JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
ALAN: When I was first asked to do this BBC Maestro course
I had some misgivings.
I wasn't sure whether the current generation
of aspiring writers
really needed to have an opinionated diatribe by me
inflicted upon them.
But after thinking about it for a while
I thought that possibly during this 40 years
or whatever it's been
that I've been immersed in this career
I've probably learnt one or two things
that might be useful
to somebody who was thinking about being a writer.
At the end of this course
when they're walking away from it
I would hope that I would have been able
to teach them a number of things
like the various bedevilments and problems
that any writer is going to face.
I would hope that I would be able to tell you
how to perhaps navigate your way around these things.
And also how to actually maintain
your enthusiasm as a writer
your enthusiasm for the job that you do.
A decision that I made early on
was that I refused to be
working upon something that I was not interested in.
I didn't want writing to become a drudge
like the job that I was leaving to become a writer.
That would be no point at all.
So, what I thought was that I should adopt the policy
of only working upon things that I was enjoying
and was interested in
which initially raises a problem
because I was also desperate for work
and trying to feed a family.
So navigating those two things
was initially a bit difficult.
I was deciding that I would take any work
that was offered to me
providing that it was morally and legally acceptable
and that even if it was from a field
completely outside my interest, say, something like football
I would find a way in which
I could make it interesting to myself.
Now, that's a bit of work
but if you do that you will make sure that
every day when you start work, it will be with enthusiasm
and interest and that you will have enough of those qualities
to take you through a long career
without getting tired of it
so that today I am just as enthusiastic
and excited about the work that I'm doing at the moment
as I was when I started my career.
I should also point out that
writing is not a single subject
and neither is storytelling.
These are things that are actually a collision
of about 30 different things in a horrifying pile-up.
And one of the things
that I hope that this course will do for you
is to talk about all of the different facets
of writing
and how to put them all together.
I will be telling you what you need to create characters
to create stories, to create landscapes.
I will be talking about the level
that you need to be thinking about these things on.
I will be making suggestions
as to how to inspire your imagination
how to write about place, how to write about people
how to write about all of the thousand elements
that go to make up a story.
This is what I hope to be imparting to you.
Now, I should also add
perhaps a couple of caveats there.
One of those is that I want you
to look at this face.
I want you to look at all of these carven wrinkles
at these haunted eyes
and I want you to consider that in my experience
this is what a human face looks like
after 40 years of writing.
So, that's something to think about.
And the other thing
is that this is not a commercial writing course.
I am not sure what a commercial writing course is.
I am not sure what commercial writing is.
All of my commercial successes were never planned as such
they were all remote outsiders that people liked.
They liked them because they were well-written
not because they were catching some current trend.
Nobody can advise about trends
and the vagaries of public opinion.
It is best in my experience
to simply be a good writer.
So that is what I will be attempting
to instruct you on.
I should also say
that the distinction between being a published
or an unpublished writer
is not one that I'm particularly concerned with here.
My intent is to simply make you a good writer
a better writer.
A writer that hopefully will then be able
to navigate all of those tos and fros
those back and forths of public opinion
and public taste.
If you're a good enough writer
then you can rise over any problems like that.
And what I'm saying is that
having done this course
that I can't guarantee
whether you will be a successful, published writer
like say, Jeffrey Archer
or whether you will remain an unpublished loser
like William Blake or Emily Dickinson.