Love-hatE

As a Scot, I have a love/hate relationship with the country. And as a Scottish writer, I have a love/hate relationship with its literature.

I read the Kelly-Maley debate in full and posted it without critique or analysis, the reason being it all hit so close to home I had no idea where to start.

My gut reaction to a lot of the praise for recent Scottish writing has been to cringe (sorry Maley). But I believe a major reason for this is the personal dilemma regarding my own (Scottish) writing, and the jealousy over other writers' publication success.

Somehow we are all shamed and feel guilty about our backgrounds. I have this in spades, especially as a writer.

So far I have avoided the issue by simply not writing about Scotland. A few years ago I was unable to even lift a Scottish book, skipping Louise Welsh and giving Anne Donovan an extremely wide berth.

While studying for the M.Litt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University I purposefully avoided Scottishness in all my writing, and cringed at the Scottishness coming at me from all the other students. I couldn't stand it. I realise now I was paralysed by the idea of writing about something close to home.

Instead I attempted to write an American novel about California. I finished it, but it wasn't real. [Read an extract at Glasgow Seeker.com]

Once out of Scotland and living in Thailand, where I taught English, I began to write again. Still America, but this time about a young teacher. Ahh, something closer to home.

Now that I'm resident in New Zealand, Scotland feels closer than ever. I recently read The Cutting Room [perfect for film, stripped down like a screenplay, a lot like my recent writing] and devoured Robin Jenkins' The Changeling [The Cone Gatherers is my favourite of his]. Amazing how getting some distance from things allows you to breathe again.

Scotland has a proud literary history - Burns, Stevenson, Scott, Hogg, MacDiarmid, Trocchi, Kelman, Gray, Spark, Welsh, Warner - and like our national football team, we will gladly sing its praises after a few drinks among company, but as soon as the print media becomes involved, it's all back-slapping and stabbing, a rather murky affair.

My reason for cringing at a lot of the praise is personal: I can't stand the chest-thumping that comes from journalists; as an unpublished novelist I have plenty of selfish jealousy, an inordinate amount of novelists have come from the M.Litt course I studied on; I have a deep-rooted Scottish shame ('who cares?' I ask myself, 'who wants to read about Scotland?'); and there is something sad in the ever-increasing somnambulistic style of book buying from high street chain stores after reading someone else's opinion.

But there's no doubt, more Scottish writers are being published than ever before. Does that mean the literature is in a golden age?

We're Scottish, we don't know how to handle success.