Travel Stories and Tales Tom Thumb
Most of my current work can be seen on the Travel
Guide which I edit. All the country guides and articles there are written
by my unless otherwise indicated..
There's still some interesting stories to be read here though:
New stuff:
Hand to Mouth to India - the full story
of when I hitchhiked from England to India with no money back in 1997. An
old book but recently redrafted.  Order Now for just £9.99 or $20 (plus p&p)
Jail Stories - The story of helping a mate get
his girfriend out of jail in India.
Story of Working for the Israeli Mafia in Japan
- Selling fake Rolexes to salary men stumbling out of blow job bars. Travel
at its most surreal.
Articles and Essays - Some thoughts on mobile
phones, graffiti, clowns and the blues.
Punting in Cambridge - Life as a tour guide punter in Cambridge!
Old Stuff:
Tales of Sufis, Dragons and Kissing Tribes - A
novel of storytelling that I put together while learning how to write.
Gurus and Sufis - A very early work about a couple
of influences in India.
Tom Thumb Stories, books and movies and midgets
My Guide to Goa
Culture Guides - a new venture featuring analysis of modern culture and society.
Currently I'm thinking of becoming a guide in Venice or Amsterdam but I spend too much time watching cool interviews on Youtube to get much work done.
Okay below are some thoughts on the writing life.
Life of a Writer
A friend with ambitions of his own to write once held
my book in his hands with a look of incomprehension on
his face as he counted the pages.
"How did you find the time to write so much?" He
asked me, "I’ve got loads of ideas for a book of my
own but between the wife, the kids and my job I hardly
ever get the chance to sit down at my desk and write.
How do you find the time?"
Easy.
"Bad personal hygiene." I told him, revealing one
of the greatest secrets of the writer. He looked at
me, mystified. I went on. "If you don’t wash that
often then it’s really hard to get a girlfriend and
consequently all your time is your own to scribble
away."
Okay, so maybe there’s a little bit more to it
than that. But having a lot of free time is a definite
advantage if only because you generally have to write
a lot of really bad stuff before anything good comes
out the end of your pen. When I first sat down to
write in earnest I felt my story was a winner but my
style came out as a regurgitation of everything I’d
ever read. Tolstoy mixed with Enid Blyton mixed with
Jack Kerouac. It takes time to find your own voice.
Or alternatively you might be born with enigmatic
expression and a lively wit but a fw thousand words
into your book you find that you actually have very
little to say.
The latter problem I avoided by throwing myself
hurtling myself across the planet on trains, planes
and bullock carts. Over the last 8 years I’ve rarely
stayed still for more than three months at a time,
hitting more than 30 countries and diving head first
into the most absurd situations I could find. The only
visible benefit of all this is that I’m rarely short
of material. In fact the struggle has more often been
to get it all down on paper before Time comes to
reclaim the memories, piece by piece. A good memory is
probably a prerequisite for most writers but the
longer an experience is left unwritten the more
imagination will be called upon to fill the gaps.
It’s been the writing style itself that I’ve found
most challenging. There are just so many traps for the
novice writer to fall into. Very often I’d come up
with a great turn of phrase to describe something and
then realize with a sigh that I was distorting the
truth just to make it sound good. It’s tough to fit
real life into a sentence.
Another trap is to take the short cut of the
mercenary journalist - to take one step up by putting
someone else down. However, the fact is that any
arrogance on the page is going to alienate the
discerning reader anyway and the rest of your words
will be read from a hostile distance. If he doesn’t
just toss it in the waste paper basket.
And that would be the greatest failure of all. The
whole point of writing is to communicate. It’s a
unique format in that no one would ever let you
lecture them for ten hours straight - but when they
read your book they dedicate themselves to your
message from beginning to end. With such liberty to
preach it can be all too tempting to become a little
pompous.
"You can’t feed your conclusions to the reader,"
An expert writer once told me, "Either they get the
gist of what you’re saying or they don’t. If you add
little explanations at the end of each story you’re
just going to insult the intelligence of the reader."
When the form gets too be too much it’s a good
idea to take a look at your content once more. Life
itself is the source of all writing and the best way
to get material is just to immerse yourself in the
great flow of the human world. I feel that my best
writing has always been when I troubled to understand
someone else’s story, be it of an individual or a
culture as a whole. It’s an act of love to interest
yourself in the lives of others. This dedication can
lend a beauty and depth to your words that’s hard to
achieve when engrossed in describing your own affairs.
The quip at the beginning of the article about the
life of a bachelor was tongue-in-cheek but the life of
a writer is a lonely one and is often reserved for the
shy and the gruff. The eccentric and the somewhat
socially-inept. A friend well-placed within the
publishing world once explained to me why writers like
to have agents to sell all their work.
"You’d be amazed how many writers stutter or
mumble when they speak," He mused, "They don’t look
you in the eye and are often about as charming as
stray dogs. They limp or they smell or they wear
clothes that don’t fit them well. They sulk or they
throw tantrums or they look down on whoever they’re
speaking too. So when it comes to getting a contract
they usually need a well-dressed, suave agent to make
a good impression."
I doubt anyone in their right mind would choose
writing as a way to make a living. I once read in a
spoof dictionary that writers are defined as ‘people
who think there’s money in books’. We all hold onto
the hope that are mania for scribbling down thoughts
will one day pay off. But like painters, musicians and
other artists, we do what we do because we can’t help
it. There will never be any final recompense for all
the thousands of hours we’ve invested in our work
because the work was reward enough in itself.
I look at it as a kind of yoga. Through writing I
can drag screaming thoughts and feelings from dark
cells of my mind through to the merciless daylight of
the blank page. It’s like giving birth. And sometimes
just as painful.
The pen acts as a bridge between imagination and
reality. The whole thing is really like a love/hate
affair. Some anonymous writer once said:
"I love the writing. It’s the goddamn words I
can’t stand."
However it’s the medium I’ve chosen and it
connects me more to real life than anything else.
Without a pen conducting words onto the page I
sometimes think I‘d probably just float away.
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