“If you’d started as a journalist five years earlier, you’d probably be editor of GQ or something.”

That was the standout phrase in a killer dissection of the catalogue of mistakes I made in my first six years of trying to become A BIG SUCCESSFUL WRITER ™. On the phone to a journalist who’s still in the middle of London’s canape-strewn maze, I listened to a long list of reasons why plenty of people like me and lots of people think I’m the kind of tosser who looks best flat on their face in the rain.

My friend essentially described me barreling around London making enemies like a more hirsute, less-driven version of Toby Young. The way he delicately put it was that “having such strong opinions might not have been the best idea.”

For a good few years I had an ego so sizable that it could have emerged from my ears and formed a solid moon orbiting my head. But that’s been replaced by a pitiful little grey cloud of the sort sported by Eeyore in the less charming Disney version of Winnie The Pooh. I’ve gone from perpetually driving forward in the style of one of those disturbingly gimlet-eyed swimmers at the local pool to treading water in the shallow end wearing comically undersized water wings.

I spent my teens pouring over the NME, Melody Maker, Select and the rest, dreaming of being a lighter Lester Bang or Nick Kent without the penchant for leather trousers and smack. But when I got the chance to work for a music magazine, I screwed it up in spectacular fashion. After talking my way in like a confidence trickster with an unusually good knowledge of Nirvana, Bowie’s back catalogue and mid-80s American hardcore punk, I managed to end up banging my head on the desk and sending proofs so error-laden they may as well have been edited by Lenny from Of Mice And Men.

A hero needs a nemesis but for someone hoping that they might one day be the kind of writer who doesn’t have to consider whether buying name brand butter and not Tesco Value spread is a good idea, accumulating enmity faster than the Pope gatecrashing Peter Tatchell’s birthday bash isn’t smart.

I spotted on Facebook today that one of my university friends has reinvented herself as a writer and is winning short story competitions at a rate of knots. Meanwhile, Joe Dunthorne, who was in the same edition of the May Anthologies as I was (I was the only first year with something in there that year), is a successful novelist and screen writer with a film on the way – directed by Richard Ayoade and soundtracked by Alex Turner.

At the party after the publication of that May Anthologies, where I could have spoken to a major London agent, I got drunk and stood in the corner silently loathing people wearing better shoes than me. I bounced around writing reviews for the university newspapers and doing dreadful stand up on bills with comics who are now storming Edinburgh and popping up on TV with a regularity that makes me want to kick in the screen like a lorry driver incensed by The Sex Pistols.

When I abruptly left my second stint at Stuff after writing for Wired and being suspended for doing so, I thought that would be a new direction. But after contributing two well-received features on The Impossible Project and Kodak, I got mired in a piece on UAVs and BAE Systems that ended up grounded after an identically-themed whizzbang extravaganza popped up in The Sunday Times.

In a five years, I went from Pensions World to Stuff to Q to Stuff to freelancing for Wired, Electricpig (which I still write for practically every day) and a lots of other exciting places. Then it just seemed to unravel.

After being nothing but condensed confidence and drive, I just fizzled out and am now off in the Siberian salt mines of journalism, writing about technology I can’t afford and mumbling bitterly about creating a brilliant column or amazing feature without doing it.

As I wrote in my last bit of confessional wailing (Cheryl Cole is 27), you can’t become a success by just sitting around and waiting for opportunities to be posted to you like invites to Hogwarts.

The trouble is I’ve got the fear. I’m a wire walker who’s stopped just looking at the next step in front of him and started staring right at the gaping abyss. And there’s a fairly substantial legion of folk with peashooters in hand ready to knock me off my balance.

In the spirit of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, what would you do next ever-reasonable-never-insane-Internet folk? Your options are a) commission Mic to write something b) retweet this column c) leave an inspiring/irritated comment.

My friend Abby is the nicest person in the history of human existence. I have not conducted a proper study to come to that conclusion but my survey sample is confined to me and everyone who has ever met her. I feel that is quite sufficient. In our first year at university, Ab and I would stay up until the early hours talking incessantly. I bear serious responsibility for her getting virtually no work done while she helped me get a piece of my writing published properly for the first time. It’s clear who came out best in that deal. 

The May Anthologies is a compendium of writing by students from Oxford, Cambridge and UEA’s Creative Writing course. In 2003, the guest editor was Ali Smith. The Cambridge introduction to the project that year was in a drafty hall in the centre of town. Ab persuaded me to go to on the promise of free booze and canapés. I have a natural homing instinct for canapés and, could, if required be used as a human divining rod for locating mini-burgers and fish & chips in little paper cones. 

Back then I was writing poetry and little bits of prose compulsively. I’d been doing it throughout high school, encouraged by a brilliant English teacher who let me sit at the back and write my own creations when I finished her assignments early. By university, I was filling my bulky PC up with scraps and pushing my plays on any drama students who’d look at them. However, besides a few music reviews for the student papers and a vague thought about auditioning for the Footlights, I kept most of it to myself. 

As we wandered about at the launch of The Mays though, Ab persuaded me to submit some of my writing. I wouldn’t have got round to it without her but I duly bundled some bits together and emailed them off to the editors. I forgot about it almost instantly and returned to my routine of sleeping all day on Tuesdays, compulsively playing the quiz machine and feeding too much change to the jukebox. 

A few months later I received an email. I was in and the only first year to make the cut. My short prose poem The Loneliness Of The Bookshop Dweller was going to be the first piece in the book and Ali Smith had name checked it in her introduction (I’d “set the challenge and the tone” for the book. Me! Actual me!).

Completing the trio of brilliant things the email had to tell me was an invite to the launch in “that London” where a living breathing literary agent would be in attendance. Fame and fortune was obviously imminent. Obviously. 

David Godwin of David Godwin Associates, which represents Arunduti Roy and, of late, Pippa Middleton, was going to be at the party. If I couldn’t charm him into immediately signing me up, I was sure I’d at least be able to get some tips on how to become the superstar I was certain I was due to become. That I had never actually finished a story and my contribution to The Mays was no more than 100 words was just a minor detail. 

Come the day of the event, I was a quivering wreck, convinced of my unworthiness, and looking paler than usual as I sat beside Ab on the train to London. After finding the swanky premises where the launch was taking place, we slipped into the crowd of chattering proto-literati and proper London types and talked to precisely no one.

I did make a Hitchenseque attack on the free wine though and by the time I was in chit chatting distance of David Godwin, a moon being orbited by more confident young meteors, I was plastered. I stood and stared and said nothing. The party started to wrap up and Godwin slipped away. I had achieved nothing more than feeling awkward in a room full of strangers. It was an experience I could have got in Cambridge, where loud entitled people are plentiful. 

One of the other names on the contents page of The Mays 2003 was Joe Dunthorne. His story Fred was great and hinted at the quality that he’d deliver on in his first novel Submarine. Last year it was turned into a film, directed by Richard Ayoade and soundtracked by Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys. The editors wrote in their introduction: “We sincerely hope not only that we got it right but also that we are introducing some writers we’ll hear a lot more from.” Joe proved them right. 

It’s nearly 10 years on from The Mays 2003 and I’m still shuffling my feet and watching the party pass me by. I remember daydreaming in 2003 as I flicked through the Granta Young British Writers issue that by the time the next one rolled around, I might be in there. Granta has published that issue every ten years since 1983 so the next one’s due in 2013. I really need to get a move on.