Man Of Few Words

Chapter 5

So, am I a real person, or a soulless machine? I think I'm a real person, and I also think this book is my way of proving it. To myself, mainly. Trouble is, I don't know how to write a book. Not only that, my career really wasn't good experience, wasn't a good foundation or build-up to writing an entire book. It very much went in the opposite direction – more building down than building up.

See, I – very astutely I thought during most of the time I was doing it – deliberately followed a career path geared towards maximising the amount of money I was paid per word. I started writing full articles for nothing in the student magazine when I was at university, then moved onto letters and scripts, then directions and messages about 'bean lines' and the like until, for the last five years or so, I've been doing almost nothing but punchy, to-the-point messages on food labelling.

That snack sausage that has 'EAT ME!!' plastered over its wrapper... that was me. And you know that instant noodle brand that now has 'NOO!', instead of 'NEW!', written on the packets of new products and flavours... my revolutionary thinking at work there. I'm even responsible for the crisps that now carry the line, 'For best results, don't sit on me. LOL!'

I actually get paid to write this stuff? Yes, I get paid well. The smaller the number of words, the bigger the number of pounds. Just the way I like it.

I've got the point in my career where I can literally earn thousands of pounds per word so part of me feels this endeavour is rather poor value. I've knocked out just a few thousand words so far and it exhausts me to think that I'll have to produce a great many more thousands before this text is worth anything at all. Strange that this concerns me when, as I promise to tirelessly remind you, I'll be dead by the time any kind of earnings come through.

But even the assumption that there'll be "earnings" is an almost laughable notion. Although simple mathematics says it shouldn't be. Why shouldn't a man who can command outrageous fees for tiny clusters of words expect at least some payment for a whole bunch of the damn things? You'd think that these outpourings could pay for a shinier coffin at least, wouldn't you? A few extra flowers maybe...

I'm not so naive though. I know full well that the revenues from the kind of writing I'm attempting here – proper writing, if you like – are way less reliable or consistent or predictable or, to be blunt, likely than that from the kind I've made a living from over the best part of 20 years. I went down that path for a reason – novelists seldom get paid, soulless machines do.

It didn't really start off that way, though. It wasn't like I came out of college and thought, "What now? Penniless, frustrated author? Or comfortably well-off writer of vacuous twaddle?" The reality was that I needed a job – my magnum opus could wait – and, to my own surprise, and to my friends' endless amusement, I got one at Jazzle. It almost felt like a real job.

"So, you basically just look at tits and fannies all day then." I think I heard this particular sparkling observation more times than I saw fannies during the three and a half years I spent working for Quinn Publishing. Actual live, in-the-flesh fannies, that is. I didn't really spend that much time looking at printed ones either. Pictures were never my department, so I actually spent all day looking at Word documents that described fannies, tits, bums and even cocks in a level of detail and with, if I do say so myself, a breadth of vocabulary that was... well... it was uncalled-for, quite frankly.

It wasn't an arousing or sexy job by any means, but it was easy. Mainly for the obvious reason that no one cared what I wrote as long as it was filth, and filth always came pretty easily to me. I remember one senior manager – I can't remember his exact role, only that he wore braces and smoked in the office – would frequently parade around the editorial department loudly reading out selections of my work. A caption, or a strapline, or even a lengthy extract from a piece of entirely made-up reader correspondence in the Sweaty Letters section. He'd read it out, laugh aggressively, then briskly rub the front of his trousers in a mock display of arousal before boorishly declaring, "Brilliant! What a load of fucking shit!" Then he'd cough his way back to his office. Presumably to masturbate. That was the persistently and generally pretty humourlessly referenced rumour anyway. But I actually can't imagine anyone ever getting themselves or anyone else off in that place. The fleshy displays of the framed magazine covers on every wall of every corridor and room couldn't disguise the fact that it was a totally and utterly sexless environment. By necessity, I think.

And everything I wrote there was fucking shit, really. How could it not be? I actually put much more creativity, imagination and perhaps even effort into my lowbrow porn work than into anything that came along later, but it was still dreadful. Because it was what it was. It wasn't even there to be read, really. The fact is that most of the words in porn rags are there because magazines look rather naked without them. Yeah, my job was to make porn seem less naked. Seems reasonable then that I eventually moved on to making lies seem less untrue.