It was the usual situation. I always wanted to write fiction for a living. I never thought I would. By the time I hit forty I’d pretty much given up any serious idea of being a novelist. Other cares – earning a living, making my way in journalism – had got in the way. By the time I turned forty two I had a three book deal under my belt and a movie contract. Things rarely happen suddenly in this business, but sometimes they do.

How did all this come about? Largely by accident if I'm honest. I've never been one to look back. Life's too busy for that. So let me try to fathom it out too, because I suspect this tale tells you something about how books turn from vague ideas to reality and some of the curiously coincidental circumstances along the way.

<!--more-->

I’ve never earned a living through anything except writing. I became a cub reporter on a tiny newspaper in the UK when I was seventeen and managed to climb my way onto <em>The Times</em> eight years later. Writing fiction was always the endgame but it never happened because, to be frank, I never had anything to write <em>about.</em>

I also bore easily. That was why, in 1986, I abandoned a reasonably successful career on what was then Fleet Street and set out to write full time on my own.

It was pretty much a disaster from the start. When you're a well-known national newspaper journalist the phone never stops ringing. When you're one more broke freelance looking for work it never starts. Nobody much wanted to know me except a tiny publisher, now disappeared, who wanted a few short travel guides, two of them in Spain, a country I knew a little from holidays. The fee, if I recall correctly, was £2000. Out of that I had to pay all my research expenses.

I was an idiot to take the commission and soon realised that, if things went on this way, I’d be bankrupt. But I managed to knock out a couple of ham-fisted brief travel books to Andalucia and Mallorca (they still turn up on Ebay from time to time – please don’t buy them) and spent a few months living on the road in Spain on a pittance. Trust me, this was not fun. In order to make <em>some</em> money out of those books I stayed in the cheapest places I could find and lived off <em>tapas. </em>I learnt many things and one of them was that there's nothing romantic about penury.

When I got back I realised I had to make some changes to my professional life, and quickly. I briefly edited a magazine to pay the bills. Then I took to more sensible freelance work, covering business and technology for the <em>Sunday Times.</em> Life became better. I no longer needed to shield my eyes when opening bank statements. Fiction drifted out of my sights.

Then in Easter 1994 we took a rare holiday, a cheapie back to Andalucia. It was Holy Week, and they even had processions with those creepy pointed hats in our village. I watched them and I remembered two things I'd filed away mentally from my brief days as a travel writer. One was listening to a bunch of teenagers practice their instruments for a Holy Week brass band by the banks of the Guadalquivir. The other was the painting below, one of the most terrifying works of art I've ever seen.

I went back to look at it again yesterday and it still scares the hell out of me. It's called <em>Finis Gloriae Mundi</em>, the end of the glories of the world, by the Sevillian artist Juan Valdés Leal, and had I not stepped through the doors of the little-known place where it resides I doubt I'd be the writer I am now. Of which more tomorrow...

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/caridad.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/finis_gloriae_mundi1.jpg"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/caridad.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/finis_gloriae_mundi-tm1.jpg" alt="finis_gloriae_mundi.jpeg" width="450" height="456" /></a>