When your plans meet the real world and gratitude fades
Now here’s a thing that always seems to happen. Work intrudes. The real world intrudes.
My novel’s first draft is sitting waiting for my return — and I have already postponed that until the start of February so I can really forget much of what is written in there and approach it fresh — and I am riding a high of confidence, looking to start writing other things. And now work has come my way. External work. Paid work that I can’t really turn down. Work that is not related to writing in any way.
This is a good thing for the family finances. It feels like a bad thing for my creativity.
And yet I know that is all complete bollocks.
When I was younger and first thought of myself as a writer, I was fortunate enough to have close to four or five years in which I had no full-time work yet never went without food or shelter — or love, really — and had all the time I needed in which to write. And the result? I didn’t write.
In fact, at many times of my life I have had time and opportunity to write. Each time, no writing was done.
But I still look for excuses. Even with the excitement of the completed first draft behind me, I look to find a way to avoid doing any more. Fear strikes again.
I am in Leeds tonight. For work. Before I left London on the train I bought two John Berger books from the Waterstones in Piccadilly: and our faces, my heart, brief as photos and here is where we meet. The lower case letters are deliberate. Or I suppose I should have written ‘sic’ after the titles.
I turn to books in times of stress in much the same way I used to turn to alcohol. The consequences of book buying tend to be less dramatic, even taking its effect on my bank balance into account. Or taking its effect on my bank account on balance. The books are a sort of reward to myself but I’m not sure how to justify them. Berger’s death a couple of days ago makes me want to read more of his books. I could have borrowed them from the library.
So, I’m two books to the good, I am in a luxury hotel with the tab picked up by someone else, and I will be paid for a day of meetings tomorrow. Then I shall be home with my family with stories to tell (and books to smuggle up to my study). My eldest moves to Malta on Saturday and managed to find a place to live today. That’s good news and will make the first part of her stay less stressful. She won’t need to buy any books.
Crazy how easy it is to find shit among the diamonds. So I shall write more and cut out some of the time wasters I let control aspects of my life and get the work done that will earn me some money in the months ahead.
And there is the other thing that happens. Write this shit out of your system. It works.
