Searching for My Narrative Arc by Andrew Crofts

 

Apologies for missing my slot last month. I intended to write a review of Book Wars by John B, Thompson, but didn’t have time to read it, let alone write about it. Instead, I moved house for the first time in 35 years. I had underestimated just how much time and effort would be required to condense a large family’s lifetime of possessions into a house half the size. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so physically or mentally exhausted. 

It has made me realise that for the last fifty or so years, hardly a day has passed when I have not been consumed by writing, reading, researching, thinking about writing or thinking about the money that I need to earn from writing – hardly a day, literally. There has been little time for reflecting on the bigger picture. So, spending a few weeks immersed both physically and mentally in an entirely different task has been refreshing as well as exhausting.

Turning out the old house inevitably caused some forgotten memories to float to the surface; articles that have my by-line but which I have no memory of writing, even whole books which have long ago faded from view, even though thinking about them must once have filled all my waking hours. So much has changed in the worlds that I have been writing in and about and so many of the things I wrote now seem strangely quaint and innocent.

The changes that I have lived through in the publishing world during the last half century are chronicled in John Thompson’s book, so now that the dust has settled, I am planning to immerse myself fully in trying to see the underlying narrative arc of my professional life.