poet Swinburne once gave a novel to a friend of his, Lady Trevelyan. And – heaven preserve us! – this book was not only a piece of fiction but it was a French novel at that! When the lady’s husband heard about this gift, he ran to the drawing room, picked up the offensive object with a pair of fire-tongs, and deposited it on the blazing coals.

Quite right too. Filthy chaps, those Frogs. You only have to think of French kissing, French letters (rubber contraceptives), and so forth, to understand that the bounders are up to no good. I understand they eat snails as well.

A deep-seated belief that fiction was likely to deprave and corrupt, particularly in respect of sexual morals, persisted well into the second half of the twentieth century.

In the 1950s, English magistrates competed with each other for the title of twit of the year: works such as Boccaccio’s Decameron (written in the fourteenth century and famous ever since) were seized as obscene and destroyed. Even quite respectable publishers lived in genuine fear of going to prison.

The situation was perhaps worse in the United States. Younger readers of this book may be unaware that, fifty years ago, novels which now seem utterly harmless were then condemned as virulently dangerous: Peyton Place , for instance, caused an uproar when it first appeared in 1956. It was then labelled as sordid and cheap. In the year 2002, this unspeakable novel was read aloud, as a serial, on BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour. And there is no more respectable radio programme on this planet than Woman’s Hour.

Until 1960, the so-called four-letter words were not permitted to appear in print in the UK or the US, and descriptions of sexual activity had to be shrouded in obscurity. In the cinema, no young Englishman so much as glimpsed a female nipple until... when? The late 1950s at least. In American films, even married couples had to keep one foot on the floor when in bed.

Eventually, however, attitudes changed. And I suppose it could be said that they changed quite quickly. For example, the city of Boston, in the USA, was at one time notoriously prudish. In the 1950s and ’60s, the proud boast ‘Banned in Boston’ was one which could be guaranteed to add to the sales of any book. But, by 1986, when I visited Boston, all had changed. There was one city block, known as the Combat Zone, on which were located a whole parade of hard-core porno bookshops, blue-movie houses, and strip clubs. All were extremely explicit. (Or so I was told. I never went in them myself, you understand. Well, only the once. And that was just for research. And I certainly didn’t enjoy it.)