There is an obstacle in my mind around which I’m struggling to negotiate.
It’s quite hard to positively identify. A combination of tiredness, a lack of patience and discipline, an imagination that struggles to spark and a fear of inadequacy, perhaps, all coagulating to clot my brain, severely hampering my ability to write critically or for pleasure. And it’s becoming a matter of huge disappointment and frustration.
Hilary Mantel recommends getting away from the desk to ‘take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie’ but not to ‘go to a party’. Walks I can do, parties I already evade. Kurt Vonnegut wondered about the fate of a writer living in ‘perfect freedom who has nothing more to say’; it’s not a lack of a things to say, it’s the ability to do so.
This piece, in itself, is a hopeful attempt to puncture the embolism.
To an extent, it is to be expected. I have two young children, six and eight, with all the inevitable demands that entails. Fitting a full-time job around their agendas fills much of the day. For too long – especially in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic – simply reading for pleasure was something of challenge. Even with commuting being something of a rarity – almost 50 minutes of guaranteed reading time a day – that mountain has been conquered.
And there has been wilful detachment. For all the intensity of work, observing and writing about what has been going on over the last few tumultuous years – referendums on Scotland and the EU, political deadlock combined with rapidly changing governments, staggering incompetence, habitual lying, cartoonishly vain politicians – escaping to the family and quieter pursuits has proved something of a relief.
But, how to extract the thoughts welling up in my head and get them on to paper?
For me, the process of writing has always been about forming the first sentence. Crafting that is the key to a whole piece. Weighing ideas up in my mind, pacing back and forth, walking round the block, trying to construct the right opening, from which other ideas can flow and spark, that has always been my first step.
Now though, ideas flit through my head like swallows skirting through a sunny sky, evasive, banking, fleeting. Even grasping those thoughts for long enough to squeeze into 280 characters is frequently a step too far.
It also has become a self-fulfilled silence. The more I dwell on it, the harder it becomes.
Just writing these few words seems absurdly self-indulgent and ridiculous but hopefully there’s an element of catharsis, the lancing of a troublesome intellectual boil.
