Literary

Of all the things I wanted to be as a child - ballet dancer, scientist, astronaut, astronomer, paleontologist (geeeek) - writer was never one of them. I wrote because I loved it: diaries and poems and short stories from four years old upwards (perfectly rhyming stanzas at six? Hell yeah). But be a writer? It never even occurred to me. Writer wasn't on the career's list, and when I went to talk to my career counsellor she never suggested it.

'What do you love doing most?' she asked me, age 13 (me, not her. She was fully grown up).
'Writing,' I told her.
'Excellent,' she said. 'Have you thought about being a journalist? Or in PR? Or in advertising? Or an English teacher? Or an English lecturer?' She got a list out. 'These are all career possibilities that involve lots of writing.'

All, that was, apart from writer.

So it didn't occur to me. In fact, my intense love of writing actually pushed the idea further away, because it was so much a part of me already that I took it totally for granted, the way you don't realise how much you love somebody when you're with them all of the time. So I carried on writing - filling up pages and pages and practicing different styles - and simultaneously panicked about what I was going to do with my life. Chose English Literature as a BA because it involved reading books, and that seemed good, and Shakespeare as an MA because it involved reading Shakespeare, and that seemed good too. I was so shy that it took four entire years of University to submit anything to the Uni newspaper, and I was so shy about writing that I refused to apply for journalist jobs because it meant other people reading me. I went into PR because sometimes - when I was really lucky - I got to write a Press Release about compost, and when I applied for Best Job I had to do the take where I said "I'm a writer" six times, because I kept laughing. And I only started this blog because I was told that I definitely wouldn't win the 70 grand Best Job prize if I didn't. And the 70 grand carrot was enough to get this donkey moving.

It's taken 29 years for me to be able to say I'm a writer, because I am: regardless of whether I ever get published or not. I'm a writer because I write: because I get up in the morning and I write, and I write during my lunch breaks, and I write in my evenings. I'm a writer because it's what gives my life significance, and because without it I'm not sure I'd bother. I'm a writer because I have a passion for it that is greater than any passion I have ever had for any man, and will always be greater than any passion I have for any man. I'm a writer, not because I chose it - not because I came out of that career's adviser's office and said "I will be a writer" - but because it chose me. Because nearly three decades of running away from it and ignoring it and refusing to talk about it or think about it has done absolutely nothing to alter the following fact: writing is what makes me happy. And everything else in my life is just what I do when I'm not writing.

Just as the career's adviser didn't tell me to be a writer, though, neither is there a career adviser that has told me what to write. And so I have struggled horribly. When I eventually realised that my only dream was to write novels, I very sensibly started trying to write novels. And, as a girl who likes to think of herself as vaguely intelligent and has been known to take herself a little too seriously from time to time, I wanted to write good novels. Award winning novels. Critically acclaimed novels. Literary Fiction novels, as The Guardian calls them. Novels with really cool illustrations on the front; the kind that people pick up and say "you know, this really is so surprising coming from somebody so young" (I would have been young if I had managed it when I started trying) and "it just totally breaks all the boundaries of fiction, don't you think?" So I wrote. I wrote seriously. I wrote pages and pages of Literary Fiction, and then - when I was 26 - I wrote an entire book of Literary Fiction: 102,378 words of the bugger. Deep, moving, stylised, with no quotation marks around the dialogue because that seemed pretty clever and modern (I put them back in eventually because I didn't know who was talking). My Big Achievement. The novel to change all novels. And then I read it and realised it was a bit crap, and the agents I sent it to agreed whole heartedly. They did, however, really enjoy the funny bits, and suggested rewriting and editing the rest of it out, and that left me with about six pages from start to finish.

As far as concerned, I was therefore screwed. What the hell was the point in being a writer if I wasn't going to win a Booker Prize for it? What the hell was the point of writing a novel if it didn't prove to everyone how clever I was? So I sulked, and I got stressed, and I tried to start another Literary Fiction novel, and wore lots of black and smoked and told everyone how hard writing was, and how they didn't understand.

It was only as I started re-reading all of my favourite novels - Anne of Green Gables, The Borrowers, The Far Away Tree, Pollyanna, What Katy Did, Great Expectations, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Pride and Prejudice - that I realised the key to my issue: I don't like Literary Fiction. At all. If a book falls into nothing but Literary Fiction (Life of Pi and White Teeth, I am looking at you), it tends to be instantly forgettable. Impressive, yes, but untouchable. Because they're not the books that change lives. They change newspapers, yes, and they change award panels, and they change bestselling lists, but they don't change lives. They just make it look like they could do.

So I put down my serious face, and I put down my next work of Literary Fiction, and I put down all hopes of ever getting a Booker prize. I put down all of my stylised efforts, readopted the speech mark, and resigned myself to being ignored forever by readers of The Guardian. I started writing a book that made me laugh: created characters that I fell in love with. And you know what? It's been easy, it's been fun, and it's been exactly what made me love writing to start with: the ability to make myself happy, and hopefully do the same to others. And my novel, in all of its fluffiness, is very, very nearly finished.

Last week at a teacher training course, I met a boy who told me - within two minutes - that he was "writing a novel" (funny how quickly that tends to come up in conversation: I still don't know his name).
'Really?' I said. 'Me too!'
He looked at me sceptically. 'Yeah? You don't look like a writer.'
'Thanks,' I said cheerfully. I have zero interest in looking like a writer: I'm quite happy looking like I can barely read. 'So what's yours about then?'
'Oh,' he told me airily. 'It's literary fiction. I couldn't possibly sum it up.'
'Fair enough,' I said with a grin. 'Mine's not. Not at all. It's about a 14 year schoolgirl called Harriet.'
Understanding dawned on his face. 'Oh, so not like a real novel, then.'
'Nope,' I said happily. 'Not a real novel at all.'
'You're lucky,' he told me, patting me on the shoulder. 'Literary fiction is so hard. It's so slow, and so difficult, you know?'
'Nope,' I said. 'No idea. Mine isn't in the slightest.'

Being a writer may not be a choice, but what you write is. And I've finally chosen to write the kind of books I love reading.

It seems so much cleverer that way.