I take photographs. Generally I prefer to work with landscapes as they stay still whilst I am lining up my camera, or as an event photographer working with bands or performers as it is almost impossible to take a bad picture of a good singer or guitar player! But occasionally I venture into the world of art and take photos that are not just records of what was there but try to tell a story.

The idea for this piece came about when I was giving a presentation to a small group of people at the Rochester Literary Festival about what it was like to be a writer. I told them about the long hours, the low pay, the bad reviews and the good, and how you always need someone else to tell you to “stop” or you will continue to edit your work until the end of time as you are never convinced it will be ready.

I asked if anyone had any questions, and someone asked me what it actually felt like when someone read my work for the first time. I thought about that for a moment, and then said that it was like being naked in front of them, standing there for them to walk all around you, analyse your body, and then start to tell you what they thought about all its wrinkles and flabby bits whilst you have no opportunity to respond or hide. It was an episode of Naked Attraction, without Anna Richardson to keep everyone in check and a camera crew that loved to zoom in tight on any flaws they could see whilst ignoring the bits that you really want them to show. You know there is an audience out there too and you have no control over what they say or think, so you imagine the worst and assume everyone is laughing at you.

That made them think, and a few of them looked like they were about to give up writing for good. A few of them even looked as though they thought the next writing exercise I gave them would involve them stripping off in front of the group (note… I’ve never done that at a lecture, but I have often thought it might help!), so I thought I had better calm them down before they walked out, and explained a bit further. Writing comes from inside, I told them. It comes from a part of you that does not normally see the light of day. When you write, you expose your thoughts, your optinions, your hidden desires in a way that we rarely do in modern society. Even when you try to hide it, things get out, and a reader can get to know a lot more about a writer through their work than that writer would ever believe.

They liked that explanation and began to relax a bit, so I carried on and went further into character development and developing story ideas. But when I got home I started to think about how it would be possible to represent that photographically, and after a few sketched out ideas I came up with this plan. I would show the “before” and “after” states, the chaotic beginnings of an idea as it starts to take shape, and then the clear realisation of that idea into something coherent and presentable. The “standing naked in front of people” concept would be central to the photograph and it would hopefully show the difference between what the reader eventually sees on the page and how it all started in the author’s mind.

The image on the left is me, unedited, un-retouched, just me. The writing projected onto me is a page from my book “Blood Changes, in a digital version of my handwriting. It was a particularly difficult scene to write as I was trying to make it hard-hitting and personal without diving into sensationalism, and I wrestled with it for ages before finally being happy with the result. So that side of the piece shows me, the writer, with my thoughts in disarray as I struggle to find the right words to do my character and my audience justice.

The image on the right is a model called Bex, with exactly the same passage projected onto her. This time, however, it is the final version exactly as it appeared in the paperback, and all the rough edges have been removed. Her serene elegance is in direct contrast to my rough and unkempt aspect, and shows how audiences often fail to realise the difficulties the writer went through to create something that they were able to read in just a few minutes.

Together these two halves of the image tell the story. The left is rough and unfinished with even the projection seeming to be thrown together in a hurry. The right is calm and peaceful and all the chaos has been tamed. But in both cases the words are presented in the form of a naked image as no matter now calm and peaceful the final version might be it is still a view into the writer’s inner life and behind the facade that we routinely present.

This image has been around for a few years now and I have used it in many places. It has been a poster for another creative writing seminar I hosted, it has appeared in articles I have written, and it has appeared in print and online in writers’ forums and blogs.

A few months after I first posted it online I was contacted by the organiser of a minor literary festival in New York to ask if she could use it as a poster for the event. The festival was being run entirely for charity and hoped to raise money to help disadvantaged writers in the city so I said absolutely they could use it and my only fee would be a photograph of it in place. The centre of the festival was to be in a side room off a well-known bookshop in the city (I cannot remember which one), so they had a banner printed up of my photograph and hung that over the entranceway, and as soon as the festival was under way they sent me a picture of it there with a few of the authors posing underneath it holding a big THANK YOU sign.

I would love to post that picture here but for the life of me I cannot find it. I know it is still on a drive somewhere, but for the moment it has drifted into digital oblivion, so if anyone reading this took a photo of my naked poster at a literary festival in NYC about 10 – 12 years ago and you still have the photo… please send me a copy!!!