Words

Having written somewhere between a third and a half of a million of them in the last year, I gave words a week off whilst on holiday last week.

My rationale was simple. A doctor doesn’t seek to mend people when she is on holiday, and a hairdresser doesn’t dress hair. They use the time to relax and revitalise, so as to come back recharged and, hopefully, better. Thus with words.

It turns out once again that words don’t quite work like that.

For once, I had no problem in writing nothing. Beyond a few emails and a couple of social media posts, I ignored their written version entirely. No blog; no articles; no tidying up the first draft of the current book; no work on the proposal for the next, no nothing. Just beer, seafood and walks along the coast paths.

Occasionally, I wondered how they were getting on, but no more than that. I saw occasional things I vaguely wanted to write about: the laundry-white backs of the gannets as they plunged after pilchards off Gurnard Point; the miracle of Liverpool and Spurs getting through to the final of the Champions’ League; the tackiness of de Savary’s legacy at Lands End. But I left them to it, and stuck to my abstinence.

Then last night, when I got back, I found that they didn’t work any more.

Like a lawnmower dragged out of the shed for the first time in Spring, it didn’t matter how many times I pulled the starter cord, the engine never fired. I needed to write a couple of things for someone, and found myself just staring, not for the first time, at a blank screen and wondering what came next. And the longer I stared at the screen, the less came to me, and the more I got distracted.

Which is where I am now, in a place that is simultaneously scary and exciting. Scary because writing is what I ‘do’ these days, and I can’t really afford not to be able to do it, and once, when this happened, I wrote nothing for eighteen months. Exciting because sometimes we all need to go beyond where the pavement ends, and where the effect of the last streetlight seeps into black shadow. I guess you get to an age where you need those microscopic slivers of peril intruding into your safe, planned, comfortable life, if only because they serve to remind you for an instance of the real abyss that lies in wait for you out there.

So what you are reading is no more than a real-time experiment that was born in my bed at around four this morning. And the experiment is that I will just sit in front of the screen, mug of tea in hand, and write about not being able to write until something happens one way or another. I will just try to bump start the flow of words until either the engine fires or, well, the silence continues. I will not accept the beginnings of what people call writer’s block, because I don’t believe in it, and because I can’t afford it.

And I don’t carewhat you think, because I am doing it for me, and not for you, and because part of the deal with myself is that I have to put the words out there, to give them a chance to be ridiculed, or recognised. And if that sounds impolite, it’s not meant to; of course I care deeply about what you think, but on this occasion I can’t afford to. This is a blog written for a readership of one. It has taken three hours and three mugs of tea where normally it would take a sixth of that time.

But if any part of it has tapped any part of you on the metaphorical shoulder and reminded you of the fragile grip you exert on the routine of your competences, so much the better.

At their best, that’s what words do.