What really motivates writers to write? Is it a passion for the craft? An inability to hold down a proper day job? Is it the desire to share one's idiosyncratic worldview with the millions, or perhaps (more realistically) the tens? Perhaps it's something more prosaic. A craving for fame, or money, or awards. Is there a writer that doesn't lie awake in the wee hours of the night, desperately dreaming of the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Nobel?
Well, actually I don't. Though I do frequently lie awake in the deep dark hours of the night - those darkest hours before the dawn, those hours of unleashed fantasy and unfettered creativity - desperately attempting to craft sentences into sweet, chaste, adorable, safe little paragraphs that will have absolutely no chance whatsoever of being nominated for the Bad Sex award.
To this end, I will go to extraordinary lengths. You might think that writing for teenagers would count as an overall evasion of hardcore porn, but in these days of liberal issue- and consciousness-raising, nothing is sacred. Not when blow jobs on buses make the daily papers and suburban rainbow parties are (supposedly) rampant (though I can't quite remember what a rainbow party is - something to do with lipstick and the aforementioned sexual act? Ask a teenager.)
How on earth does a writer cope with this omnipresent threat of exposure? The threat that the entire world will soon be guffawing over our earnest comparison of the male member to a bucketful of eager eels, or the (misplaced) suspicion that everyone finds the idea of passionate sex with an Airedale irresistible. Towards this end, I write of waves gently lapping on beaches. Eager tremblings. Hesitant stirrings. And my very favourite technique, the ever-appropriate use of the jump to "afterwards," as in, "they embraced tenderly, lips trembling, thighs pressed close together, while somewhere a passion began to grow, magnificent and dark and bigger, even, than God. Afterwards..."
"Afterwards" manages to suggest hours of filth and wild sexual perversion exercised off-stage, at a safe distance from the reader, a safe distance from the writer, and an extremely safe distance from the Bad Sex awards.
So while it might be nice to share a longlist with Ian McEwan and Norman Mailer, I'm hoping to remain forever a voyeur on this one. And in case you're wondering where my money is, it's 100% behind Quim Monzo. You don't even have to read the guy to know that for this prize, he's a winner.
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