This Happened Once Before

Later this month my book I Was There - The Beatles Live will be published, featuring more than 350 fan memories from the 1960s of encounters with the Fab Four.  The stories, many of which have never been told before, cover the earliest days of The Beatles, including pre fame encounters with John, George, Paul and Ringo.

This is the second book I have written (hence the title of this piece) which tries to capture a slice of social history in the words and memories of music fans, and follows on from You Had To Be There: The Rolling Stones Live 1962 - 69.

In compiling these books, I have been struck by the passion and fondness with which people remember the 1960s.  Sometimes the love of the group and its music has turned into a lifelong obsession with the group, or a group member.  With The Beatles, it is Paul McCartney.  With the Rolling Stones, it is Brian Jones, despite his having died in 1969.

But often the fondness is for a life well lived and a youthful memory of good times and good friends.  These books are not full of Albert Goldman like revelations about The Beatles and the Stones.  They are wistful and witty memories of fifty and more years ago, when life was simpler and the world was full of possibilities.

What I have particularly enjoyed in putting these books together is hearing the words 'the memories came flooding back.'  If you pick up one of my books, I hope you'll get the same warm feeling once you start reading it as you would if you heard Ringo's drums or Keith's guitar.  My books are a slice of the Sixties, and as a fifty something who can barely remember that decade I'd say that's no bad thing.

My writing habits

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of volume 1 of a three volume biography of Graham Greene in a secondhand shop.  I hadn't read a great deal of Greene, but I was particularly interested in the fact that Greene had agreed to be interviewed by his biographer Norman Sherry and that the volumes hadn't been put together simply following a trawl through the press cuttings and a look into the Greene archive.  The most fascinating point I learnt was that Greene would produce 500 words a day without fail.  On the days when he really didn't want to write, Greene would still pen 500 words, even if that meant counting the words as he went along and stopping mid sentence as soon as he reached the 500th.

I was reminded of this fact when reading Chris Hill's blog about the writing habits of famous authors http://songoftheseagod.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/whats-your-writing-routine/ which has led me to think about my own writing habits and how these have evolved over time.

The first story I ever wrote was 'Peter And The Pixie', an Enid Blyton knock off that I wrote on my mother's writing pad.  I was 7 years old.

When I was a teenager I wrote stories on an A4 ruled pad with a biro.  Paper was in short supply (we weren't impoverished as a family or anything - I just didn't want to spend the money!) and so I wrote longhand and as small as I could to cram the words onto the page.  I would sit on my bedroom floor and use the bed as a table.  Again, I didn't lack a desk in my room because my parents couldn't afford to buy me one.  It just wasn't the way I used to work.

Later on I upgraded to a piece of thick cardboard that I bought from the gift shop after a visit to the Laserium in Oxford Street (next to Madame Tussaud's) which I'd bought thinking it was a fold out poster.  The Laserium was fabulous, but the merchandise was a huge disappointment.  It was just that - a piece of card with a not very vivid laser picture on it - and at the time I remembered thinking that I'd paid 99p for not very much.  But after I got it home that piece of card was pressed into service as 'something to lean on' and all the time I wrote in longhand after that, including writing my essays at university, I relied upon it, even reaching a point where I couldn't write without it because I liked the way it had moulded to fit the shape of my fingers.

For a while I tried using an old Imperial typewriter that my parents had in their attic.  A beautiful looking piece of machinery it was in need of a proper servicing and so I abandoned it for a small portable typewriter that I bought secondhand, and then an electronic typewriter that my girlfriend at the time bought for me as a Christmas present.  Then in 1987 I bought a desk (secondhand from work, and which I still have today) and a word processor.

The Amstrad PCW9512 was a revelation.  It came with a daisy wheel printer that sounded like the Trans Siberian Express when it was thundering away, which didn't endear me to the neighbours when I was printing something off late at night in the back bedroom of my terraced house, but the printed product looked great.

But what I liked best about the Amstrad was the way in which you could cut and paste a document, storing different sentences or paragraphs under different keys whilst you were working on a document.  Word's clipboard has none of that ease of use and while it exceeds the Amstrad in many other ways I still yearn for that ability to edit a document by taking it apart and reordering paragraphs in such a simple way.

The other attraction of the Amstrad was that it was just a word processor.  Granted, these were pre Internet days but there were no other distractions - no Solitaire, no Excel spreadsheets to play with, etc.  When I went upstairs to the bedroom I had designated as 'my office' to write, that's what I did.  The Amstrad fired up in a matter of seconds and away I went.

Sadly, I made the mistake of buying a PC a few years later and selling the Amstrad to a colleague whose daughter wanted a word processor.  (And twelve months later he was telling me that she had had a short story written on the PCW accepted for publication in a magazine, which was more success than I'd achieved).  I didn't realise at the time how my productivity would be affected by this move.  It was the daisy wheel printer that did it.  A quieter, quicker laser printer sounded so attractive and the Amstrad didn't come with any alternatives to the daisy wheel printer that I was aware of.

I compounded the error of selling the Amstrad a few years later by throwing away the dozen or so PCW disks that I had which contained much of what I'd written between 1987 and 1992.  I had hard copies of some of those documents, but despaired of finding a way to retrieve the material and so was a brave soldier and binned the disks.

Then family came along, as did various job moves and other reasons for not prioritising writing, and before I knew it I'd hit 50.

And now?  Now I think I'm more productive again.  I only work a four day week and so can, if I'm disciplined enough, spend several hours writing on a Monday.  I try to shy away from the PC and the temptations of the Internet, of running auto maintenance, of downloading the latest version of Java, etc., and all the other time stealers associated with switching that machine on.

Now I will sit at the kitchen table with a pad of scrap paper.  I don't write in microscopic letters any more.  In fact, I have worse handwriting than anyone else I know, and sometimes manage barely thirty words on a page and can get through a dozen pages of scrap in a matter of minutes.  But if the creative juices are flowing then so be it.

Or I will sit with the iPad as I'm doing now and write something in Notes (although I need to be mindful that one slip of the finger can delete everything I've written with seemingly no way of recovering this, so I regularly email myself what I've written before it disappears into cyberspace), which I also use on the iPhone if I have an idea and a spare five minutes.

One of my other failings is a tendency to start things and not finish them.  So I'll get twenty or thirty pages into a story and then go back and start editing the first chapter, or rewriting the opening paragraph several times, rather than ploughing on to the end and producing a complete first draft.  Maybe one day I'll produce a book of all the stories I've started and never finished.  But a blog about all the stories is probably a topic for another day, so....

Anyway, Chris's blog and his clear commitment to keeping writing all the time has reminded me of Graham Greene's maxim and - oh, is that my 500 words now?