What a grizzly and unpleasant occupation writing is! How many other jobs could you have where you go to work, slave for six solid hours and come home feeling that you’ve sweated blood and achieved nothing? True, today – my first day back after a break – I did write a few spoof headlines for ‘Newsjack’ (they’re looking for contributions) but then I discovered that I’d missed the deadline for my headlines so now I have to scan the real headlines so that I can make more spoof headlines ahead of the deadline. It’s making lines in my forehead…
Contenders for next week include the Trump ‘wall’ story latest and the ongoing Brexit saga. Watch this space…
I find it difficult working in the library because of the other people coming and going and because I don’t have a space that is mine. Unreasonably I regard the table at the far end as my space and get irritated if someone else bags it first: it’s also quite limiting that you only get three hours a day up to a total of seven a week on the computers. But when I work from home, is it any better? I get distracted by phone calls; I go in the kitchen to make a drink and end up loading the dishwasher. It’s hopeless. And when people say to me, as they sometimes do, how wonderful it must be to have a creative gift etc etc, I want to jump up and down and scream and say, ‘have you any idea what hell you go through to produce even the minutest piece of perfect prose?’ As Michael Caine used to say to people, if you wanted to do it, you’d be doing it. If you really wanted to be an actor you’d be out there doing it; working in rep, am-dram, street theatre – whatever, just so you could act. So if you want to be a writer, write. After all it costs next to nothing: what could prevent you?
Anyway, even though I got entangled once more in the impenetrable thicket that is my novel, the day wasn’t entirely wasted. After all, at the end of it I got to write this blog post…
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 