On the Plan for Next Year
2025 will be 1990 (Remixed)
The point of this year’s Writer’s Diary has been to help you with your writing.
That won’t change next year, but I’m going to be going about it in a less obvious way.
Rather than give straight writing advice, I will be looking back at one year in my life.
Not just any year — 1990, the year I wrote my first novel and, I think, the year I became a writer.
A writer of fiction, anyway.
Up until then, I had been writing poetry intensely for five or six years. All through university, from 1986 to 1989, I was concentrated upon becoming a poet.
Between 1990 and 1992, I lived and worked in Prague. And immediately before that, I had been in Glasgow for a few months, at the beginning of its time as City of Culture. That was where I started my first novel, The Lost Notebook of Babel.
If any part of my life is worth paying attention to, because I was in the right place at the right time, then 1990 is it.
This is the year I envy my past self for living through.
My idea is to share my 1990 Diary, plus some of what I was writing at the time, but also to expand on this.
What mistakes can I see myself making? What advice might have been useful?
Also, and more generally, although I did keep my eyes open to what was happening in Glasgow (the first year of the Poll Tax) and Prague (the first full year after the ‘Velvet Revolution’), there was a great deal I missed.
What was going on — culturally, socially, politically — that I should have noted down but didn’t?
This was not 2024, or 2016.
This was the year international correspondents happily quoted William Wordsworth’s ‘The French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’ (1805) —
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—
This was the year of Jesus Jones’ ‘Right Here, Right Now’ —
there is no other place I'd rather be
Right here, right now - watching the world wake up from history
Maybe there’s something to be learned from looking at post-revolutionary optimism, possibility and radicalism.
There are gaps in my 1990 Diary, blank days, and these will make room for something a bit more like what’s been going on this year — direct writing advice. Stuff about point of view. But I hope most of it will spring out of where young Toby has arrived at.
Oh, I should also say, he falls in love.
Twice.
This sounds great, Toby. Looking forward to another’s version of 1990. I was living in a squat in Palmers Green gestating what would become the eldest of four children (I wasn’t planning any) and waiting many many many more years to begin my first novel.
Wonderful! I like this a lot Toby. Great points about 1990 and what we miss - when young we are so greatly affected by close up things. I was at film school then and working at least 2 nights a week at the fridge, so immersed in my immediate bubbles that I didn't fully register the external world beyond music, movies, fashions, Brixton or Soho! My Brixton born & bred, second-gen Jamaicain musician, broad-thinking friend, Wolfie, came back from Berlin all excited as he'd experienced the fall of the wall & even had a brick! I was so disengaged I didn't register quite how cool that was or would become at all. I was though, very affected by the Gulf war. As it was more in my direct bubble, at the Fridge, I was at work, a captive audience behind the box office when the head of our security guards switched all the tv screens (about 12) to the overland mapping of the carpet bomb first invasion into Iraq. He was saying to me ( and he was much like a baptist style preacher, as i think his father had been) that this was the rise up against the white devil, that Gadafi and all would be behind this war, that it was WW3. I went home & sobbed my heart out, the words carpet bomb were new to me, I couldn't believe such horror was occurring. The next day I arrived at our film school building ( PCL as it was then, now Univ Westminster & moved out to Harrow). Then it was on Riding House St. It was all locked up with a notice, closed due to a bomb scare. This set me off all over again so i was in pieces when I found all my cohorts celebrating in the Yorkshire Gray, quite amused by my tear-stained face, handing me a vodka, not having witnessed the invasion in the same way as I had, they were all sinking drinks, glad the bomb scare gave us reason not to go to lectures!