To be a writer, to me, is to be the kind of person who would always give the above answer to Hamlet’s fatalistic question. I want to live. I want to live so hard, so big, so free, that the constraints of the every-every-every day have transcended from the previous humdrum into being something that yields still more experience, holds a wealth of life waiting to be lived. That doesn’t mean I have no ambition, nor that I wish my life to wane in an office. It’s just that I can see now, in a hundred ways I couldn’t before, that life is life and the only thing that changes is the way you look at it.
As a writer I aim to have a mind as open as the virgin sky on the day The Creator checked his filofax and found, ‘Things to start tomorrow: Everything.’
As the person carrying this inner writer around, I aim to try and live life as aware as possible. Never to switch off, or to introvert myself, or to become self-absorbed. I try always to listen to what is being said, to pay attention to what people believe, how they are, what they are. There is so much world to see, even in the same daily two-and-a-half mile bus ride...if you are really looking. The same goes for people.
I want to experience as much as possible what my life is, what it does, how it works and how it fits into everyone else’s lives. I will want it to change, to grow and to live and experience different things, to have new experiences and dare new and excitingly stupid things for charity, and even when things aren’t changing, my perception is sharp and I can still learn.
And as a writer, if I ever reach a level of skill where I can, like Hemingway, talk the reader into the easy and casual belief that it’s perfectly all right for me to have a bottle of beer with my breakfast, then I will die happy.
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