Island Hideaway 7 - Isolated Island, Population One​

My uncle died just as I finished university. When I inherited the island I was still looking for work and hadn't firmed up any plans for a career, though I had vague ideas about achieving literary greatness. ​​

I decided to pay the island a visit while I planned what to do with my life. I had ideas of selling it, or renting it out to tourists, either of which would leave me with an income and some assets. ​​

​​According to the documentation I had received the island had one house with 'all mod cons'. According to a distant cousin my uncle had spent the previous summer living there to escape creditors, the advantage of the island not featuring on any maps.  ​

​​All visions of selling the place, let alone renting it out, vanished as soon as I set foot on the soil. It was a dump. The whole island was overgrown, the beach, small as it was, was swamped with rubbish, the paths barely discernible amongst the overgrowth. The house needed repairing, cleaning, painting, modernising. The 'mod cons' included a 50-year-old toilet, an ancient stove and five plug points, 'mod' clearly standing for modest rather than modern.  It was going to take a whole heap of work for my inheritance to be worth as much as the ferry fare home. ​​

​​That said, however, the house was habitable. In a sense. It had running water, electricity, a gurgling, tromboning din of a toilet, no signs of damp, two bedrooms and a view of the sea to die for.​​

​​With no better offer in the outside world, no girlfriend or family ties, I decided to move in to clear the island out and make the house habitable. With work the island would be worth something and would give me options. ​​

​​It meant I could live off the minimal income I received from the occasional article I had published, as I wouldn't have rent to pay. It meant that I became a full-time writer (officially - unofficially I was a very part time writer and a full-time island cleaner).​​

​​With no distractions from other people I had 16-hours every day, give or take the ten minutes I spent collecting provisions from the Boatman. I dedicated eight to writing and eight to cleaning, clearing, repainting and repairing the house, and reclaiming the island for human habitation, fitting in cooking and eating as and when. I spent a week just removing the plastic litter from the south beach, only for a gang of swans to claim the beach for themselves as soon as I finished.

​​My absence of commitments meant that when I did get offered  work I could devote time to researching the articles, reading previous editions of the publication to get a sense of the style, and then apply it to the article I'd been commissioned to write. I could turn it around quickly, but still produce high quality work in the company style. ​​

​​I wrote anything I was asked to, magazine articles, website text, advertorial pieces. Across the corporate world there was a desperate need for words, words were the future, it was 1997 and the world needed words like it had never needed words before. A few years down the line, when websites had extra capacity, it would be pictures that would dominate, but that was the future, I was living in the now, and the now was words.​​

​​Of course, you couldn't just write words, you needed to be asked to write words, and in order to be asked to write words you had to write and ask if you could be asked to write words. So I did. Write and ask that is. In my first year I wrote 1,397 emails and letters (yes really, some magazines were still based on donkey-post) requesting work. I updated my writer’s CV 184 times (not counting correction of typos) and even set up my own webpage, a big deal in 1997. ​​

​​The first article I was commissioned to write was entitled 'The ten best places to eat in Stoke'. It was for a women's magazine, with a circulation of half a million, half a million women every single one of which almost certainly never wanted to dine out in Stoke, but mine wasn't to reason why, mine was to churn out words until I die.​​

​​When I was first commissioned to write the piece, before moving to the island, I'd planned to travel to Stoke, eat at some restaurants and write about it. In other words I had visions of being a proper journalist. However, I'd pretty much spent out moving everything I owned to the island and didn't have the money to visit Stoke, let alone eat at lots of different restaurants when I got there. The magazine had been very cagey about the issue of expenses, and as I set to research the article I realised why. Travelling to a city, staying there for a few days and eating lots of meals while you were there, cost money. More money than a half-page fluff-piece about eating in Stoke that none of the readers would even pause to glance at was worth. Why the piece was ever commissioned I'll never know, an editorial joke, or an attempt to please a Stoke-based sponsor? Or simply a mistake.​​

​​So I set about writing my article without visiting any restaurants. Or visiting Stoke. ​​

​​Some people may criticise my approach to research, but Shakespeare wrote about Venice, Italy and Verona when he'd never been to any of them. Graham Swift wrote about the Fens without ever going there, so why shouldn't I write restaurant reviews without ever leaving my island.​ I was following  a path taken by the literary greats, except my path led to Stoke, and an article nobody would ever read, not Venice and one of the most performed plays in human history. ​

I have an advantage over Shakespeare, obviously, I have google. I have review sites, I have google maps, I can even download menus. So I wrote my piece, exactly hitting my word count and submitted several days ahead of deadline. The piece was well received, generated no complaints and before I knew it I had a regular column reviewing restaurants in towns and cities across the UK, none of which I could afford to visit nor eat at. That led to other work. Since becoming a freelance writer I’ve always been amazed at the extent to which editors all know each other. Every editor I speak to for the first time seems to know every other editor I’ve writer for. It’s as if every magazine editor in the UK lives in the same shared mansion, all taking breakfast together where they share the names of reliable copy producers, for no sooner had my Stoke piece appeared than a dozen separate magazines approached me, all requesting articles entirely unrelated to the Stoke restaurant scene.​​

​​I didn't use my own name for the article, and began using different names for different magazines. By the time Mo arrived on the island I was up to 137 different by-lines - some imposed on me by the editor, some were my own imagination, some were simple practicalities, for magazines in the meat industry I would adopt the name Titania Butcher, for the various crochet, cross-stitch, knitting and related magazines I would be Fred Needle, alongside the name I would adopt a character, so that there was consistency in my writing style, each by-line was a unique, identifiable version of me. Fred Needle was uber-enthusiastic, there was no cross-stitch pattern that would ever truly disappoint, just some were more splendid and life-changing than others. Titania Butcher, on the other hand, was prejudice through and through, a Norfolk Horn sheep over a Suffolk, entire continents' meat industries dismissed out of hand. "The Americas don't really do meat," she/I once wrote. ​​

​​Sometimes I would start rivalries between my various selves, savaging a film review I had written under a different by-line for a different magazine, they snapping back at myself - I think my original plan was to ensure I got recommissioned by the original (bigger) magazine who would feel they had to give me right of reply. The magazines loved it, rivalry sells, and the great thing about my self-rivalry was that it would never result in a court case or an actual fist-fight. ​​

 ​Of course, the editors all knew my various noms de plume. The only people being deceived were the readers, and nobody cared about the readers. ​

​​My writing may not be at the level of Shakespeare, but I discovered I had a genius at producing exactly the innocuous churn of words that people need. People needed words about the Swedish frozen food industry and I wrote words about the Swedish frozen food industry. People needed words about the latest hair care product and I wrote words about the latest hair care product. I had discovered my superpower; writing pointless, worthless, meaningless prose. To deadline, to word-count, to company style. ​​

​​My reputation grew, I got more work, and slowly my income increased and I became a proper writer, I was making a living. In fact I no longer needed to live on the island, though there was a problem with that, which I'll come to.​​