Take It To The Limit

Formative Moments for the Novice Author

Here’s one I prepared earlier (who still associates that phrase with Blue Peter? I do); it appeared a year or two ago when I ran an author newsletter via MailerLite, before discovering the (mostly) wonderful world of Substack. I referred to it in an earlier post (Reliable Narrators?) but as I noted then, it stalled somewhere on the way to publication here.

Something set me thinking back to the first thing I ever got published in a proper magazine. Curiously, it’s not the first writing I ever got paid for, but that’s another story. The experience of first publication was thrilling, but it also taught me a lot.

In 1986 I found myself on an international rock-climbing meet in the spectacular location of Meteora in Greece. I’d never climbed outside the UK before, and to ramp up my starry-eyed excitement I wound up doing my very first climb there with a famous climber called Dietrich Hasse—and when I say ‘with’, I do mean literally on the same rope.

To cut a long story short (precisely what this post is really about), as soon as I got home I did a massive head-dump of everything that happened, including pitch-by-pitch accounts of every single route we climbed during the week, typed it up, and sent it off to the UK’s leading climbing magazine, ‘High’. (Along with the pick of my photos from the week, in the form of slides, because this is long before digital¹.) A few weeks later I got a call from the editor, Geoff Birtles. He wanted to publish it, because it was an area little-known to UK climbers, and because there had been an ‘official’ element to the trip, but…

GB: “Jon, it’s nineteen pages long. I’m going to have to make some pretty drastic cuts.”

JS: “But you’re really going to publish it?”

GB: “Yes, if you’re OK with me cutting it.”

JS (wanting to dance round the room but limited by the phone-cord): “Please, please, dear Mr Birtles, go right ahead, whatever you think best, Mr Birtles, sir.”

(This recreation of the conversation may not be verbatim: it was around thirty-nine years ago.)

Of course, when the thing appeared a few months later (early 1987), I was thrilled—but also a little bit distraught that many of the bits he’d cut were my favourites, where I’d waxed most lyrical. Never again would I submit any piece of writing without finding out what the word count should be and sticking to it.

That all-important first published piece, ‘complete’ with severely trimmed text.

This could be challenging at times, not least in the photography guides which make up almost half of my non-fiction output. Trying to explain concepts like depth of field (and why it isn’t the same as ‘depth of focus’) is never easy; trying to do it as concisely and lucidly as possible is doubly difficult. However, it is also great discipline for the writer and something I hope has stood me in good stead in the rest of my work.

There’s another lesson which I trace back even more directly to that first, mildly traumatic, experience: kill your own darlings, don’t wait for someone else to kill them for you. Looked at another way, kill the expendables and make the darlings immortal. Either way, this requires you to recognise what’s essential and what’s not.

On the subject of word counts, after 35 years of writing professionally for books and magazines, sometimes to strict templates and always with at least a guideline to length if not a precise limit, it is a relief to have the freedom that self-publishing brings. In fact, I suspect it’s precisely because so much of my non-fiction writing had been under such constraints that I am so resistant to applying a similar approach to my fiction. As I’ve mentioned before, my attempts at pre-plotting or outlining a novel have been woeful failures. It’s at least plausible to suggest that I subconsciously wanted them to fail (how would I know?). In fiction, I’ve happily embraced being a pantser.

However, this does not mean that all the discipline I’d learned through the years of writing non-fiction went out of the window. In a passage I come back to frequently, Ursula K Le Guin wrote: ‘There’s a difference between control and responsibility.’ The converse of this is that freedom need not, and probably should not, imply absence of responsibility. I’m not writing to order, or (shudder) ‘writing to market’, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a responsibility to my readers—however many or few they may be. In the thirty-eight years since I emptied my head onto the page after my return from Meteora, I hope I’ve learned to clear away the dead wood and trim the fat (and not to mix metaphors!). Good writing, I dare to suggest, is writing that’s as long as it needs to be, that will be impaired rather than improved by adding or subtracting words.

