Today I hit a writing wall. It’s not so much a block as a realisation that I could go on indefinitely in my current direction because I like to describe the sound that metal banisters make in a tiled stairwell and the lemony colour of a sunny courtyard. And I like those lovely quantifiable word counts.
But I know there’s some edge missing. So I took my own advice, and went meta. I wrote as usual, but I wrote about the story rather than writing the story itself. I discovered that I had been revealing too much as I went along. Because Harriet wants this thing, she breaks this law, and here’s what her daughter Mary thinks about that. I realised that if I hid some or part of Harriet’s actions and motivation from Mary, I could make that part of the subject of the story. And in needing to discover why Harriet did such crazy things, I might cure Mary of her insipient passivity.
So that was a thing.
I ran in the sun. I wrote code. I rephrased translated error messages for a client. As I ran I thought about when I was a child and a local boy rode his bike at me on the pavement, how I refused to move for him and how he threw his bike down pushed me up against a lamppost, his hand round my neck. I remember saying to him “you don’t want me… you want Michael up the road.” I can’t remember now why I thought Michael would be a viable alternative victim, but I’ve clearly kept an awareness of having been so spineless with me since then. I wondered if I could give that to a character. Would it define him, or would the character consciously attempt to make amends when tested as an adult? Am I a better person than that now? I hope so, but fear not.
I worried about short story structure, and how I think there’s a magic secret somewhere that eludes me. I bought Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents The Art of the Short Story. I figured I could maybe peel these exemplars apart at their sentences and perhaps pull something warm and beating from one or two. I hatched a plot to write a short story a week for a year. I worried that this was taking on too much. For a while I just worried.
I hung up washing. The cherry tree is giving up fruit for the first time since we planted it. Raspberries have appeared. I despair of our corn, but the beans and peas are going crazy. I poured boiling water on the weeds in the path and felt bad about it for a moment. I sprayed soapy water on the lemon tree in the conservatory — it’s sticky thanks to the oozings of scale. I failed to make bread. And I bought the beer I am about to drink.
