Why I Write

My wife and I always end up going to a couple of big gigs in the summer and, while it's true that I find myself becoming more and more intolerant of audiences – it's the talking during songs that I find hard – it's also true that, now that I go to pubs far less, gigs and galleries are what I find myself being drawn to even more. In July we saw David Byrne, and we seemed, at times, to be both in a gig and at a gallery: a young, preternaturally talented band had been organised into shapes and colours that involved the eye just as much as they engaged the ear. What I tend to remember of great gigs are moments: Radiohead banging out "There There" on what were essentially two tom-toms; Elvis Costello falling to his knees in the middle of "Alison"; the way that Johnny Marr, when he was playing with The Smiths, seems in my memory to be four guitarists all playing simultaneously. With Byrne, it was "Slippery People" and "Psycho Killer". It's a paradox that they were both so great that what I remember is me rather than them; the extremity of my reaction. I lost it. Twice. When I asked my wife why she thought it was all so good she simply said: "Joy". And she was right.

Nick Cave? It shouldn't work. That day we had already seen English Teacher, who are shaping up to be something rather special. They remind me of Bob Dylan's statement that he wanted to produce a sound that was "that thin... wild mercury sound – metallic and bright gold". A bit of prog; a bit of indie – and something else. And it's the "something else" that, I think, as writers and performers, we all yearn for: the thing that's ours and ours alone. Cave seems to have a greater amount of that than most. Like I said, it really shouldn't work. His songs, if you break them down, are more like chants. Sing a high note for a while then sing it an octave lower, keep repeating this and throw in some Biblical or Wild West imagery – that would seem to be the formula. It isn't, though, that they're just like chants. They're also like prayers, or incantations. Spells. And The Bad Seeds? They remind me of how I used to use to describe Elvis Costello's Attractions: God's pub band. Grizzled veterans, most of them, but with none of the potential weariness that that implies. Can you be precise and passionate at the same time? The Bad Seeds can. Meanwhile, Cave sang: "I am transforming; I am vibrating." He did this over and again while The Bad Seeds simmered behind him. The verb is exact: you could feel them urging themselves, then refusing, to come to the boil. It was – it became, through repetition – as close to being transcendent as anything I've ever seen and heard. Cave has... I don't know. A vision? A style? A mode? Whatever it is, it's his. And it's transfixing.

Hold those thoughts – joy, and the thing that, over the years, you have become; the thing that's yours – and let's read George Orwell, who is the patron saint of writers.

"When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art". I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing."

I wish that writing was this way for me. I mean, it can be, certainly. There are two novels that I currently want to write. One of them is undeniably political, insofar as I want it to be about Reform. I want to track the effect of the Far Right on a suburban town; to do a number on them essentially. But Orwell also describes what will inevitably happen next:

"I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want completely, to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."

He goes on to say:

"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand."

That last passage seems to be to be undeniably true. Why do I write? Well, it's almost never to put a certain point of view across. I hate Reform; I detest Farage. The book that I will almost certainly write (if not quite yet) is driven by anger, yes, but it's also driven by something else: by an urge that would seem to supersede any logical attempt to describe the book. Why have I spent a month going over and over the first few paragraphs? Why have I been adapting and adapting their length and syntax? The simple answer is that I don't know. "Joy" is close. There's real pleasure in it, although I'd like to revisit this because it's still not quite right. I watch someone like Byrne and I respond to the artistry, yes – to the great songs especially – but what I think I respond to most is that sense of abandon. To be consumed by what you do – to be so very much in the middle of it that it's like being submerged, without pain, in a conflagration. I know that feeling. And, yes, it is very much like joy. But it isn't quite.

The other feeling? That working towards a thing that is your thing. Now that's a feeling I know well. I think I know exactly how good and how bad I am. I know what works, I think, and I know what doesn't. In the words of E.I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth: "I know where I can go and just how far, without making a mockery of the thing we all love." I believe, too, that I have found a voice that sounds a lot like me. Is it "my" voice? Well, that's a very complicated question; we all know how performative writing is, and I have always taken Orwell's claim to write prose that's as transparent "as a window" with more than a pinch of salt. No, it sounds like me. It's like me but with a little more oxygen. Or perhaps that isn't quite what I mean. What do I mean? I had to think for a moment there, and what I think I mean is that it fits. I'd say that I'm comfortable with it if "comfortable" wasn't a word that comes with implications of low heat. What I mean, I think, is that I feel expressed by it. It isn't, quite, me, and yet it speaks successfully for me. Or else – and this is the most accurate definition I can muster – it speaks for the part of me that can only be expressed by writing prose.

What do I mean? I mean that, inside every writer, I am sure, there's something that's essentially unnameable. Henry James: "We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." As ever with James, the passage conceals as much as it reveals. Why is our doubt our passion? And what, precisely, is the madness of art? But it will serve. It expresses very well the blindness of the process: the feints and false starts and the sense that you're plunging forward, like a mole. But, like a mole, the blindness is in you. The madness is in you. It's what Martin Amis called "the wound": the thing, like the grit in the oyster, that has you desperately trying to make a pearl. It's endless, it really is. Writers have to write. It can feel like joy, but I suspect that we all know it isn't really. It's much too compulsive for that. We do it, moreover, despite the nature of the result. I mean, obviously, you don't even know, most of the time, if it will be published. But it isn't only that. You never know, I mean, if your writing is good enough. I believe I've found a voice. I think that I'm expressed. I have days when I think that what I've written is exactly right. And I have days when I think it's terrible. Or not exactly terrible: flat, I mean, and pointless. Bland and amorphous. Nevertheless, I carry on regardless.

When I was little, for one reason and another, I didn't develop a strong sense of who I was: of where I ended and the world began. What I now realise that I felt was the lack of safety that one's inner life can provide. But Buddhism has partly taught me this: that one's inner life is entirely within one's grasp. That, actually, the "self" is a construct but that you construct it; you have that power. There is real comfort in this, but at that age I was all at sea. It could be as simple as not knowing when to stop; as drawing the same picture over and over again until what I was left with was a black piece of paper. Poems; stories; songs; novels. They provide you with a kind of closure. I don't mean this, particularly, with regard to endings. Endings, I've noticed, often take care of themselves. No, I mean that each sentence, when I think it's done, is inviolate. It's its own thing, entirely. You can't mess with it: it seems to cross its arms and refuse to let you change it. What you do, ultimately, is create something very definite, and I find that compelling. There's a kind of safety in it that, despite the above attempt at analysis, I can't quite explain. But I don't need to. I only have to keep doing it.

So. Joy, possibly. Your own thing, yes. Transcendence? I should be so lucky. But something more. I don't feel, quite, when I'm writing, as though I'm trying to explain or express anything. Or, no, I am but that isn't, by any means, the most important thing. The primary urge is to write sentences. To experience that closure. The rest of it – tone; imagery; plot; characterisation – feels, obviously, to be of immense importance. But that's much more conscious; much more in the nature of a competition, with other people and myself. I write; that's it. And that, in and of itself, is the important thing. It just seems to happen. It's happening now, I'm happy to say. And now I will edit, and edit and edit, until, finally, I can feel each sentence reach its final shape. It's a compulsion, but of the most pleasant and rewarding kind. May you all have an obsession that feels so satisfying.

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. Rough Music, his second novel to be published, is coming out in September.