This isn’t a confession: I’m a proud adult skateboarder.
A 35-year-old grown man, married with children, with a job (sort of) and a house, and I love cruising about on a wee plank of wood with wheels on it. I love learning new tricks and I love the lingo – as an author, patter is, of course, my business.
I learned the basics in my tweens/early teens, gave it up for twenty years and started again in 2021 in a bout of post-lockdown madness which turned out to be anything but. It was a terrific decision. (And to be clear, I’m not good at it, but I am very enthusiastic.)
As a kid I never learned any flip tricks – the famous ‘kickflip’ for instance, where you jump up in the air and the board flips beneath your feet – and when I got back on the board I made it my mission to crack it. And, in November 2024, I finally did. I landed a heelflip, rolling on concrete.
Countless hours spent tweaking every aspect of my foot position and formation, my balance, the line of my shoulders, movement of my arms, bruising my shins and knees and ankles (the feeling of the rail of the deck chopping your Achilles can only be summed up by the barfing emoji), resulted in finally landing back on top of the board and rolling away. Into the sunset.
It was a sketchy one though – back foot toe dragged on the ground. So I immediately did it again and with slightly better results.
Skaters have a saying: ‘Two to make it true’.
I quote this in my new novel, Paperboy (published in March 2025 by Pushkin Vertigo), a crime thriller set in Glasgow that involves paper shredding and police corruption. Early in the novel, a bit of skateboarding knowledge helps one cop identify a faceless, rat nibbled corpse.
Two to make it true: landing something once isn’t real. It doesn’t mean you can do it. You have to do it again. To prove it, to yourself.
What’s this got to do with writing? Well…
In 2023 my first book came out. Squeaky Clean is a crime thriller about a man, Davey, who works in a car wash and ends up getting dragged into the criminal underworld when he borrows the wrong customer’s car to get to a court date on time. That customer – Paulo McGuinn – turns out to be a criminal kingpin and takes over the car wash, seeing an opportunity to clean more than just motors. Disgraced polis DI Alison McCoist – suspected of corruption or incompetence or both – discovers something fishy going on at this car wash and spots a chance at redemption.
To my astonishment, Squeaky Clean won the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Book of the Year 2023. A truly incredible moment, one that’ll live in my mind and cheer me up when I need it forever probably. It’s hard to describe it other than to say it’s kind of like landing your first heelflip.
It’s a funny thing being a debut author and winning a prize like that. Because although you’ve been given this accolade, you’re still the new guy, you’re still inexperienced. Was it beginner’s luck?
And now my second novel, Paperboy, is out on the shelves and the question that is causing me much anxiety is: can I do it again?
Two to make it true.
I don’t mean winning the McIlvanney again – it would be greedy to want more – I just mean, can I write another book that people like? That they connect with? Can I write something as good as that first book? Something worthy of me being included in the McIlvanney alumni of top Scottish crime authors – living legends of tartan noir – like Chris Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Peter May…
Paperboy is a sequel to Squeaky Clean no less, and this makes things worse. When you’re working on the tricky second album you can go two routes:
- Stick close to the first one and try to recreate what people loved about it, risking it being called samey or worse: ‘the same but not as good’.
- Take a wild punt on something really different, potentially alienating fans of the first one.
My instinct would be to take the second path, because at least if you fail you can go down in a blaze of glory. BUT, a sequel doesn’t allow you to do that. With a sequel you are tied to using familiar characters, settings, tone and style. With a sequel you’re locked in to trying to make a Godfather II or Empire Strikes Back. No sweat.
Limits can be good for writing though, and I really enjoyed writing Paperboy, it all went very smoothly, which is a good thing but is also somehow another source of self-doubt.
Other nagging doubts were whether I could recreate the ‘voice’ of Squeaky Clean successfully. I deliberately narrated the book in a register similar to that of my characters, whose dialogue I wrote phonetically to capture the sound of Glaswegian on the page.
Could I get the right balance of humour and grisliness again? It’s a bleak, awful world these gangsters live in, but I was free and easy with the jokes, my narrator a bit wide and snide sometimes. I struck a teetering balance between comedy and grit.
In trying to do this again, would I slip into self-parody?
