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I took apart a pen – one of those ones you click on and off – and tried to put it back together again. I couldn’t quite make it right. One of my attempts looked OK, until I clicked the pen on, and half the pen launched across the room like a catapult. I fell about laughing. My last effort still wasn’t right – the pen doesn’t click on or off, and the tip of it retracts and expands as I try to write, as if it is now equipped with suspension. I kind of like it. I unwrapped an easter egg and tried to compress the foil wrapping down into a perfect tiny cube – it was something distracting to do with my fingers. I made it so small – I carried the cube around in my pocket for a week, took it out from time to time, tried to make the cube smaller. I got out candles for Earth Hour, and didn’t put them away again. They appealed to my pyromaniac tendencies. I dripped wax into my ashtray, creating an unpleasant grey waxy lump of ash and cigarette butts, which I eventually disposed of. I made small candles out of the large candles using random things for wicks – pieces of paper, matchsticks – and lit them, they burned erratically: slow, then scarily fast. This is how my mind works…

I finished my professional short story a week or two back. I renamed it my semi-professional short story, and showed it to Tim. It was seven thousand words, in the end, and did a servicable job of telling a story, but failed to soar. I had a long talk to Tim about it – he’s the best reader I know, he has that ability, which I don’t have, to put aside his preconceptions about how writing should be and look at something objectively. He saw the same things in it I did – the same flaws and strengths – which was nice, it’s good to know I can still see my writing as others see it. Hearing somebody else articulate, clearly, what was going on in my writing, helped me realise what I needed to do to fix some problems we both saw: things that have crept into my writing, these arch oratorical flourishes and self-concious mannerisms that detract from the reality of what I’m trying to say. I’m not so much interested in fixing the short story – it is what it is, and I don’t think any amount of work will make it more than that – but I’ll give it a final polish sometime soon and send it off somewhere – it might be publishable.

Last Friday I started writing my novel. I decided I would write one thousand words a day. That was five days ago, and I’ve written five thousand words of it – about two thirds of the first chapter. It’s not much, but it feels like a beginning, it feels alright. Obviously there is a long way to go, but this is how I used to write, back in my late teens and early twenties. It’s not such a hard commitment, one thousand words a day, it just takes discipline. I don’t want to write this thing slowly, I don’t want to spend three years on it, I want to get it down on paper. If I can keep this up, in three months I’ll have a draft of ninety thousand plus words, which would be nice. It might not work out exactly like that, but I’d like to see if I can at least go close. I made a deal with myself a while back, and now I need to fulfill it – if I don’t write now, and write seriously, then the last three years of my life were pointless.

For some reason, I don’t know why, I do feel an obligation to keep this blog updated, at least semi-regularly, if I have anything at all to say. But one thousand words a day is a lot, and I’m not going to put my novel on hold to write this blog. As half-assed as these entries are, sometimes, I do usually put at least some effort into them, and it takes time. If I get a chance, and have something to say, I’ll write this, but if I’m not around too much for the next while, that’s why.

I wish I had better reasons for wanting to be a writer – a more pure desire for self-expression, and less regard for the opinions of others. But a lot of my motives come from self-conciousness and a desire to prove myself. I have these stupid illusions about writing – that if I write well enough everyone will like me, that if I write well enough I can make myself happy. I went down to Austinmer on the weekend, and normally that relaxes me, but I found myself feeling anxious, and I started to recognise other things, symptoms I know well, that suggest things might be starting to go slightly awry in my head, a tilt in my perceptions that if not checked might send me down for a while. It hasn’t happened yet and sometimes I can avoid it, but this is how it happens: first slowly, then quickly; a non-specific anxiety that I know will find specifics if not turned away. I’ve been working hard against this all year, keeping myself busy, staying productive, staying healthy, these small things that seem to help, and possibly I’m overdue.

I probably can’t write well enough to make myself happy, but I do believe that when I write, and write well, I can stay ahead of the moods that sometimes chase me. I know I’m not a genius, not like Shakespeare or Joyce, I don’t have that sort of off-the-scale ability with language, but I do want to be good. I don’t know what happens to me if it turns out I’m ordinary at this. I know there are things I can do when I write – I know that when I try I can put down decently constructed sentences, one after the other, and I seem to be able to describe a scene and make it real in a reader’s mind. Whether I can offer any insight into what it means to be alive, or show the world as I uniquely see it, or make something that is beautiful... I don’t know. But I know I need to stop talking about being a writer and go back to doing it. I need to go do this for a while.

posted by Nicholas @ 1:51 AM