My First Novel Came After Tough Times | by Lester Gartland

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel a particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share.”

Anne Rice
(On Franz Kafka, 1995)

Thanks, Anne. I did just that.

Introduction

The above quote by Anne Rice is featured on the first page of my novel, A Hake’s Tail: A Psychedelic Tale of Apathy. However, it wasn’t until I had finished the book that I stumbled across this perfect summation of Franz Kafka’s work, and what I had attempted to achieve with my own.

For those who are unaware: Franz Kafka never sold a book in his lifetime. He had a very difficult relationship with his father and wrote fiction in order to work through and communicate his feelings with the world.

Another of my favourite writers is Hermann Hesse: Much of his work was written as he was going through therapy. Although Hesse saw success in his lifetime, like Kafka his books acted as a catharsis. 

My favourite writer of all however would be Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote in plain, direct, and humorous sentences. Much like this. He witnessed the bombing of Dresden in a POW camp in World War II and went on to write satirical fiction highlighting the absurdity of war. Most of the time his writing is specifically building up to a punchline to add some levity to situations. Or sometimes it will lead up to nothing to prove a point. Ho hum.

I thought I’d share with you how I got into writing.

Stories in Music

I began my creative interests in music actually. My father, who was a jazz trumpet player, bought me my first guitar when I was ten years old. I am self-taught and a good soloist and improviser (which, as it turns out, is a pretty good transferable skill). My father introduced me to all the different genres of music and showed me all the different avenues that creativity can lead you down. At a time when most people my age were waiting for the next Oasis album, I was getting stuck into Django Reinhardt, Art Blakey, and Lester Young (my namesake). I quickly realised that purely instrumental music was lacking something for me. Storytelling. My tastes expanded to artists who tell stories such as Tom Waits, and Kate Bush.

After completing my GCSEs I went on to study music in college where I learned the theory of composition, patterns and techniques which are unavailable to the auto-didactic (at least they were before YouTube, you can learn anything on there now). I received decent grades. After that, I thought about continuing to study music at a university level but I also had the notion that it would be quite enjoyable to be able to afford ‘things’ and ‘stuff’, so instead I got a job in marketing.

Soul Searching

I enjoyed working as a marketing assistant for the Surrey Chambers of Commerce. The work was creative enough that I felt fulfilled and I managed to move out from under my mother’s roof, which suited us both pretty well.

After a couple of years of working and living with a few other guys of a similar age - and learning about which foods do and don’t mould outside of refrigeration - I got some devastating news. 

It’s a very common trope for musicians to have addictions. My father (being a jazz musician no less!) was a heavy cigarette smoker, among other things synonymous with jazz music… Walking back from work one day to unwind in a shared house that could only be described as an immersive science experiment, I got a phone call. My father had lung cancer.

I’ll spare you the depressing details but needless to say I was devastated. After he passed I found that my life was lacking more than just a paternal presence, it was missing the music that he brought. Within a month I had been accepted into the University of Sussex to study music songwriting.

In the three years studying for my degree I met some of the best friends I still have. I decided to go full-in to the music lifestyle. I began writing music and ideas and lyrics every single day and eventually had more than enough material to start a band. All the songs were stories about characters, situations, drama, humour etc. Then before I knew it I was writing enough to be in multiple bands simultaneously-which I did. My peers were mostly impressed with the prolific nature of my lyrical output. So much that I ended up giving away a lot of lyrics/poems to other musicians who wanted them.

Looking back it sounds exhausting, but twenty-year-olds have an exhaustive amount of energy. Somebody should look into harnessing that for a greener future. After some years of working in the music scene, my band had gone through some line-up changes, our bassist had to leave because he suffered from addiction. The same thing happened to our drummer, and then things steadied out for a while. When working on a new album, suddenly, our second drummer went missing. We learned later after a week-long search by the police that our drummer had taken his own life. The rest of us left in the band decided that we should all go our separate ways.  

Music in Stories

I don’t play the guitar much anymore. I still have some of them but they mostly gather dust. The feeling I get when I play it isn't the same considering all the things that I now associate it with. What I never lost a passion for, however, was storytelling. 

The first time I tried to write a book it was absolutely awful. I was trying to write a fantasy story. It’s still saved in some dark corner of my computer somewhere for me to go and look at every now and then when I need a good chuckle. The reason it was absolutely awful was that the story I tried to write had nothing to do with my personal experiences. Sometime later, after binning that project, I was still itching to write. I didn’t have any other outlet so I gave it another go. I wrote my collection of short stories, Deroceras: The Dream of a Nation. Like Vonnegut, I attempted to satirise the world as I saw it. At the time of writing it (and still today!) The world appeared to me as absurd, Donald Trump had just become POTUS and the UK decided that it would have a better time taking its ball away from the other boys who wanted to play. The UK didn’t realise that the other boys had balls of their own and were perfectly fine carrying on without the UK.

I found that while writing this book, and working out why I felt this way and that about the subjects, my bleak outlook on the world actually transformed into something with quite a bit of levity. I could watch the news of all the ridiculous things and see them in a way which was not so severe. 

I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have that same outlook on all the sad parts of my life’, and I began writing A Hake’s Tail. I filled it with the baggage I was carrying around with me about my father’s death, my friend’s suicide, addiction, struggling, etc. I wrote it in an abstract, poetic way, the same way I used to write music, I made that novel a piece of me in order to connect with others and heal myself. When I finally completed it and wrote “The End”, I had not only accomplished something that is a considerable amount of work but also worked through my anxieties and hang-ups about the past. I had taken my baggage and unpacked it into a wardrobe where not only can you see the black mourning suit, but you can also see the colourful summer clothes, the cosy jumpers, and the activewear. Not only can you see the odd sock with a hole in it, but you can also see all the socks I’ve managed to pair up.

And that rather odd metaphor brings me back to Anne Rice. As every good song should have a coda:

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel a particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share.”

Anne Rice
(On Franz Kafka, 1995)

Thanks, Anne. I did just that.

Lester Gartland is a Data Science Apprentice at Multiverse and is currently struggling with writer’s block. You can find his books in paperback or Kindle edition on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.