The coffee machine needs coffee beans. This somehow becomes an incredible injustice, that I have to fill it up, have to attend to this chore when I should be writing. There’s no juice in the fridge, I have to scrabble about in a cupboard to find another carton. This means cutting it free of its multi-pack and opening that fiddly tab thing that stops it leaking. Another injustice. The minutes are draining away, the morning has begun and I should be writing. I am still only half-awake and oblivious of any perspective, of the minor nature of these inconveniences in comparison with … well (gestures at the whole world). After what seems to be a creativity-threatening age I arrive in front of my laptop. It is not that there is a blank screen in front of me, nor that I have no ideas. It is just that … the interruptions in the morning routine. No, it’s that I did not sleep well, waking to turn over as if my brain was startled by its own body. No, it’s that my desk needs a dust, or that thumping of the neighbour as she prepares breakfast. All these things, they have ruined the calm of the morning which, clearly, is needed for the words to flow.
I sit. The house is quiet, the dog sighs next to me. It is none of these. I am bored with my story. I could write some more of this scene or that one but I don’t want to. I’ve become disinterested in what is happening, it feels flat, pedestrian. The characters, they are fine, I still rather like them, though I worry they have not yet fully come to life. But their story, it needs something more. That scene where two of them meet in a high place? They just talk and then … they go back down. Why have them up there if the height is not going to intervene in some dramatic way? No-one leaps or screams or ends up dangling over a fearful drop. Nothing comes careering out of the sun at them. The place doesn’t shake or crumble around them.
The screen has not changed in front of me. It is not blank – there is the text I wrote yesterday. I close the app and open my journal. I write about writing. It is a kind of cheat, it feels like writing, I look as if I am sitting at my desk ‘doing’ writing, at the appointed hour. And – let me be honest – it is easier, being freed of any responsibility towards plot, description, character, style. I write about my boredom with my story, my frustration with that scene. No-one will ever see this so it does not matter that I have used different versions of the word ‘bored’ multiple times.
What does happen though is I think, constructively, about my story. The act of journalling about it forms a sort of helpful process, stops me descending into just criticism (more like whingeing). I can feel that bit of my brain that likes to solve problems waking, taking the problem before it, grasping at the coffee and starting to tease out solutions. It wakes me up. Things happen, realisations – why does anything hugely dramatic need to happen in a scene that takes place in a high place? Is it the location that is the problem or is there something about the exchange between the two characters that needs revising? Yes, that feels right – their conversation feels too light, it is their first meeting after many years, they have a difficult history and they talk as if they are two friends meeting for coffee after a busy weekend. It may not need the scenery to act up, it can just stay there and be lofty – the characters need to liven up.
The dog sighs again. This time much louder, she is hamming it up a bit because its breakfast time. I stop writing. Instead of thinking about minor inconveniences, I can feel some engine in my head turning over the solution to this scene, these two characters and I sense I can return to it soon. It could mean re-writing it, it could mean adding or editing but it is at least writing.
