Vulnerability

Okay, so, on Tuesday evening I was with a group of Ukraine writers and ended up recounting two or three times that I had felt so vulnerable in writing that I made poor decisions or I was led the wrong way. That suddenly sounds so much more dramatic than it really was. Nobody has led me into a dark life of crime and scandal, although there may yet be hope. What I meant was, for example, the way that my school careers teacher laughed at me for wanting to write and how that sent me off down the wrong line for the next decade. Or much later when you’d argue I was doing well in writing, but I was fired off Crossroads. In that case the vulnerability was in how I still went around pretending to be a writer and, to be fair, doing quite a lot of writing, but I’d lost hope and hadn’t told myself that I had. It took an incident four or five years later to show me that I’d actually almost absolutely everything right with Crossroads – er, bar writing a good script – and that I wasn’t necessarily…