Life lessons from a bestselling writer’s FINAL CHAPTER
Long before he had become an author, Fowler worked as a copywriter in London. He was fired, he writes in his posthumous memoir, not long after refusing to work on adverts for cigarette companies and possibly for describing clients as ‘human blowflies’ in a meeting. ‘Remember,’ his boss told him as he left, ‘you think you’re an artist but you’re just a word monkey.’
The comment was presumably intended as a put-down – but in his characteristically chirpy way, Fowler noted the distinctive expression and stored it away for future use.
His book gathers lessons he learned over decades of being a ‘word monkey’, in which he turned his hand to many genres – ghost stories, science fiction, satire, young adult fiction; but was best known for his Bryant and May series about two antique, eccentric detectives.
Fowler finished the manuscript for Word Monkey shortly before his death, from cancer, earlier this year. His reflections on writing are interwoven with descriptions of him becoming more ill. There are also sidesteps into more straightforward autobiography.
In the most moving of these, he recalls touching his father for the first time. They were never close: Fowler was a bookish child who became, as he puts it, ‘a North London gay liberal f***ing nightmare’; his father was an often taciturn DIY fanatic. But two days before his father’s death, he allowed his son to cut his hair. His skin, Fowler noticed, was soft; not the hide he’d expected from such an intimidating man.
Many of the writing tips are invaluable. It’s not enough to have a good idea. Base material, Fowler advises, must be ‘hammered into something pure’. Beware, he notes, the ‘three-day rule’ – which states that if 72 hours elapse between writing sessions, you’ll have to spend half a day re-establishing the story’s mood. When attempting a short story, something must be hidden from the reader. He also condenses advice from other authors, such as Raymond Carver (‘Get in. Get out. Don’t linger’), Jodi Picoult (‘Whether it’s garbage or good… you just DO it, and you fix it later’) and Peter Carey (‘My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed’).
Fowler is a restless writer: a leaper, a jitterer. The book rather tunes in and out, like a dodgy radio – sometimes it’s very funny and insightful, other times, not. In my favourite moment, he does what you long for him to do: stays still. He’s on holiday in the Canaries, bracing himself for another round of chemo. He sits on the terrace with his eyes closed, feeling the sun on his face. ‘For a minute,’ he writes, ‘I could sit here and remember a time before all of this began, and how happy I had been.’