Escapism

There are many easier and certainly many, many more likely to be profitable ways of making a living than being a writer. I’m… not quite as stupid as your average bear, and, um, actually very capable at a surprising number of things. I could have chosen another course, any one of fifty, really. In some of them I might even have done well. I look at my peers from academia… and I could be a grumpy old Prof too, at the bludgeoning edge of science.

But here I am, working on yet another novel. The truth is an author is what I always aspired to be, holding (against rational analysis) the idea that really there was no higher target. No-one, as a small boy, that I revered more and regarded with more awe. I seriously thought that it was an impossible goal, a profession requiring too much talent and intelligence for me (which curiously, was not something I felt about Doctors or scientists or pilots or tight-rope walking jugglers.)

As some people idolize sports stars of movie stars (they were nothing to me) — I felt about authors — those I liked anyway. It was honestly quite easy for me to believe I could never achieve that. Easier, when I finally confided the ambition to my English Master in final year at school (I went to a school that had been set up for the sons of officers and gentlemen a century before, had not changed in substantial way, and was like living in real-life version of ‘Stalky and Co.’ It was less fun than the book.). He said: “Freer, you can’t make a living at it, and anyway you can’t spell.”

Because he was dead right on the last half, I assumed the first part was true too. It cost me a lot of years, before I decided to hell with it, I would try anyway. It was quite as hard as I expected it to be. Some of that was that I made it that way.

The question remains: why did a miserable little scrap of a kid fixate on authors being THE profession he aspired to most? And I was a most miserable scrap of humanity – I was not expected to live, and, without my mother’s absolute iron determination, might well not have. Medicine has come on a long way, since, for which I am grateful. But I remember the nights… so exhausted from fighting for breath that all I wanted to do was just stop. And my mother saying “Just ten deep breaths, Davey. Ten breaths. Come now, you can do it.” That was not one night – but many. I don’t know how she coped.

The answer was simple: I escaped. I didn’t HAVE to live with that miserable sick little body – which I hated, staying indoors when other little kids played. Books took me away. Nothing else did. By the time I was eight I had got to the stage where people stopped worrying I would die, and started worrying that maybe I bloody wouldn’t. I did my best to catch up on all the outdoor hooliganism… but I never stopped reading, never stopped being transported from being the littlest kid (years of being sick meant I stayed littlest in most classes) to fighting Kraken or exploring strange worlds or alien artifacts. Yes, I had to come back. It’s never easy being the littlest kid. But I came back with hope and better able to cope. You see, I had somewhere wonderful to escape to.

And the people who made that… were called ‘authors’. They give respite, ease to troubled minds, escape from everything from bullying to despair. They did not build a little hiding place: they gave me whole worlds. They let me recover, and let me come out again — albeit reluctantly sometimes, when I would rather have stayed in Brocéliande or Barsoom — with hope and courage. To take on hell with a fire-bucket. To prove myself, to swim into caves and climb cliffs. To cope with tragedy. To stand when I wanted to run.

People sneer at ‘escapism’. Well, when they can relieve the troubled and distressed of their cares even briefly — then they have room to talk. Until then, I will continue to believe it is a fine and noble thing for anyone to strive to create. And I will do my best to try to provide it. I am not fit to polish the shoes of those demi-gods who I imitate and use as role-models. I’ll never be Pratchett or Zelazny or Heyer or L’Amour… but it’s a goal worth striving for, more so than ones I can reach.