Getting the Reason Right.

Do you want to know the real reason why I can’t be a poet? It's because I don’t have the hair to go with it. Poets have flowing locks, don’t they? No chance.

That’s often been my problem, you know. It was usually the lifestyle that attracted me to an endeavour rather than the activity itself. All my life I wanted to be a writer because I was drawn to that whole scene with which it’s associated – the typewriter, the French windows opening onto a summer garden, tea on the terrace at 4pm sharp, and then back to the study in order to get the manuscript finished because my publisher is hounding me. Or maybe the same typewriter in a sordid garret, air full of tobacco smoke, empty scotch bottles filling every corner, sweltering in the heat of the night while the world passes anonymously below me. I was happy with both.

As long as I saw it that way I couldn’t write for toffee. I tried, but everything read like a second rate business letter. It was only when I discovered that I actually wanted to write stories just for the sake of writing stories that I discovered how to write stories.

I suppose the first hint I had of the Right Reason to Do Something was being a photographer, which I only did because I loved taking photographs and couldn’t think of any better way to spend the daylight hours and get paid for it (and I was a landscape photographer because I’d always loved landscapes.)

So there you have it. Just thought I’d mention it because it cropped up in my head. Lots of things crop up in my head, but they tend to trip over each other and fail the test of Things I Want to Write About.