On Becoming a Novelist

A Different Diary

2025, at around least here, will be 1990.

1990 is the year I most envy my past self for experiencing.

A lot happened to me.

When the year began, I was 21 years old.

Still living at home in Ampthill, Beds.

Not working. Not independent.

By the end of the year, my life had changed.

I’d moved to a foreign country, twice.

I’d fallen in love, twice.

Most of all, I had drafted my first novel (unpublished).

This fresh time is what I am going to be revisiting over the coming year — by sharing, footnoting, analysing and having some fun with my 1990 diary.

Who is this person, young-Toby, who gradually turned into me? What does he know already? What does he need to learn? What would I teach him, if I could?

I remember reading, around this age, Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Letter[s] to a Young Poet’.

Woolf’s advice was especially brutal —

And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty.

Seen from age 21, this seemed like a decade’s ban on having any readers.

Seen from now, I can only nod and smile.

I broke Woolf’s rule — my first book, Adventures in Capitalism, came out when I was 27.

That’s not something I regret. I am proud of that book. It cleared me a lot of space. And Woolf was addressing a poet, rather than a novelist.

In 1990, I was in the process of turning myself from one into the other — for the most part: I do write poetry, and I’d like to think of myself as a poet, but it’s not been my main thing.

In 1990, I believed — rightly — that if I was ever going to earn a living as a writer, it would have to be as a prose writer.

I wanted to do that (publish a novel) as soon as possible. I didn’t want work to stop me from working.

And so the years between 1990 and 1996 seemed long, frustrating and perplexing.

Why wasn’t I where I wanted to be?

But they were also when I learned what I needed to learn in order to be a writer. Which is why I think this experiment in time is worth pursuing and witnessing.

Back to the future.

I already know a few things about myself, but am sure I will learn more.

I wasn’t as patient as I should have been, or as grateful for the time I did find for myself — by heading to a country where I could support myself without having to do a job Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.

2025 is going to be a hybrid year. Part-Diary of a Young Poet, Part-Letter to a Young Novelist and Part-Whatever Occurs to Me.

Wibble-wobble, and we’re away —