You knock on the dark oak door, wondering what can be on the other side. There is no sign on the door to tell you. All you have is a cryptic letter inviting you to this address in a Victorian back street just off Whitehall. The letter praised your writing, said it had been ‘noticed’; that you should come along tonight and meet people who can help with your career. Natural suspicion fought for a day or two with desperate ego and eventually lost.
The door swings smoothly open. Standing before you is a man wearing a red velvet smoking jacket, whisky tumbler and cigar in his right hand. His eyes appear to possess a perma-twinkle. He’s almost handsome, possibly charming. He’s grinning at you as if he’s known you for years.
“Come in!” he says, moving to one side and gesturing towards the large room behind him. “Welcome to the club.”
You see a log fire, lots of maroon leather chairs, a golden bar at the end of the room behind which a bow-tied waiter moves with calm speed, shaking a cocktail, behind him are sparkling rows of spirit bottles, decanters and flasks. You smell cigar smoke and the mouth-watering aroma of bacon. There are about twenty men and women scattered about the room, most talking in twos or threes. With a lurch of wonder, you recognise some famous writers’ faces.
You are being invited in. To the club. Here, you will be helped by friends who have friends and contacts on the inside. You will be able to casually drop the name of your club into cover letters to editors who are also members. Your stories will suddenly find their way into thousands of hands. You’ll be nominated for writing awards that previously you couldn’t even discover how to approach. You will sit back in a leather chair and smoke big fat cigars and eat bacon sandwiches with the crusts cut off and order drinks you’ve never heard of before. You’ll be cared for, loved, accepted. You’ll be in the club.
Walk inside and you can give up fighting. After all these years of struggle, you can finally relax. Let the system take the strain. You feel a clump of well-won emotion blocking your throat.
Your host is still smiling, waving you inside.
You take a step forward, heart melting with gratitude.
But then something stops you going further. Is it that the twinkle in your host’s smile contains just a hint of self-loathing? Is it that the dim lighting doesn’t quite disguise the dark red stains on the deep brown carpet? Is it those hunting scene paintings on the wall no doubt put there by the real owners of the club? Or the barman’s slightly cynical smile as he pours another cocktail for the grey-haired writer dozing at the bar? Or the slightly over-reaching laughter? Or the, now you think about it, lack of any actual writing going on?
You turn and walk away to the hissed comment of your host, “You’ll regret it.”
The world is run by clubs, of course. Small ones like the group of regulars in your local who can make the difference to your night being pleasant or slightly off. Big ones like the British establishment who can make even the worst crimes committed by its members go away. And the not so clearly defined but nevertheless effective ones like the publishing industry.
When a writer is deciding what to write, he doesn’t tend to think in terms of the admission criteria for the club. At least not when he’s starting out. He’s only concerned with creating a convincing plot, a great character or two, and expressing a new angle on a theme that’s important to him. He’s like the kid who just loves kicking a ball against the wall and playing spontaneous games with his mates; trying new tricks, weaving in and out of defenders, not passing when he should, shooting for the hell of it instead.
But if he wants to play professionally, he has to join a football club. Where there will be rules, codes of conduct, uniforms, non-playing but ultimately powerful owners, a manager who needs him to play more defensively than he’d like.
And here I’ll stop the football analogy. Because it’s actually different for a writer. The club is in us. It’s the accumulated domicile of the many needs to conform, all of which are anathema to the creative process. Despite what I said about the restrictions of a football club, a great player will still thrive within it, even against it. But the ultimate writer’s club is his own inner padded leather chairs and Cuban cigars, which will stop him stone dead.
No one tells a writer to homogenise a character here, to be the right kind of derivative there; to steal his ideas because copyright doesn’t cover them; to toe the latest PC line; to be ‘cool’ – to wear the story like a branded T-shirt instead of totally inhabiting it with passion and heart and belief. Club writers care about how they’re perceived. They write blogs from a slightly elevated (but pretend humble) position of The One Who Knows. They imitate self-deprecation but in reality want worship. They find out who thinks similarly on the publishing side and seek them out, not because they have a fantastic story to sell but because they might some time in the future have an okay, do the job, inoffensive imitation one that won’t give any readers mental heartburn or that they’ll remember twenty minutes after reading, which is just as well otherwise they might realise they’ve been sold a nicely decorated dud designed to little more than bulk out the writer’s list of credits.
All of which means non-club writers are destined to walk a fine line. They are after all trying to succeed in a world full of clubs, where most people rapidly move from one kind to the next – family, work, social – barely taking the time to suck in a lungful or two of free oxygen in the spaces between. The non-club writer produces a punchy, beautifully written story that makes people feel but also think, and already he’s in trouble.
On the one hand, there is the clear-conscienced writer who has produced the best story he possibly can, but now has no idea what to do with it. On the other, is the club member who doesn’t even start a story unless he knows who’s likely to buy it.
Skewing it all, unfortunately, is the large proportion of public taste for the club concoction; the easy to digest, predictable, mildly exciting ride. Hence the dreary predictability of best-sellers. So it is then, that the non-club writer has two clubs to battle, one giving the other exactly what it thinks it wants, its taste built on what it’s already been given, perpetuating a closed circle of mediocrity.