Writing While Walking
Waaah! I just wrote a mini-novel here, then got distracted, clicked on a link somewhere else and… IE navigated off to that other pack. I hit the back button immediately, but by the time I arrived back here, my whole list of thoughts had disappeared from the text box. I want to cry.
Anyway… blah blah blah writing. Lots of stuff about why I hadn’t done much lately, and how my “novel” had ground to a halt, and I’ve not been writing in my blog because my brain has started to turn everything I experience into a piece of writing and, as MJH said recently (in relation to Climbers, one of my all-time favourite books):
your life *is* evanescent, ephemeral, essentially unrecordable. It wouldn’t be a life if it wasn’t. You can never call it back. You can never stop trying to call it back. The biggest load of cock in the world is Jameson’s description of nostalgia as a “lack of faith in the future”. That may be true of collective nostalgia, of contemporary western societies and their RetroLand tendency (Gordon Burn is brilliant at this): but it’s not true of individuals. The nostalgia of individuals is genuine, worthwhile, as heartbreaking & evanescent as anything else they feel. In some measure, Climbers is about someone having a war with that understanding, and winning the war, and losing by winning. “Mike” is so massively in denial, right down to the tape, when he’s still claiming to have learned nothing from all this…
So anyway, the result was I wrote nothing. But after an increasing urge to write something, and an ongoing conversation with Guy, and buying a Samsung SVR-S410 “voice pen” which lets me put down some of my thoughts when I’m walking, instead of losing them by the time I get home as is more usual, I decided to… write something.
So I restarted a project which Gill and I first discussed about three years ago. At the time, I was keen to write but had no ideas to write about. And Gill had lots of ideas but felt that she couldn’t write them up in a readable way. So together we were going to collaborate on a book of short stories. Gill came up with a whole bunch of Alexi Sayle-esque scenarios, but I never got around to writing them. Well, today I started on a story about a sculptor who hates the people he sells his work to. Took a stroll to the botanical gardens to see one of this guy’s works (yes, he does exist: all of Gill’s stories are inspired by reality), had many thoughts on the way and got them all down on the voice-pen (god that thing’s embarassing to use: I only dare talk into it when there no people within half-a-mile. I think I’ll buy a mobile phone headset and pretend I’m using that, so I can feel slightly less of a social deviant). I even spent a good hour or so in the café, reading Antwerp and half eavesdropping on the people around me. For the first time ever, I felt like I was listening to real conversations, conversations which, who knows, might find their way into a story one day:
[on seeing a chaffinch on the wall of the café] “It could be a jay. Jays have pink bits, don’t they?”
and
“I want a hairdresser that I can tell ‘I want my hair this way’ and they’ll tell me ‘actually, you want it that way’.”
“She’s very good, she always asks me how I want it and I just say ‘do whatever you want’.”
“So would you recommend her?”
“Well… I never like to make recommendations to friends. I think she’s very good but, you know, if you recommend someone to a friend and they have a bad experience, well…”
(this thread of the conversation went on for some time and led into)
“Like that decorator I told you about?”
“The colour-blind decorator?”
(screams of laughter from around the table)
etc.
OK, so from here on in… writing. And research. And hopefully a few slightly oblong short stories. First, the sculptor, then I’d better do some research in Antwerp next week on the woman who lived across the river and became an obsession for the man who spied her from the fixed viewing binoculars over the water. Hey, I’m quite excited about this; but then, it always starts off that way…