’As long as it needs to be’ is not going to be the same for every author. Internet writing pundits are fond of proclaiming that readers have short attention spans now and that authors need to avoid long sentences, long paragraphs, and long books (and now I’m wondering how long I can keep this sentence going; can I equal some of the half-page masterpieces² of Iain M Banks?). But there are still lots of big fat books on the shelves, and plenty of people still read the classics. There’s room for a wide range of voices.

In every particular I fail Strunk’s Elements of Style. If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologise for that. I ought to go back and ruthlessly prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.
— Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

At a shade over 120,000 words, Vows and Watersheds is the longest of my books, a third longer than Three Kinds of North or The Sundering Wall. In the final months before hitting the big red button marked ‘launch’ I looked long and hard for places where I could cut—and I managed to scrape away all of 3,000 words. Its length means that it costs more to print and to post, which eats into my margin on direct sales… but that’s my problem.

Remember at the start I said that the Meteora piece was the first writing I ever got published but not the first I got paid for? And you were wondering how that came about… well, weren’t you? Here’s another ‘long story short’ explanation.

Lawrence Sorry-Forgotten-Surname on ‘Jean Jeanie’ (VS 4c) at Trowbarrow Quarry, Lancashire, one of the climbs featured in my first paid-for piece.

Again, it’s all to do with rock-climbing, which was a big part of my life in the 80’s, and for a good while after. My Bible in those days was a coffee-table book called Hard Rock³; I had, and still cherish, a copy of the second edition. There was also a companion volume, covering easier climbs, called Classic Rock, and later one for harder stuff, Extremer Rock⁴. It seemed to me there was something of a gap between them and that there must be a lot of middling climbers like myself who’d be a ready market for it. So I wrote a cheeky letter to the editor, Ken Wilson, enclosing a piece I’d written on a couple of climbs in the unglamorous setting of some Lancashire quarries not far from my home. And lo and behold he wrote back to say, yes, they were planning just such a book, and that the routes I’d chosen did merit inclusion… and enclosing a cheque for £20. That equates to about £80 now, forty years on, which neither is nor was a princely sum for fifteen hundred finely-crafted words… but I didn’t care. Overnight, or so I thought at the time, I’d become a Professional Writer.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check… and it didn’t bounce… I consider you talented.
—Stephen King

Talented? Hmmm… Professional? Well, maybe I was jumping the gun just a bit. The book never appeared—I have my theories about why, but don’t know for sure—and I didn’t get published or paid for anything else until the Meteora piece three years later. I didn’t give up the day job until 1994, a full decade after receiving that first cheque, and when I did, I was earning significantly more from photography than from writing. (I always did both, and over time the balance did shift back towards writing, but that, too, is another story.)

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A semi-random sampling of subsequent published work, including the first two books to carry my name (top row near right, bottom row far right). In both of these I contributed the photos and Terry Marsh provided the words.

1. The first digital camera that appeared even vaguely practical to me was the Nikon D1, launched in 1999. The first one I actually bought was a Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro, in 2004.

2. Probably not… And to be fair, in his Culture novels, Banks did use those magnificently labyrinthine sentences to suggest the thought processes of the Minds, sentient AIs a thousand times quicker and smarter than any human—and about a billion times smarter than ChatGPT or any of today’s so-called ‘AI’.

3. A small but proud boast: when my former climbing club formed a Facebook group during Covid restrictions, I turned out to have done more routes from Hard Rock than anyone else in the group. This definitely doesn’t mean I was the best climber there, but I might have been the most dedicated ‘Puerile Ticker’ (in Ken Wilson’s phrase).

4. Should anyone reading possess a copy of the first (1987) edition of Extreme Rock, which only ever ran to one print-run, it’s now a significant collector’s item; I sold my far from pristine copy for around £120, suggesting a mint example would fetch rather more. The new version, from Vertebrate Publishing, includes much new material to cover major advances in the sport over nearly four decades.