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Even the disappointment and loneliness of starting out as a writer doesn’t have to be terrible – if you can find a reader you can trust I’m lying down, Best Beloveds. This is as close as I get to a hobby. Over the weekend I attempted to establish sleeping as a further leisure activity, but I’m afraid that the vast list of things I have to do before most days break – or, indeed, I myself break – made that impossible. So lying down and working – it’s almost as good as a rest. Not that I am complaining about being in work. Being in work is a good thing. Being in work when you are self-employed and me – and your employer is therefore almost as mentally sturdy as Charlie Sheen – is a less good thing. Not that I’m in any way chemically enhanced, or unhanced – I can forget why I’ve ended up in the kitchen again and am holding a single shoe without any assistance from prescribed or clandestinely imported substances. When I shake my head my brain thumps against its sides like a neatly parcelled corpse in the boot of a slewing car. Meanwhile, I have been asked to write a little about the typist’s progress from hoping-to-be-published-anywhere-at-all-ever to dear-God-shoot-me-just-in-the-shin-then-I’ll-get-a-day-off. This is, of course, both a happy progression and something that should be much better organised in my case. Here, I’ll try and look at what we might call the very early days. The awful and wonderful early days. So, to begin at the beginning. My own experience of starting out was haphazard and almost certain to fail. I didn’t really intend to write, I was simply living in a tiny, cold bedsit with no other ways of being constructive. (And if your only way to prove yourself useful is by producing a steady trickle of maimed and ugly short stories, you should probably take a good look at yourself.) I joined a writer’s group and then remembered that I don’t like groups. I sent off stories without really researching my target magazines who duly returned my efforts, often accompanied only by a scribble on a square of paper slightly larger than a commemorative stamp. I had occasional successes, and an encouraging letter of rejection, or – dear God – an acceptance, or – good heavens – not just a free copy of “Quentin’s Quarterly Gallimaufry”, but a check for 20 quid, could light up my month. I was more often disappointed than not, but I was also learning that I cared about this. I cared so much that I would start again after every sad envelope flopped in, write something else, forget that it hurt to be knocked back. I was writing by hand with later multicoloured corrections as nervousness and tinkering racked up rewrites. There weren’t really any personal computers about (imagine that). A bit of planning before I’d started and then stepping back for an overview would have helped me much more than altering things blindly and investing affection, rather than criticism. As it was, I ended up with page after page of Jackson Pollocked nonsense. I didn’t know any better. I wanted advice, but I was afraid that someone well-informed would simply tell me I shouldn’t bother because I was incurably dreadful. I felt lonely and pointless and hungry. If you’re at that stage now then you have my sympathy – it’s horrible. And it’s worse now: opportunities to get involved with tutoring, or reviewing, or workshops are evaporating; the publishing landscape is ever-shrinking as are advances; there are fewer magazines out there and fewer anthologies; there are fewer places for new books in bookshop chains. And, yes, it may be that you don’t ever get published and reach anyone’s shelves. You may be a risk that someone would have taken 10 years ago, while today you seem unaffordable. You may be a good writer, but unlucky. There may be a day when you fold that set of ambitions away and set your mind to something else. We have to consider this. But if you haven’t given up yet, I can say – and I think I am being honest about this – that even this initial grind needn’t turn out to be 100% horrible. Really. It needn’t. When everything about writing is a slog and you seem to be getting nowhere, your lack of pressing demands from numerous admirers does mean you have the time to sit back and consider why you’re putting all this effort into what appears to be an unrewarding relationship. You’re flinging out the best love letters you can, you’re breaking your heart and no one’s answering, but on you go regardless – why? If your answer is that you love what you’re doing and couldn’t abandon it without being someone other than yourself, then you probably have to keep slogging. The certainty that you have to write can be a pain in the neck, but it’s also a great, firm truth to build around – the shysters and manipulators and compromise-peddlers won’t be able to shake you, if you fasten yourself to that. And if you are eventually successful and your work as an author does take off in one direction or another it’s not unlikely that there will be other times when, for other reasons, you come to doubt if the effort is worth it, or if you’re suited to it. Your experience in those first, hard times will be there for you then. If you’ve not had enough money and not had enough support (or any support), if people have thought you were crazy and yet you’ve kept on and tried to learn your craft and taken notes and practised observation and made horrible mistakes and pondered giving up and listened and puzzled and fretted and wasted your time and woken at three in the morning being shaken by the best idea you’ve ever met and fought sentences for days until they’ve actually rolled over and let you win, then you already, deeply, know that you’re a writer. You already know that you kept writing, even when you had no reason to. You already know that it calls in you, that it’s a good thing, a life-changing thing and that you’d be foolish to ignore it. Way back when I was at my beginning I summoned up the courage to find my local writer in tesidence – we had one, funded by the Scottish Arts Council – and he read my material while I felt nauseous. Then he showed me how to make cocoa. Thinking back on it, making cocoa is probably all he could think of to do with someone who was clearly a ball of pure tension and liable to cry, if not faint, at any moment. I’ve been in his position since and it’s hard to be correctly tender and correctly firm with someone who’s just handed you an armful of their dreams – cocoa might not be a bad distraction. Someone who has fully committed to their work, pressed everything they can into word after word – because half-measures won’t cut it – they will have more than a little interest in what you think of the results. I sat and pondered my gradually cooling mug while he talked me through the two or three stories I’d handed over and was factual about their flaws and kicked the crap out of one of the endings – I still remember – and generally bludgeoned me. It was sore by the time we’d finished, but it was wonderful, too. Here was a writer who was talking to me as if I were a writer. I wasn’t a good writer – what I’d done was full of flaws and holes and silliness – but somebody qualified had read my work and thought it had enough merit to deserve close examination. I left knowing how to make cocoa – I still use his method – and feeling bruised. But I also knew it was all right. Somehow, it was going to be all right. I would start again, and I would rewrite. So Dear Readers, I wish you the very best attentions of a reader you can trust. Quite possibly this won’t be all 38 variously deluded members of your workshop, or your partner, or a secretly embittered relative, or a stranger on a bus, or anyone you have to pay. You’ll need somebody who cares about writing, who wants to help, quite possibly who wants to pass along the help they received when they were starting out. I wish you a Good Reader. Onwards. Fiction AL Kennedy guardian.co.uk