Tee-Vee

I haven’t been writing so much.  At the beginning of October I gave version five of my architectural-murder-jealousy novel to friends from my MA– the sharing of work is something we regularly do – and promptly stopped.  I’ve been busy at real work.  I’ve been trying to whip what will hopefully become a best-of, if I may, DavidMarstonWrites into shape and I’ve muddled around with a short story that has become lost in a cul-de-sac of boredom. 

Last Wednesday, I finally got the judgement on my novel.  Afterwards, we went for food and more drinks.  I sat there feeling somewhat bruised and battered, my confidence smacked down into dark stinking pit.  It was constructive criticism, certainly, and each and every blow was one that I deserved and even expected, but still it stings.  You’d have thought I was used to it by now, but no, I have to crawl away and heal before I can come back for more. 

The most successful member of our little cohort was out the country and so, as the conversation turned to the writing life, the rest of us seemed a little embittered at both its failure to materialise, but also perhaps, we gave acknowledgement that this is what it will always be like.  Writing will be something done in the stolen moments.  It’s never going to take over from the commute, the open plan office, cheap coffee from dirty mugs and tedious processes designed to test your will to live.  I am writing this at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning whilst my girlfriend sleeps.  When I next write it will probably be in an evening when I’ve scheduled myself to be in because she’s out.  Late at night, early in the morning; the moments when I am not supposed to be elsewhere, those are the ones I snatch to write. 

But this lack of time combines with a more recent lack of focus creating a different problem.  I think I am becoming stupid.

A few years ago I felt as though I knew what was going on, that I could turn my attention to any subject and come up with something coherent, relevant and interesting to say.  Now, I increasingly feel isolated from the rest of the world.  I struggle to come up with things I want to discuss let alone finding the words with which I want to explore the world. 

My head feels full.

The feedback I got from my friends is all perfectly valid, not to mention greatly appreciated.  Instead, my bruises come from disappointment in myself to be more than average.  I still, still after all these years, get the basics wrong too frequently.  I can’t spell.  My grammar is poor. My vocabulary limited, and I have a tendency to use words incorrectly.  I feel more and more limited, unable to retain any additional information or convert it into new ideas. Even reading, I find myself scanning, failing to take it truly in.  I find myself wondering whether I can write at all.

So what’s changed?  Okay, I no longer take long, solitary walks around the city ruminating on the world at large.  I sleep more and drink less.  In return I have more happiness sprinkled through every day which seems like a fair swap and nightly intelligent conversation outweighs self-indulgent mulling.

Part of it, I suspect, is bandwidth.  October through to December were ridiculously busy at real work.  We’re trying to buy a house, which is proving intensely frustrating and time-consuming.  Life, as if has a knack of doing, keeps getting in the way.

My immediate response has been to blame my increased habitual sleep – I typically go to bed  a couple of hours earlier during the week and get up later at the weekend, yet still find myself more tired than I used to be.  Nah, it’s not that.  I’m unconvinced that I ever used those extra hours constructively. 

Perhaps they gave me more time to think.  Commuting by bike has certainly reduced the quiet brain space that I found on the train (and the number of amusing, intentionally or otherwise, conversations overheard), but in return my waist size has dropped again and I’m probably less likely to suffer cardiac arrest anytime soon. 

Meh, whatchya going to do?  Can you be physically fit, mentally adroit and, effectively, work two jobs all in one life?

My next target was television.  January has been a time of austerity and so we’ve been watching quite a lot of TV.  Not hours upon hours, but more than is usual.  Lovefilm is partially to blame, but so are all the reviews I read of supposedly amazing television shows – Borgen, Sprial, Broadwalk Empire, Treme, Breaking Bad, the Killing – none of which have I seen.  For me, mildly precociously, I’m interested in seeing the use of that big, widen canvas that the writers get to work.  It strikes me as being close to a novel.  Space for development, rather than a soap opera’s space for repetition, is an interesting tool.  Old TV shows used to work around the assumption that every episode was someone’s first and so the plot could only stray so far; now when programmes aren’t stumbled across and watched as live broadcasts but collected on digibox hard-drives or saved for intense Sunday-Tuesday night viewing the old rules no longer apply.

Yet, when I think about it, I’m not convinced we’re watching significantly more television.  Living alone, and then not just austere but completely and utterly broke, I watched every episode of the Wire when BBC2 showed all five series across a few short months.  My sister is a film fan and when I visited I’d return with up to a dozen classic movies to watch.  Plus I worked my way through all three series of the original House of Cards, Brideshead Revisited and that thing about the Swedish detective staring Kenneth Brannagh; whatever it was called. In the past two and a half years we’ve managed less than five series of the West Wing; we’re hardly gorging every night.

The point, I think, is that I’m just looking for excuses.

Or that, maybe, my belief in my supposed intelligence was misplaced.  Maybe I was fooled by only having myself and a bottle to talk to.

Back in the restaurant, the question moved onto whether the so-called writing life – of being bound up by books and words and working in solitary – was even desirable.  It’s an ideal, spending your whole life with words, but like anything the idea of it is more perfect than the reality.  Wouldn’t it, eventually, just get boring?

A week passes and the bruises heal a little.  We view another five houses and try to buy at least one of them; it doesn’t come off.  I take my irritation out on my bike, riding it too hard up the Old Kent Road, skirting between the traffic and shouting at an old man as he rides across the pavement and then the wrong way up the road.  Afterwards, I feel guilty for taking my annoyance out on a stranger.  His day might have been even worse.

The bruises fade, from red welts down to soft brown earthen shades.  I play around with the structure of my novel and think about the other points people made.  I spread papers all across the dining room table, moving sections around, trying to shift the drama to where it’s needed. 

I sit and look at the inch and a half tall stack of paper.  Two hundred and thirty odd pages.  It’s a start, it may be far from perfect but it’s a start and that is something to drawn confidence from.