Happy New February, Best Beloveds – here I am in my typing chair, surrounded by scribbly bits of paper, bookmarkless books doggedly concealing facts that I need right now and data sticks. You never can have enough backups when you're writing a novel. Thieves may break in and steal your (at home) laptop and your (for travelling) laptop. Hideously unlikely interactions of sunlight and magnifying lenses may burn your ecologically shameful, printed-off pages. During an almost inevitable psychotic episode you may melt, bend, stamp on, or simply eat your auxiliary disk drive and rats may gnaw the disks you've hidden under your floorboards to fragments overnight. Really you should deposit at least three or four storage devices in the safe-keeping of your doctor, or your bank manager, or someone you can actually trust – and it would be good if you could implant a memory chip about your person, positioned far from any organs valuable enough for forcible extraction by teams of international street surgeons, this keeping your precious chapters free from collateral damage by feral scalpels.
In short – the longer my novel gets, the more anxious I become about its safety and, lunging paranoia aside, the more likely it is that my computer will go into an operatic series of crashes before simply dying in my arms like a concussed gannet. (Readers will remember that I know whereof I speak when it comes to expiring seabirds.) By the end of the year, should all have gone well, my study will be almost impassable and the luggage for any journey beyond the corner shop will include a small, fireproof safe.
Not that I believe my novel is any good. I never believe that. And my enduring levels of dissatisfaction can be difficult to explain: telling people, "I hate everything I produce," seems a tad negative and also suggests that I'm happy to assault the dashing and generous reader with any old nonsense. In fact, I am – believe me – doing all that I possibly can to produce books that are as good as I can make them and I do believe my work has managed to improve through time. I just never quite climb precisely all the way up my intended mountain – the route gets altered, or the mountain's a bit to the left, or some of the heather's squiff, if not actually broccoli when you look at closely.
There used to be a delightful pair of older ladies who would attend readings in Edinburgh and loiter until the very end of the signing queue in order to lean forward (to be honest, rather drunkenly) and whisper to unwary authors, "Yes, but you could do better... " Although it was always lovely to meet the pair of them and to see how much innocent joy can be derived from cheap boxed wine, a free evening's heating and applied malevolence, their words were, of course, unnecessary. I already knew I could do better. I have always known I could do better. The one, solitary, mortal thing that I could not do any better is knowing that I could do better. I'm Scottish. I'm a Calvinist. My cerebrospinal fluid is – I like to imagine – awash with uniquely prickly lymphocytes whose sole purpose is to swim round and round my brain, endlessly carolling could do better.
OK?
Or rather.
Not OK. Never OK.
Which is, perversely, very much OK. This certainty of imperfection – in Scots and non-Scots, I'd have to point out – has kept generations of us busily working away, obsessing and convulsing, lest we should fail even more embarrassingly than we fear we might. People like me are always about to be fired, or unmasked, or mocked, humiliated, cashiered, bastinadoed, tarred and feathered and generally knocked about for being dreadful. Believing this too vehemently would, we must surely agree, be catastrophic, but harnessing the little monster in our chests which taunts and derides us can mean that we keep on tinkering and correcting beyond the point at which we might otherwise despair, or surrender, or worry feebly about the bleeding from our ears. We are, in short, a fretting and puzzling fellowship of imperfect perfectionists, flailing gamely through the variously delightful hells of our own making.
Having said all that, I wouldn't have said all that if I weren't moderately happy about the tiny amount of typing I've coughed up thus far. If I still loathed it as heartily as I did last week, I wouldn't have been able even to discuss it with you. Had I met you in the street, I would have pulled down my hat and ignored you, weeping inwardly as I loped away to punch myself repeatedly on your behalf.
Since then I have erased every repellent syllable of the bilge I managed to secrete over the festive period. (I never do remember not to write when I have flu and am tired, even if I feel I should be writing, even if I think I still can …) I have started again and am creeping forward between bouts of displacement activity, 14-hour jolts of sleep (which do rather eat into the working day) and startling hypnopompic hallucinations. All of the above being par for the course. Already, I'm telling my friends about people they've never met, people they can't meet, people who don't exist, people I see in my sleep. As another brace of older ladies I overheard on a train put it so nicely – "It's better than having your leg cut off". And how true those words are, even today. Onwards.
