I've
taken to writing again.
There's
something about the summer, even a wet one, that gets in the way of my
imagination. On the other hand the summer is always my most productive period
for reading, being the farthest removed from teaching. And reading is at the
heart of good writing.
This
summer I was also spent some time fretting over what to write next. I'd
finished a novel last spring and put it to one side as I struggled to develop
an idea for a commission. That I failed in my task at first dismayed me. I
couldn't take an idea, somebody else's idea, and make it work. But I
learnt something new from that.
I
remember reading an interview with Mark Haddon, the author of The Curious
Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time, a few years ago in which he was asked:
"You
said in an early interview that you'd always felt like you had your nose
pressed to the window of the House of Literature and they were all in
there – Ian McEwan was in the kitchen, and Jeanette Winterson was washing up.
Are you there too now, peeling the potatoes?"
His
answer resonates with me:
"You
realise eventually there is no place like that. What keeps you writing is that
you don't ever enter a place that feels like home at last. You're still going
uphill. There's still a little glowing light in the distance that you're trying
to get to. I was writing something recently and I was chuckling at something
I'd written, and my wife looked across and said, "Do you think that real
writers do that?" And I didn't even notice it was funny at first, because I
still think, "Oh, one day I'll be a real writer." "
Writers
come in all shapes and sizes but I suppose they all write for a reason.
They're maybe not fully at home in the world and maybe never will be. And
writing, at least for me, is an act of discovery which draws me away from that
feeling even if only for a time. Don't get me wrong. I'm not miserable. I like
a pint and a laugh. I'm happy enough. But I've always felt slightly off-kilter,
out of line, on the outside.
I
could never describe writing as a job because that implies I do it for money,
to occupy time or to soothe my ego. And none of those are true. So when I
sat down and planned out a new book today, it was because I was driven to do
it.
And
it's the book I want to write.
