Sometimes your purpose can change and what seemed vitally important is no longer the most crucial focus of your existence. This offering by author Matt Thorne crystalises the importance of connecting to others in finding meaning.
Matt Thorne is the author of six novels, including Eight Minutes Idle, which was recently made into a film and won the Encore Award, and Cherry, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He has also co-edited two anthologies and written three children's books plus an internationally bestselling critical biography of the pop star Prince, described as "the definitive work" on the musician. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and is one of our practitioners, available to teach at retreats at Woodhill Park Estate.
If you’d asked me what my purpose was twenty-five years ago, I’d give you a very clear answer: I was put on earth to write. Short stories, novels, reviews, the occasional radio drama or bit of screenwriting, almost everything aside from poetry and lyrics (unlike many novelists, I realised I had no ability in this area early on and steered clear rather than risk embarrassment; there is precisely one poem of mine extant and that was published in an experimental magazine so obscure only the editor and I still own copies).
As long as the writing kept coming, nothing else mattered. Because I thought this was my entire purpose, I became too obsessed with it. The problem wasn’t starting writing, it was stopping. I remember agreeing to contribute to a collective novel (about a love affair between the notorious diarist and sex-fiend Casanova and the chateau-dwelling sub ‘O’ from the Story of O, written exquisite corpse style) a few weeks before my first son was born, and merrily telling the editor that I would have plenty of down-time in those first few weeks so writing something would be no problem at all. Ridiculous, right? I finished my chapter while holding my baby son in my arms and wondering why on earth am I pushing myself so hard?
A short while later, I went to the doctor and he asked what I did for exercise, and I realised, for the first time in my life, the honest answer was nothing. Not that I was ever a gym-fiend. In my teens and twenties, when a doctor asked this question, I’d responded with ‘dancing’ (“Horizontal dancing?” one GP had asked with a leer). At university, I played croquet, but that’s not going to get anyone fit. Later, I’d joined in with whatever sporting activity anyone invited me to play, even though I wasn’t that good at tennis, squash or golf (I did turn out to have a weird aptitude for tree-frisbee-golf). Real golf was a particular disaster: I’d assumed that the muscle memory from pitch ‘n’ putt and a few sessions on the approach course at St. Andrews while there as a Masters student would stand me in good stead, but this proved so not be the case that the person who’d invited me had to stop the game and give me an impromptu run through the basics midway through our round.
I wondered if childcare counted. Since my wife had returned to work, I’d been looking after my son four days a week and got used to the shouts of well-meaning advice from passing strangers whenever he’d cry in the pram. “He’s too hot,” one busybody would shout. So I’d pull back the blanket. Only for someone else to inform me, “he’s too cold.” So I’d put a hat on him. Then the next stranger would insist I’d made him too hot again.
After a while I stopped listening to their advice and focused closely on my son until I knew exactly what every noise he made meant. I wouldn’t listen to anyone about how to write, so why should I pay attention to randos’ opinions on how to take care of a child?
Was this my new purpose? It was, for a while. Along with yoga. Yes, I know. The first time I only went because the friend who’d recommended it to me promised we could go for cocktails afterwards. And the first few times the cocktails were as important as the hours on the mat. Though I did develop something of an addiction to a few studios in London (my favourite was ChromaYoga, with its mixture of colours, sound and scent, it was more like a nightclub than exercise, and I was very sorry to see it go, irrespective of whatever damage I was doing to my eye-rods by exercising in bright pink, yellow and blue rooms).
I understand why people get cross with their friends for how their priorities change when they have children, and I’m not saying this for brownie points - well, maybe a few - but it wasn’t even a choice.
Writers of the generation above me (especially, but not exclusively, men) responded to fatherhood and the commitments of family life by running away, busting up their marriage with an affair and a new life and then writing about that. My mother is not a fiction writer - she used to write business books - but that’s essentially what she did, the business books being her equivalent of the average baby boomer’s divorce novel.
Most of my contemporaries found healthier ways of coping. The women I knew just got on with it, either creating art out of their new lives or retreating for a while. It was the men who struggled with turning domesticity into interesting drama - most of them anyway, there are some brilliant exceptions - and some produced often seriously loopy novels. (I have one of my own in that vein, buried in a drawer with the poetry.) But I realised I needed to change things up. My new purpose might’ve been to be a good father, but that included bringing in money.
