The Third Person

‘But listen – he was just this fucked up kid with too many high ideals. He was a kid who could write, sure, but he wasn’t structured or disciplined. He had no work ethic. The way he was, he had no bestsellers in him.’

I finished the end of my whisky and poured myself another.

‘Jim was a teacher there? At the Factory?’

‘Uh-huh.’ She glanced back at Thornton, who had collapsed over his glass again: a husk of a shell of a man. He was a meta-fuck-up.

‘You wouldn’t know it from looking at him now, but that man there used to be one of the best businessmen in the business.’

The Factory’s where they teach you to write. It’s all they do, day in and day out: nearly five hundred children at any one time, all aged between eleven and eighteen, housed under one long roof and under the nine-to-five tutelage of those who have gone before them. Prospective students are picked out by the Tests at as early an age as possible and then taught the trappings of plot, character and sentence structure before graduating: turned loose into the world as novelists of potential note, standing and bank balance.

He never stood a chance, of course. He couldn’t do plot and character: he just couldn’t abstract things in that way. Didn’t even want to. What he did was take a snapshot of an event and put it in your head. When he tried to put strings of events together, or create characters, it just didn’t work; the law of ever-decreasing returns applied, and each successive scene became duller and duller. The longer and longer he spent at the Factory, the emptier he felt. His time there was hollowing him out – turning him into a shell they could fill – and pointing him, by force, in a direction he just didn’t want to go.

It was never going to last.

Things came to a head four months after he’d arrived, but by that time he’d had a whole bunch of run-ins with the staff and was just waiting for an excuse. It came during James Thornton’s Commercial Viability class, in which the man explained the rules of publishing to a class of twenty enthralled would-be writers, and him.

‘Writing is purely and simply a business,’ Thornton repeated.

In fact, Thornton simply couldn’t stress that enough, and he hated the man more every time he said it. Not for him, it wasn’t. Not ever.

‘A business. That’s all. You have to approach it in that manner, or you’ll fail. You’ll be a nobody. Nothing. Not a writer, anyway – that’s for damn sure.’

Thornton had a moustache and the kind of confidence you get from a string of successful relationship novels, but he couldn’t swear for shit. He said damn too slowly: rolling it around and drawing out tension that simply wasn’t there. A girl at the front tittered appreciatively. Thornton was pretty famous.

He went on.

The gist of it was this. Fiction is business, and publishing houses aren’t always likely to risk investment on an untried, untested author. Even if they did, and you got your book published, there was no guarantee that you’d actually sell. A stamp of approval from the Factory gets you halfway in life; marketing takes you that little bit further; but smarts get you the rest.

‘Once you’ve got your foot in the door,’ Thornton said, leaning on the desk in front of him with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, ‘act quick. And act smart. Your book is out. What do you do? What you do is approach your bank and take out a business loan, and then you scour. You scour the country from end to end, and you buy up every copy of the book you can find.’

He stood up, staring at a few of them in turn.

‘And that’s it. The publishing company says “Wow”, and offers you a contract on the spot. Hundreds of thousands of pounds flutter down into your pockets as if by magic. As much goddamn dental work as your mouth can cope with. And when they put your second book out, they market it so hard you don’t even have time to breathe. You’re in.’

A boy at the front had his arm up straight as a flag pole. ‘Is that what you did, Mr Thornton?’

Thornton leant on the desk again and showed the boy his teeth: perfect and white.

‘We’ve all done it, son,’ he said. ‘We’ve all done it.’

Two weekends after that, he went back home and saw Kay, who he missed now he no longer sat next to her in class. He was slightly relieved to see that she missed him right back. They made love a couple of times, and he took her for drinks in the cafe they’d had their first date in, which felt like an age ago. It was a sunny day, and he took his notepad and jotted down descriptions of the trees, the people and the lake, surprising her with them as they walked – giving her little linguistic trinkets to remember him by. She folded each one up carefully and placed it in the pocket of her jeans, giving him a secret smile in exchange. The Factory had never felt so irrelevant and far away.

They talked about their future together and, as they did, he could feel it solidifying. The prospect felt far more real and important than anything he’d ever write down in a notebook, or sell for a million.