Termination Blues

What no one tells you about finishing a book

Photo by Behnam Norouzi on Unsplash

Having to write a book is bad enough but, for me, finishing one is far worse.

My new biography of Brian Epstein, the man who discovered the Beatles – the reason I’ve neglected all you kind people who subscribe to Read Me Do – went off to its various publishers this week.

It took only just over a year to write compared with the four years I toiled at John Lennon: The Life, and tips the scales at 85,000 words as opposed to Lennon’s 360,000, cut to 300,000. Yet the withdrawal-symptoms, or cycle of symptoms have been the same as always.

Firstly, a (very brief) period of relief and euphoria; followed by total exhaustion when I wanted to do nothing but eat Smarties – even the drab modern kind with weird blue ones - and watch Talking Pictures TV; and now a feeling of total emptiness inside.

The result of spending months buried in a mountain of one’s own words is to lose all objectivity about the work. ‘Are you pleased with it?’ people keep asking, to which my feeble reply is ‘I don’t know.’

Yet again I wonder why I ever chose a profession that makes tightrope-walking or alligator-farming seem sensible by comparison and condemns one to live perpetually in the future-longing for the moment of placing that final full-stop – while letting the present go to waste.

It’s only amateur writers who enjoy or are ‘pleased with’ writing: professionals complain and agonise about it. F. Scott Fitzgerald compared it to ‘swimming underwater.’ My other literary hero P. G. Wodehouse wrote more than 100 books and found each one (so he told me) ‘a ghastly sweat.’ Even Dickens bemoaned the time and trouble he had to take with a sentence that the reader’s eye would skim in a split second.

For me, loneliness isn’t as much a problem as for other authors for I’m always conscious of thousands of Beatles ‘experts’ looking over my shoulder metaphorically speaking, waiting to pounce on the smallest slip.

And nowadays such experts are to be found in every language and culture. An Italian publisher who recently issued a new translation of my Beatles biography, Shout!, thoughtfully sent me a list of errors he’d corrected that had been in print for the previous 42 years. Grazie!

However, my abiding fear isn’t that I may have got something wrong, it’s that I may have got everything wrong: every fact, interpretation, conclusion and even adjective. Is it too late to get the manuscript back and try again from the beginning?

Whereas once the book seemed like a prison, it now feels like refuge from having to think about quotidien things like climate-change or income tax or what Keir Starmer means by ‘working people’ when he so obviously doesn’t mean me

What I used to think imprisoning, I now rather miss. For instance, trying out phrases in my head as I push a trolley around Waitrose or power up and down the slow lane at my local swimming-pool… getting up in the small hours to make some tiny textual correction that could easily have waited until morning… scribbling ideas on bits of toilet-paper when, as usual, I’ve neglected to carry a notebook.

But, of course, the process isn’t nearly over yet. Ahead lie roughly nine months of legal queries, choosing photographs, copyediting (or sometimes un-copyediting), enthusing publicity departments and dealing with set after set of proofs until I’m sick to death of every word.

Publishers like to compare the run-up to publication with a pregnancy, but it can often end in still-birth or the ‘remainders’ bin.

The great French writer Guy De Maupassant was troubled by no such neuroses. If ever he finished a novel or short story before the end of a working day, he simply began another one.

Lucky guy, never to know that feeling of emptiness inside or try to fill it up with Smarties.