It was clear that I was going to be unable to stick to the one-novel-a-year schedule I’d once followed (in a frantic burst of effort designed to get enough money for the first few years of my son’s life – and keep the in-laws off my back – I wrote four novels in 2003 alone, three children’s books and one for adults, which were parcelled out over the next few years) and needed to rethink how to keep going.
As most of my best fiction came out of late nights in Soho with night-owl friends, that was going to be tricky. I’m not trying for sainthood by the way: I was still bar-hopping and going to clubs and gigs in East London, watching the dawn come up and doing the next day’s childcare on no sleep (oddly, now he’s grown up, my eldest son goes to those exact same clubs himself).
But I needed to think more broadly about what my new purpose might be. And I faced up to something I’d always resisted: that the romance of the solitary artist only goes so far.
When I was younger, I’d always considered my involvement in the collective production of art a step on the way to working alone, the final point in a creative journey, but now I was beginning to question whether there were other forms of artistic endeavour that might be equally worthwhile.
As a teenager, I’d belonged to a community theatre group, Kingswood Youth Theatre, writing and acting in improvised dramas. I met some of my lifelong friends there, including Fleur Darkin, now a noted choreographer. It’d been frustrating sometimes to see good ideas shot down, but it was also rewarding to work collectively on something and see plays take shape in workshop conditions.
I’d always taken for granted the volunteers who put together this group - the dramaturges and directors and stage crew who ensured each show was of a professional standard, even getting us into the Bristol Old Vic’s experimental stage.
But now I was a father, I realised how selfless they’d been and felt an urge to help others in a similar way. I’d always resisted returning to academia after leaving university, but when a professor who’d written essays about my novels collared me at a conference in Serbia and asked whether I’d consider taking a position at his university teaching Creative Writing, I realised it appealed.
Part of the appeal of this new position was working with the great Fay Weldon, one of my favourite novelists ever since discovering my mother’s copy of her novel The Heart of the Country at thirteen. If Fay had taken the gig, I knew it’d be serious (and it was: fuelled by a constant supply of Red Bull, Oreo cookies, and – at the appropriate hour - champagne, she make the classroom the most exciting place one could be, the mark of a truly inspirational tutor). Along with the novelist Celia Brayfield, she’d created one of the most innovative Creative Writing courses in the country, and I realised all the experience I’d had writing novels alone in my room could help others struggling with their own work.
Was this my purpose? Some authors (increasingly few in number) resist the idea of teaching others how to write, but having written my first novel while doing a Creative Writing M.Litt at the University of St. Andrews with the acerbic poet and short story writer Douglas Dunn, I knew how a few words of the right sort of criticism could save years of apprentice effort, and to this day (I’m now the Director of the Creative Writing MAs at Royal Holloway, University of London), I’m guided by his approach of listening to a student tell you what they need and then working out how best to help them achieve it.
So, yes, this was my purpose, but not all of it. Students need to know their tutors are still getting published, able to prove themselves in an ever-changing marketplace. Having examined myself to death in fiction, I wanted to write in a different way. My editor said he’d always wanted a non-fiction book from me and after consideration, I decided to write about the pop star Prince, one of the most prolific musicians who’d ever lived.
It was a book that took me seven years to write, carried me across America and brought me into contact with dozens of people who were very clear about their own purpose, which was to help Prince with his creative endeavours, even if this drove them to their own physical limit.
This, in turn, provided me with another purpose: so much of Prince’s creative work is at risk of being forgotten, and in writing this book I’d help provide a critical reading of it, producing a book that has found enthusiastic readers around the globe.
Spending all this time asking people what it was like to work collectively in the studio made me hunger to get involved with a collective creative endeavour again - just as I had as a teenager - which led to me adapting one of my earlier novels for film.
And there is nothing like working on film or TV as a writer to get a sense of sometimes how limited a writer’s purpose can be: you’ve provided the blueprint, and now they want you to shove off, so they can get on with it.
So what’s my purpose now? For me, it’s being aware that none of us are just one thing. Sometimes our purpose is being a good partner. Sometimes it’s helping someone achieve their dreams. Sometimes it’s stepping back and being quiet, sometimes it’s advocating as loud as you possibly can.
But for me, most of all, it’s realising that ‘Writer’ isn’t the only thing I am, and that it probably comes way down the list, after ‘Father’, ‘Husband’, ‘Cat Butler’, and, to my youngest son, “that guy who’s in the house way too much
