When I was four my mum read Treasure Island to me and I’m pretty sure that’s when I decided I wanted to be a novelist. Not that I would have understood any of that at the time. All I knew was that some power had whisked me away from an ordinary suburban childhood to a place that was exciting and scary and filled with the most amazing characters. Later I would realize that this was what novels did and that I wanted to be able to do that – create and live in these alternative worlds.

During my teens I wrote a little – mainly rambling, introspective pieces that were mainly about girls – why I loved them, why they didn’t love me, how I could get to love them and so on and so on. You know the kind of thing.

I wrote a few little stories. But the big one – a novel – well, I never went anywhere near that. I was afraid to try. What if what I wrote was no good? What if I wrote a few pages and then dried up? There was no way I could stretch those flimsy ideas of mine out to 300 pages or more. And the notion that anyone would read, let alone buy, something I wrote seemed too unlikely for words.

But one day – I can’t even remember it now – one day in my late twenties, the spell was broken. For some reason – I don’t know what it was – I started a novel. I wrote a page or two. And then a day or two later I wrote some more. And after that some more. And more. And eventually I ended up writing a novel.

It was rejected by every publisher that I sent it to – and I sent it to a lot.

It’s good that it was. It was very bad.

Of course I didn’t realize how bad it was at the time. And so I kept on sending it. And they kept on rejecting it. But more importantly, while all of this was going on, I started another one.

Starting was much easier this second time and the idea and the plot – I still think – were pretty good and original. However, the characterization was fairly poor with the characters wooden and clichéd. But I finished it. An agent in the United States nearly took it on but then she suddenly stopped calling. And I continued to bolster the profits of the postal service by sending it out to publishers and agents and they continued to send back the rejections. (It would not be an exaggeration to say that I could literally paper several rooms of an average suburban house with the rejection letters I have received over the years.) But, in what was becoming a bit of a familiar ritual now, I started on a third one.

This one took me 10 years. It wasn’t full time, you understand – I had a day job. And this one was good. I knew that as I was writing it. Part of the reason it was good was that it took me 10 drafts to get it right. If a particular piece didn’t deliver the emotional impact I was looking for I threw it away and tried again, trying to up my game each time. This was novel writing in a different league from what I had done previously. But if I hadn’t played in the previous leagues, I wouldn’t have known what it was to play in this league.

Once I was finished I started the sending out again. Once again there were lots of rejections but this time, one publisher said yes. (And often – in many areas of endeavour – all it takes is one.)

Soon proofs were coming to be corrected and there was a cover design to sign off on. And then one day a package arrived at my house. In it were 10 copies. I held one in my hand. I remember thinking what a small object it was to have resulted from such a huge amount of work. The book was really well received. One reviewer described it as ‘better than Schindler’s List’ – which itself had won the Booker Prize. My book was nominated for two prizes.

My fifth novel was published on 21 June 2014. I’m a novelist. Nelson Mandela said it would be like this. He said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done’.

The thing you’ve got to understand is that I don’t think it’s talent that has gotten me to this point. Sure, I have some talent but so do many people. Nor is it passion – and I’m very passionate about writing fiction. No – I believe it’s two other things entirely.

Those two things are commitment and perseverance. Commitment got me started; perseverance kept me going.

Listen to me carefully. I can’t say this clearly enough.

Whatever you want to do – you can do it. All you need is these two companions on your journey – commitment to get you started, perseverance to keep you going.

Commitment

J.K. Rowling showed commitment during the seven years she took to write the first Harry Potter book. She was going through a divorce and living with her daughter in a tiny flat, subsisting on state benefits. Her manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers before finally being accepted. (I often wonder what those publishers think about now when they lie awake in the small hours of the night.)

The Beatles showed commitment when they were told that ‘guitar groups are on the way out’ and that they had ‘no future in show business’.

The thing about commitment – and I’ve experienced this time and time again in my own life – is that once you commit, once you cross that bridge or burn those boats, then all sorts of unexpected things happen. Opportunities emerge, doors open, people appear. Others have also noted this same phenomenon.

In the nineteenth century, the American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, talked about commitment in his famous book, Walden: ‘if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings ... if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them’.

And last century, the Scottish mountaineer, William Hutchison Murray, said it in his 1951 book, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition:⁸ ‘but when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money – booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

In some ways, commitment is the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is take that first step. Perseverance will take care of the rest.

Perseverance

Confucius hit the nail on the head there. This is how everything gets done.

Look at what Walt Disney went on to do. This is the same Walt Disney who was fired from the Kansas City Star newspaper because he was told that he lacked creativity. (By a funny coincidence, that’s also something one of my former bosses once told me!) There is a story that Disney was turned down 302 times before he finally got the financing to create Disney World.

Think of anyone who is described as ‘an overnight success’. It’s almost certain that when you look a little more closely, they’ve been grafting away for years. Most of us have seen Susan Boyle’s audition on Britain’s Got Talent – the audition that catapulted her to overnight success.

Susan Boyle began singing in school productions at age 12, and she and her mother often talked about her possibly becoming famous. Boyle sang for years in pubs and local competitions before Britain’s Got Talent. She worked and grafted away for a long time; there was nothing overnight about it.

So when you falter and you feel like giving up, then Thomas Edison is there to whisper in your ear that ‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.’ (I had figured this part out for myself. A favourite saying of mine is that. ‘There has to be another way’.)

And if the going really gets tough then there is no better man to have at your side than the redoubtable Winston Churchill who’ll advise you that ‘If you are going through hell, keep going’.

Play the long game. Just keep showing up. Just keep taking that next step. That’s not too difficult, is it?