Since taking early retirement from teaching at the age of twenty-four, I have never really had a proper job, and although I consider writing to be the most important and fulfilling thing I do, it has always been fitted in and around performing, socialising and helping bring up the children. Having said that, I am a compulsive scribbler and would feel very uneasy if I couldn't put pen to paper during the day. And pen to paper it is. . . no keyboards, no screens, no mod-cons. Writing this article made me think in fact, about myself as a writer. I suppose I must be one, otherwise what am I doing here? But although I have had umpteen books published, I always think of myself as a poet, and one who stumbles in the dark. Constantly amazed to find that he has written a poem, and with luck, may write another.
Proper writers, I assume, are clear-sighted, organised and ambitious. I am none of these. They rise at dawn, have coffee and go straight to the PC to knock off 3000 words before lunch (something salady and wholemealy), followed by a brisk walk with the dog, and then another 5000 words before that first G & T at sundown. At home I have an untidy book-lined study ("Dust is the carpet of the contented") which features a large desk and a wicker wastepaper basket the size of a wheelie-bin, a quiver of pens and pencils and enough notebooks to reforest vast tracts of Amazonia. Within easy reach are Collins's English Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, the Poets Manual and Rhyming Dictionary (ed. Frances Stillman), rosary beads and dental floss.
The Way Things Are, all 83 pages of it, took seven years to write, although during this period there were plays, poems and stories for children, anthologies edited, competitions judged and all the usual stuff, not to mention the poetry readings. Even so, as a writer I rarely enjoy the feeling of having completed something, as I am always in the middle of something else. I look enviously at friends who complete the novel, or the play, and then take a well-earned rest after a job, not only well done but well paid. After recharging the imagination batteries, off they go again. I get the feeling sometimes, that I am writing just one book, parts of which are published every few years. The plot eludes me and I'm not sure who the characters are. One of them, though, may be a writer.
Roger McGough's latest collection, The Way Things Are, has just been published by Viking