New Year's Resolution: Don't Look Back

Maybe this year’s resolutions are forgotten already. Perhaps it’s for the best too. They can be silly, insubstantial things. But here’s a general resolution I stick to, new year or not. When it comes to writing, look forward, not back. There’s no point in dwindling over what’s gone before, good or bad. The only thing that counts is what’s to come.

Writers have a funny relationship with their work. It’s quite different to that adopted by readers. People who read books fix the time of the work at the point at which they turn the pages — quite naturally. They often forget that, for an author, the diary is running on altogether different dates. My next ‘new’ book is The Blue Demon/City of Fear which will be out next month in the UK and in May in the US.

That book was finished in July 2008. I’ve written its successor, revised one book of my backlist entirely and planned another new work in the meantime. When I go out on the road to promote it later this year I will have to pick up the book to remind myself what’s going on and why I wrote it. For most authors when a book’s finished it’s gone. We only have room for one live work in our heads at any one moment. It’s best, always, that should be the book we’re working on or about to start.

I remember having a fascinating conversation with the great George MacDonald Fraser, author of the wonderful Flashman novels. Someone had just gone on Mastermind with the Flashman books as a specialist subject. The chap won the contest with an astonishing display of memory for dates, plots, characters, all the wealth of detail George put in, based on months of research in the Trinity College Library in Dublin if I recall correctly.

George was amazed by this feat. Not simply for the prolific memory the chap displayed but because most of the questions posed in the quiz he could never, ever have answered himself. He’d forgotten the answers, lost the plots and people of those books. With good reason — he didn’t need them any more. Those titles were written, gone, committed to the public. Why clutter up your imagination with something that’s no longer of use?

Most of us work this way. It’s the only sensible approach to take. In truth only two books matter, the one we’ve just written and need to push to the world at large, and, more seriously, the book to come. Never look back. Never bask in the false glow of warm reviews or mutter bitterly about the nasty ones. Never take yesterday’s successes for granted because a year down the road no one will remember them. Writing is like prize fighting. After every round you have to pick yourself up, go to your corner, learn what lessons are to be found in what’s just happened, and get on with preparing for what comes next.

Usually, that’s a new book. I’m just seeing off the revise for the ninth Rome novel, The Fallen Angel, but its successor, a very different kind of work, is already building in my head. I’ll be off to Italy to start work on it in a couple of weeks.

And last year? A weird one to be honest. The publishing world hit hard times in 2009. I’m just an author, unqualified to pass an expert opinion on such matters as the Google Books agreement, the effects of retail consolidation and ebooks and all those other ground-breaking changes now happening. It seems to me authors, like publishers, are heading for hard times, times in which we may well find ourselves selling more books and earning less along the way.

That’s another good reason not to look back. I can’t do a thing to alter the fast-changing eco-climate of the world of publishing. All I do is write books. Best focus on that.

Related posts:

1. Nic Costa: the next two years
2. Everyone's a publisher now
3. You don't need to write every day
4. The ebook tsunami – how will publishing survive?
5. A new book for old