Placing your bets
Making the right choices - and the write choices...
When I was a young boy my father and I had a Saturday morning ritual. After going shopping we would sit down with a newspaper and attempt to select as many winners as possible from the afternoon’s horse racing, some of which we would watch on ‘World of Sport’. The ‘ITV7’ was a Saturday staple.
Those were the days when the UK’s laws around gambling were more relaxed than they are today. When we physically went to the races - coach trips to Sandown, Kempton, Goodwood, Brighton, Newbury, Salisbury etc. - as an eight-year-old I was able to go and place bets with bookmakers, no questions asked. Money changed hands.
How times have changed.
My love of horse racing has, unsurprisingly, never left me - nor has my inclination for the occasional ‘flutter’. I am acutely conscious that it is one of those negative habits which can so easily spiral out of control - and I am grateful that I’ve had the wherewithal (common sense, I suppose) to keep it in check over the years. Many others are not so lucky. When I occasionally go into a bookmakers it is all too easy to recognise those (like my father to some extent) whose habit has got the better of them.
But, like anything else, that’s the result of choice.
We make choices all the time of course, both large and small - a dedicated sub-set of which reserved for those of us addicted to writing. At the macro level we are choosing when to write, how much to write, what to write, and who to write for; and at the micro level, every time we sit down with pen and paper or open a document on our computers, we face into the barrage of ‘which word next?’ or whether to put a comma just there or not… Sometimes that last one’s the trickiest of all!
Personally, my biggest decision - the most ‘macro’ of them all - was to give up paid work early and dedicate myself to my writing. It is now what I do. In terms of ‘work’, it’s the only thing I do.
So, good decision or bad decision?
Well, it depends how you want to measure it. No regular income, not enough books sold (or Substack subscribers!), insufficient ‘outside’ engagements = ‘bad’ decision. Or writing so much more, having the time to be ‘prolific’, being contented in the life I’m now living = ‘good’ decision.
The answer’s clear cut, isn’t it?
And the ‘micro’ decisions?
If you write a thousand words in a day that equates to more than a thousand decisions, and not merely whether ‘A’ follows ‘B’; those commas, remember! But how many of your choices are ‘good’? Fewer than you might imagine, or wish for, or kid yourself are ‘spot on’. The other day I spent three hours drafting a story and then a further hour editing it; in that fourth hour I discovered how many wrong decisions I’d taken along the way!
But that’s great too, isn’t it? And inevitable. Taking those false steps (even if it’s just a misplaced comma!) is such an essential part of the process that we should embrace them - and yet so many people abhor / avoid editing. In my mind that’s equivalent to saying “I’ve made a few dodgy choices but they’ll do” rather than trying to improve on them.
Would you do that with many other things in your life?
As writers it can be far too easy to focus on the ‘macro’ - especially what to write perhaps - when the real joy can come in getting the ‘micro’ right, even if that’s as a result of hours of painstaking re-work.
And let’s not forget, given we’re addicted, we don’t have much choice anyway..!