On abject failure!

It’s not an exaggeration to say that a writer’s life consists of repeated failures. What I mean by that is that it’s extremely rare that a story, or poem, or novel ends up even remotely resembling a fully realised version of the idea that inspired it: everything starts as one thing and finishes as something else entirely and, in that respect at least, fails.

Then there are those other, less abstruse failures. Those projects on which you labour for months or years, convinced of their worth, before belatedly realising they are, in fact, holed below the waterline. As you might imagine, I’ve had a few of those, but three stand out.

The first was a short story I started at the time I was reading Beckett’s Molloy. The idea was a simple one, as some of the best ideas are. The story featured two obsessive men who shared a fascination with the aesthetics and functionality of public toilets, and spent their time visiting and comparing notes on the facilities in shopping centres, railway stations, libraries, cafes and other public spaces. It was structured as a phone conversation, over the course of which it was gradually revealed that in the harmless simplicity of the two men’s preoccupation lay the secret to world peace. After all, with existence reduced to its essence – the primacy of bodily functions – there was no intellectual or physical room for conflict of any sort; in place of strife was an idyll of scarcely believable cosmic equilibrium.  

In my mind this was an absurdist masterpiece, a tour-de-force, a work of bravura ambition and unrivalled technique; I saw prizes, theatrical adaptations, earnest profiles in the national press. It took me five years of revisions, with each unworkable draft serving only to convince me further of my genius (99% perspiration!!) before I clocked it was – pun intended – a crock of shit.

The premise of the second of my greatest failures was – and I appreciate this might be a bit of a stretch – even more unlikely than that of my first. Called A Page From a Thousand Decent Novels it was an attempt to satirise the sort of thoroughly decent ‘literary fiction’ that plays to, rather than challenges, the middlebrow reader’s sensibilities. It took the form of a page-long extract from a thoroughly decent novel and was formatted accordingly, complete with page number and header – A Thousand Decent Novels. Its subject matter was the sort of non-event that happens halfway through a thoroughly decent novel: a woman looks out from her townhouse window over a square full of trees (presumably plane, though I can’t remember), reflects a bit, and does some sighing.

I absolutely loved this piece, as a father might a layabout son, yet every time I sent it somewhere, it came straight back. Perhaps the most definitively bemused of all of the editors who saw the thing were those at the Cambridge Literary Review who wrote, ‘apologies if I’ve missed something…’ The only sane answer to this was that they hadn’t, and that the piece had taken experimentation to new levels of hubris and delusion.

Perhaps the most spectacular of my failures to date however, was my children’s picture book. Again, I spent years on this project. The plot was simple, as all the best picture book plots are. It opened with a lonely boy looking out of his bedroom window at a snow-covered garden. The next page introduced a splash of colour to the otherwise monochrome scene: a visiting robin. The boy fed the robin nuts and raisins and the two became friends. A few pages in, having tried to make his chum’s diet more interesting by leaving out more exotic foodstuffs, he had attracted more colourful birds. By the centre spread, it was the middle of summer, the boy was feeding pineapples and mangos and lychees to peacocks and toucans and birds of paradise, and his garden was a riot of nature, Rousseau on steroids. There was just one problem: he’d lost sight of the robin.

The second half of the book saw him try to rectify the situation, and rekindle his relationship with his original friend. He did this by incrementally cutting back on the fancy stuff. This had the desired effect, with the exotic visitors thinning out until, by the last page, we were back with the boy, happy again with his nuts and raisins, the robin, and the snow-covered garden.

I had this story pinned as a moving and exquisitely calibrated parable about the value of friendship. I was sure that, as well as attracting unprecedented critical acclaim, it would earn me a fortune. It wasn’t until I was onto the fourth draft of a speech accepting that year’s Carnegie Medal that I stumbled onto the idea of giving it to someone else to read. And their verdict? That it read as a thinly-veiled attack on immigration, and a hymn to English ethno-Nationalism.

Of course, as soon as they said this, I could see it. In fact, I couldn’t unsee it. The project was binned, along with any idea I might ever be able to write for children. Or make any bunce from my books. Looking back, I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned from these encounters with failure. I couldn’t tell you what it is though.

My latest collections of short stories – The State of Us: An Anthology, and Encounters With Everyday Madness – are available now from Waterstones and all good bookshops