The writer between books: incoherent notes
newsletter: sept. 2004
Between books is a weird time for any writer. There's an element of delicious guilt; I'm playing truant from the demands of my imagination. A splendid laziness comes over me, when I deny any and all obligations to future projects...What does it matter if I write another book anyway? There are thousands of others out there for people to read. Bookstores are crammed with the things, display space is at a premium, the glossy books are always upfront - there's something a little depressing about the sheer quantity of books and how they seem to scream for attention. Who needs one from me? Isn't life nicer anyway when I can just run on idle...?
Yes and no. No and yes. I drift into reveries. I construct oddball characters and notions almost randomly; denied a life on the page, these weirdos swarm inside my head anyway, clamoring for attention. They seem driven by a will of their own: that sentence above where I claimed to 'construct oddball characters' - scratch that. It isn't accurate. They come unbidden, uninvited, gatecrashers at my solitary party. The trouble is, the writer has no easy OFF button. There are voices in the head. Half-constructed stories. Loose fragments. An undeveloped character tells me Go left on Waterloo Street, which is pretty meaningless...I don't have a context for it. I don't know why a character with no name and no identity should spring into mind out of nowhere and tell me to take a turning on a certain street - or maybe he's not from nowhere, maybe he's been forged in that nebulous foundry way at the back of the known brain where the fires burn night and day whether you tend them or you don't. (I believe there might be such a place: the hot core of the unconscious. How else do you explain the source of stories?)
It's worrisome this. Voices in the mind. Half-glimpsed faces you don't know. Broken sentences. An unfamiliar townscape floats away. Empty trams rattle past enormous buildings I've never seen in the real world. Cities I don't know. Harbours where uninhabited ships lie. Or an action that has no firm basis comes to me, floating on air: a bejeweled hand pulls a baby parrot from a Scottish tweed cap. Voila. Conjuring a conure. Where is this stream of stuff coming from?
My late grandfather appears, grizzled jaw, one eye slightly turned in, and tells me a story about life in Glasgow in the 1920s, something to do with a fishmonger slapping a woman's face with a chunk of haddock. And then he says he dreamed that. It never happened. And he fades. So I am invaded by stories told by dead people about things that never happened except in their dreams. Am I dreaming the dreams of the dead myself?
A man appears. Big raincoat. Fogged glasses. He says he's a spy. Or used to be. He wants to audition for a role in a book - no, he wants to be the goddam central character. Am I planning a book in which this man might be included? My mind says no, not yet, or if you are you don't really understand it. You never understand what you're doing anyway. A spy novel. I don't think so. The man has white hands and a poor complexion. I'm a spy and I want to be big in a book....Not my book, I say. I'm idling. I'm between stuff. I'm indecisive. What do I want to write?
Nothing. Lots of things. I yearn to write a great adventure story filled with active characters. No inner longings, no dread, no introspection, just men and women of action hurrying through the world to perform important duties. I want to write a tiny sterile literary novel in which nothing happens, and none of the characters are at all sympathetic and at least two of them are called Julian. I wouldn't mind writing a really serious crime novel, all gloomy interiors and half-finished sentences, a bleak moody thing more concerned with crime and morality than forensics and tedious cop procedure...
I realize what's happening. This always happens. I'm waiting to be led. I'm waiting for a character to take me by the hand and show me the way into his/her world, and introduce me to his/her story. I don't know who this person will be, or when it will happen, so I remain on idle, thinking the Guide is coming, I can hear him in the distance, yes indeed, he's on his way, one day, eventually....
But nothing. So meantime I am out of control, my head's
fevered, people come and go down the corridors of the brain,
some casting shadows, others not, some talking gibberish,
others maintaining enigmatic silences. The armies of future
fictions. Or just rejects from the foundry. I don't know. I
have no control over ther process. It runs me. I obey. But
first I have to wait, amidst all the trash and gossip and
whispers and shouts and threats and promises that explode as
quickly as they arrive.... This is writing, toots.
Whose voice was that?
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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