On Being a Writer and an Accountant
On being a writer and an accountant
by Gill Darling
You may not be surprised to learn that accountancy is not a subject covered much in fiction. The novel that springs first to mind is Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry by the avant-garde novelist BS Johnson, published in 1973. Christie, young and disaffected, hits on the idea of applying the principles of double-entry bookkeeping to his own life. Any real or imagined slight (debit) against him must be matched by a corresponding credit, or recompense of some kind.
Hence having to walk along a certain stretch of pavement due to the placement of a building is counterbalanced by Christie committing a minor act of vandalism on the offending building. Of course, the retaliations escalate, so that by the end of the novel Christie has successfully bombed the Houses of Parliament.
In double-entry bookkeeping, a transaction always has total debits and total credits that are equal. Modern accounting software simply won’t let you post a transaction that flouts this: a cursor will flicker gently, waiting for you to post the adjustment that will yield obedience to this immutable rule. Moreover, the individual transactions taken in total have to obey something called the accounting equation: total assets must equal total liabilities plus equity.
You could – and some commentators do – recognise in Christie Malry’s system of retribution a straightforward religious interpretation: there will be a day of reckoning when all injustices are recompensed, and each of us will receive what is truly due to us, based on the sum of all our individual behaviours in some grand cosmic balancing of the equation.
If asked whether I have always been a writer I would reply yes, albeit one with decades of writers’ block. At primary school I wrote – and illustrated – whole books, penned short stories and plays, which I corralled my reluctant friends into performing. At secondary school this fell away as the challenges of puberty took over. I loved English and I loved Maths, but my sixth form college couldn’t countenance a timetable of a mix of arts and science A levels, so I was funnelled into studying Maths, Further Maths and Economics (so much more practical!) and ended up studying Economics and Statistics at the University of York.
Most of my friends at university were studying for English Literature degrees in a department where the artistic temperament was baked in. Tutors would mysteriously disappear at short notice to go on sabbaticals; rumoured to be drying out from their latest bout of alcoholism. One professor wept in seminars while discussing Dante. There was none of that kind of nonsense in the Economics department.
I graduated from York with an indifferent degree and moved to London. I continued to not write. After a few years of working in the non-profit sector I made a startling decision: I would train to be a chartered accountant. The exams were notoriously onerous and fiendishly hard, but I felt up to the challenge. After all, I still liked maths. And so, for the next three years, studying, and training, were pretty much all I did. As compensation, I channelled my career into the non-profit sector, so I got my accounting chops auditing small charities and co-ops.
Eventually the urge to write won out again. Tentatively, I started writing short stories. They weren’t good enough for publication but still, writing them at all felt good. I moved north to Manchester in 2003 and once again life intervened: bereavements, relationship breakdown. I wrote a novel, very slowly, that was riddled with issues I didn’t know how to fix. A few more years passed. It was 2014 and I was fifty-one before I made the decision to give writing one more serious try and, if it didn’t work out, to find some other outlet for what I felt I had to say.
I was lucky enough to get onto a mentoring scheme run by the wonderful Arvon charity. With the support of my mentor, the novelist Ross Raisin, I completed a new novel. An agent liked it enough to take it on, but wasn’t able to sell it. I wasn’t surprised: everyone tells you how hard it is. I wrote a third novel that would become my debut, Erringby, a coming-of-age story set in the 70s, 80s and 90s and loosely based on Great Expectations.
So is there a crossover between writing and accountancy? As a fiction writer you get to play God in the universe you have created. You can reward the good and punish the bad characters. You can tie up all the loose ends in one big pretty bow, if you want. And there’s satisfaction in seeing divine justice meted out. As young children we need good to prevail over evil in the stories we’re given to read. As older readers, we rejoice when Eliza wins Mr Darcy, when Dracula is vanquished, when order is restored in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
But life, as Christie Malry inevitably discovers, doesn’t always work like that. In reality, the bad often go unpunished, the good continue to be downtrodden, unrecognised. So we have the titular Old Man returning to the shore with just the carcass of a great fish in Hemingway’s tale, only to resolve to go fishing again. We have the subjugated Winston Smith in 1984. Endings can be unresolved, or ambiguous. Or, as with Infinite Jest, they can just… end.
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Erringby by Gill Darling is out now in the UK with Fairlight Books and is published in the US on September 1st.
ERRINGBY
Kit is waiting expectantly for life to begin. Orphaned as a young child, he recoils from his adoptive parents’ mundane existence, drawn instead to the bohemian world of his Uncle Col and Col’s charismatic wife Marianne. Amid the permissive atmosphere of Erringby, Marianne’s rambling family mansion, Kit becomes increasingly obsessed with his aunt. One debauched summer, the eighteen-year-old Kit wakes to find himself in bed with Marianne. But what happened? And who is his sudden mysterious benefactor?
As Kit grapples with the ramifications of that night, he, Marianne and Col find their lives spiralling out of control. Unfolding against the changing cultural landscape of the seventies, eighties and nineties, ‘Erringby’ is a captivating coming-of-age novel with echoes of ‘Great Expectations’.
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