Hanging on my parents’ wall, there’s a framed torn-out page from a 1980s exercise book, that passed for homework when I was five. Underneath the title ‘When I grow up’ I’d scrawled just one sentence: ‘I want to write more stories.’ The teacher’s comment reads: ‘You can but try.’
It’s a reminder that I’ve always wanted this career. I’m sure that many of us can’t help but be writers. Ink is in our blood. If no one ever bought another book, if no one commissioned another sitcom episode, if no one read another tweet, I’d still write.
Perhaps I’m too scattershot in my career aims, lacking a little focus. I just want to write – and I don’t seem to care in what format. Seemingly I never grew out of that five-year old’s general ambition.
I normally say my route into writing was selling a joke to Radio 2’s The News Huddlines in 2001 for a tenner. But I was writing long before that: comic plays at uni, but before that fun school assemblies, but before that sketches for church services. Only just before that, that homework on the wall.
I’d always wanted to write a novel, but thought it too hard, and I didn’t know a way into it. The radio route was only easier because I knew that The News Huddlines would read anyone’s jokes (still today, Radio 4 Extra’s Newsjack does the same thing). I didn’t know a publisher who’d do likewise – or at least not one who’d get back to you the next day and make it all happen within the week. Befriending the Huddlines producer led to working on Lee Mack’s radio show, then to his TV sitcom Not Going Out. While writing that show, I recommended Miranda Hart for a part – I didn’t know her, I’d just seen her and thought she was funny. She got the part, then her own sitcom, which I helped write. Such fun. Such serendipity.
The chance came to write a book about life on the road as a stand-up and churchgoer, becoming So a Comedian Walks into a Church (DLT, 2013). Since that travelogue memoir, I’ve written two more books with DLT, and also a history book in Hark! The Biography of Christmas (Lion Hudson, 2017), a jokebook in What ARE They Doing Down There? (BRF, 2018), and two children’s books in Noah’s Car Park Ark and Moses and the Exodus Express (SPCK, 2018), with two more on the way. Four publishers, seven books, six years... Like I say, scattershot.
I admire those writers who focus on one book till it’s done. I met a Christian novelist for a coffee a while back. When he asked what I wrote, and I outlined the above, he said, “Oh, you’re a hack.” That hurt, but he had a point. I wrote to order, rather than followed one dream. I still want to write that novel – but I put it off because other things come up, or because there are tweets that just have to be written.
So my weekly workload consists of writing in coffee shops: on a sitcom script, the next children’s book, a paragraph of that novel, a play idea, or that biblical epic screenplay that I’m convinced will sweep the Oscars in 2030ish. I balance this with two children, one wife, one dog, various stand-up comedy gigs, and several coffees with other writers.
I’ve got an unusual eye condition called keratoconus (this is going somewhere). It means one eye is very blurry and lets in too much light, while the other is extra focused and is pretty much carrying the first one. I think that says it all. Half of me is focused when I need to be, the other half is easily distracted by bright colours and the overwhelm of life at large. If I were to let myself be totally unfocused, I wouldn’t get far, but I try to balance that colourful blurry craziness with a more intense focus – on God, on telling the right stories that I think He wants me to tell.
Given that, I don’t think it matters too much if I’m drifting from children’s book to memoir, to sitcom, to play, to history book. I’d still like to write that novel, but God knows when that will be. That’s fine by me.
Five-year-old me’s aim is still true: as I grow up, I want to write more stories. Like the teacher said, all of us can but try.
Editor’s Note: For delegates arriving on the Monday (16 September) for this year’s Retailers & Suppliers Retreat Paul Kerensa will be putting on his one-man show.
Together Magazine
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