I’ve been a Latin teacher for nearly a decade. It’s hard work and long hours but I’m just doing it to pay the bills until I get my Starbucks barista qualification. It’s also been pretty useful for writing my next book.
Nicholas Bowling
This week I have spent 14 hours playing Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s not something I am proud of. My publisher is waiting for a new draft and my year 9 students haven’t seen a marked piece of work all term. But what’s more important, getting some kids through their exams or helping Dutch and the gang rob the Saint Denis central bank so they can start a new life in Tahiti? It’s a no-brainer.
I have a brown belt in kickboxing. I got it when I was eighteen. I actually reached black belt level but never got my certificate because it involved going to Birmingham and I wasn’t prepared to pay for petrol. I used to be able to do the splits and everything, but now I’m old and withered and can barely tie my shoelaces without getting a groin strain. I now use my brown belt to clean small- and medium-sized spillages in the kitchen, because the fabric is very absorbent and it doesn’t show up stains. Perfect!
I am a climber. Overthinking seems to be a prerequisite for writing fiction, and lots of writers talk about taking long walks to sift ideas or clear their heads. Climbing does it for me. There’s nothing like it for “putting you where you are”, as Johnny Dawes once said. In another life I think I might have been a mountaineering instructor, but in that other life I am far less clumsy and have far better eyesight.
I have the ugliest feet of any real-life human being I know. I have very big feet to begin with. Thanks to my career in kickboxing I have broken eight of my ten toes (two per year for four years – fact). Thanks to my career in climbing, I thrust the remains of those toes into little rubber shoes that are two sizes too small and then kick them repeatedly against rocks for hours at a time. The result is something a butcher would be embarrassed to put in their shop window.
I play the bass in a couple of bands. If I weren’t a writer or a Latin teacher or a mountaineering instructor (see above), I’d be touring the world playing unpleasantly complicated and inaccessible jazz. At the moment I mostly play at weddings, which are fun and pay well. I could play at your wedding. Can I play at your wedding? Please?
I have a pair of dungarees but I never wear out of the house. I wish I could. I love the idea of dungarees. But I’m very tall, and when I wear them I look like I should be manning a petrol pump somewhere in Mississippi.
I stopped reading for five years in my twenties. This is almost not an exaggeration. After my degree, I’d completely forgotten how to read for pleasure and I read only a handful of books. School and university literature courses almost seemed designed to have this effect – I have completely fallen out of love with literary criticism. When I was twenty-six somebody lent me “The Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss, which is the most incredible fantasy book. From that I learned how to read and how to write again.
I think writing is mostly just graft. It’s over-romanticised a lot as a profession, but at the end of the day it’s just brick-laying with more cups of tea. There is something strange and magical about ideas – their creation and formation – but ideas aren’t exclusive to writers.
I think children are cleverer and wiser than most people give them credit for. They are also more honest than adults. Not in a “I’ve-broken-a-vase-and-I’m-going-to-own-up-to-it-way”, or a “I’ve-forgotten-my-homework-so-I’m-going-to-apologise-to-my-teacher-way”, but in the sincerity of what they say and think. In return we owe them honest books, books that are as funny and scary and sad and odd and messy as life is.
IN THE SHADOW OF HEROES by Nicholas Bowling out now in paperback (£6.99, Chicken House)