Would sharpening the things I felt I could do better this time around ruin what gave the first book its charm?
Another worry was that Squeaky Clean had an autobiographical element to it. Ten years ago, I worked at a car wash in the east end while at uni. I used that day-to-day experience to make the setting feel real and I included little incidents that really happened.
Paperboy is about a guy, Chuck, who runs his own confidential paper shredding business but his gambling debts lead him to selling information to dodgy geezers, and things get worse for him from there. I do not have any background in this whatsoever and was relying on second hand information. What if I’m just talking a load of bollocks?
The car wash gave Squeaky Clean a centre, a place the action always returned to. This is not so with Paperboy. Chuck runs a mobile shredding operation. By necessity, he – and the reader with him – are always on the move. The story stretches out wider than the east end this time, all across the city, into the suburbs, even up north into the highlands a little. The scale is bigger. Is everything else growing with it?
Jesus, when you pile it all up like that, you wonder how Ian Rankin even managed to get Rebus book two done, never mind the twenty-fifth (Midnight and Blue – out last year).
Back to skateboarding.
You don’t just start trying to heelflip. Tricks build on other tricks. There’s a natural order, it’s like a branching tree. To learn to heelflip you first need to be able to ollie.
An ollie is what skaters call a jump, but the board comes up with you.
(It’s named after the skater who invented the trick in the seventies, Alan Gelfand, whose nickname was Ollie. Though strictly speaking, he did his on vert ramps, and the ollie I’m talking about is the flat-ground ollie, first done by freestyle and street skating demigod Rodney Mullen in the early eighties. The history and mythology of tricks and their names is fascinating – historians and linguists, get into skateboarding! Start by looking up the ‘no comply’, you’ll love it!)
Unlike snowboarding, a skateboard is not attached to your feet. You get the board in the air using physics. The back foot ‘pops’ the tail off the ground, which bounces it up into the air, then your front foot pushes forward into the nose to level it out. (While remembering to actually jump up, right?) The split-second timing of each movement is crucial to making it work.
Plus, you have to battle your brain to make yourself actually land both feet back on the rolling piece of wood. You have to conquer the voice in your head that is screaming, “I’m gonna fall on my arse! I’m gonna break my ankles!”
Done correctly, it does indeed look, and kind of feel, like the board is stuck to your feet and you get this sensation of ‘floating’ before you land. It is sweet.
To heelflip, you start the same way but as the front foot pushes forward to level out, you go further, and flick it off the corner of the nose (off the ‘toe side’ to heelflip, off the ‘heel side’ to kickflip, make sense?), causing the board to flip. Then you gotta land back on top of it. And if you make it you have to do it again. Two to make it true.
To get to that point you will try and fail so many times it’s not worth keeping count. Skateboarding is all about progress through failure. It’s the only way, and writing is the same.
Behind Squeaky Clean are three finished and never-published novels and who knows how many short stories – some published, some forgotten, some both. The rejections and disappointments can be brutal.
So is landing ‘primo’ (when the board does not rotate fully and your feet come down on the edge of the deck – again, barf emoji) and falling onto your backside on the concrete, winded, every bone and joint in your mid-30s body jarred, and the board’s wheels and trucks dig a big, purple bruise into the underside of your thigh flab.
Surely only a sick mind can get up and keep going after that. Only pure love of the game could make you scrape yourself up off the pavement and say, ‘Maybe the next one’.
Skaters have another favourite phrase: ‘One more try’. It’s a joke but it’s also not a joke. It’s not literal, it doesn’t mean ‘one more’, it really means ‘again’. Again and again and again.
And with every attempt you improve, bit by bit. Even though progress is not linear and you may feel like you’re going backwards sometimes, it’s all part of it. You learn. You shuffle on. You look for the next challenge. You fail. You try again. And so on until you quit or die. There’s no finish line to get to. No point at which you have learned everything there is to learn. Same as writing. And there’s comfort in that. I think.
So, if you land two and make it true, the rest are in the bag?
Write two and the third book’s sorted, right? No problems, no worries, no doubts?
Right?
Only one way to find out.
In August, Callum McSorley will be appearing at Authors in Conversation, hosted by Bothwell Futures, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
