Out of ideas

Having spent two whole weeks off in the real world skulking about in an office, Reed has come back here only to go away again. Reed will be Abroad for a week. I am sure Abroad has a plenitude of computers with Internet access, but will she have access to the access? She might. And she might not. You will have to wait and see.

Me? Oh I’m the Editor. I tend to get shoved in a closet and forgotten when Reed is on holiday. I’m sure she thinks this is a good thing. Damned if I know what she’ll get up to, off the leash, unchecked, ungoverned, and left to the thrall of her own judgment. I have visions of her being chased out of a tavern by pitch-fork-waving locals because, as we know, when undercaffeinated she carries on like Tallulah Bankhead channelling Mother Teresa. Does that image make you half as uncomfortable as it makes me?

But she has promised to take this book with her, and work on her poetry, and post whatever she comes up with on her return. Oh we few, we happy few, we band of bothered.

Hello. My name is Reed and I am a Blocked Writer. If you live with a Blocked Writer, you have my deepest sympathy. Do we, or do we most certainly, make your life hell too if we can?

Allow me to clarify [They will stop you how? - Ed]. Oh, very well, please keep reading while I qualify. Writer’s Block, now, seems to come in two main types. There’s the sort of person who would just love love love to write and yet has absolutely not the faintest what to write about. Not so much a Blocked Writer as a Writer-shaped hole in the scenery of the thus-afflicted’s mind. And there’s the sort of person who has dozens of ideas, some fully fledged and trailing entire colonies of plots, sub-plots and sequels, and yet when sat down in front of the paper this kind of person suffers a fit of self-consciousness so acute that they burst into tears and spend the rest of the morning ODing on coffee and Malteazers. If one is of the first sort one probably suffer the agonies of the damned and so on, but I can’t help, or even comment, as since the dawn of my infantine consciousness I have been plagued with stories. I have an endless supply of things to write about. I just can’t actually write about them. Writer’s Block. The Writer exists, but is Blocked [No doubt by the fatuous mini-traumas of a reasonable childhood that any more robust psyche would have cheerfully converted into three best-sellers by now - Ed]

So, this person you live with is trying to write. Say they have the day off work, or (oh, God help you) don’t work, possibly because of the writing thing. You arrive home of an evening, looking very much forward to not being harangued or asked to do stuff, and there is the writer, either still in jim-jams or, worse, dressed in that tee-shirt with the stain and torn sleeve, knickers and flip-flops, slumped in front of the telly watching the Simpsons, clutching a vast mug of cold tea and eating toast. What’s more, the washing-up is still in the sink, and has had four more mugs, three knives, a bowl and a pair of chopsticks added to it. And the washing machine has been sitting for hours, full of wet laundry, slowly impregnating it with a near-permanent smell of damp.

‘What on earth have you been doing all day?’ you ask, perfectly reasonably, as you shovel all the stinky wet laundry back into the machine for another wash. To your suprise and irritation, Writer behaves exactly like a sit-com teenager, bellowing something indistinct about ‘hassle’ and ‘blocked’ and when things are getting truly warped ‘at least you get paid for sitting bored out of your tree in front of a computer all day!’, and slamming the bathroom door after them. You can hear the taps being turned on and a strong smell of bubble-bath fills the landing.

The truth is, there is no excuse for this. Yes, I know, I was there, I was that soldier, and I had no excuse for it either.

The people who live with blocked writers, and support said writers, financially and otherwise, are indeed heroes, full of faith and trust and hope in the future. Not one of them deserves a surly helpless overly-bathed flip-flop-wearing slob in the house. So why do they get one? What is actually going on, secret even to themselves, behind the eyes and in the hearts of the two participants?

The following examples have all happened to assorted friends family and acquaintances, and, yes, myself, but I’m not saying who did what to whom when. That would be unfair indeed. I am calling the participants the Significant Other (SO) and the Writer (W). If you recognise yourself, oops, sorry. We can always have a row about it later.

- SO actually owns the computer, and insists on using it in the evenings regardless of the fact the evenings are when W does their best work (if you don’t have the cash for your own computer, this one has no real solution. By all means, write your novel long-hand if you can. Some people can’t. Bugger).

- SO feels abandoned when W wants to stay up until three am writing, and uses emotional blackmail to get W to come to bed with them (NB, this is not usually about sex). Even if the emotional blackmail fails, the sulking the next day works.

- SO finds an entire weekend has been wasted in watching W bang their uncommunicative head on the computer keyboard, and pressurises W to NOT write at weekends in the future for the sake of the relationship (especially difficult to deal with if W also works full-time).

- SO doesn’t really like the genre W is writing in, and can’t help but let this slip.

- W feels that they will have to repay every penny, second, deed and word of SO’s generosity, in spades, at some future date (this is probably W’s problem. I blame the parents).

- SO has deep faith in W as a great artist who will do something fantastic one day. W has no idea how to deal with disappointing SO by being mediocre or even unpublished for the rest of their life.

- SO has no faith in W, but is supporting/ indulging them anyway, out of love. W knows this and is filled with the burning bile of guilty resentment.

- W is writing on subjects out of SO’s experience and comprehension. Nasty little jabs of envy and feeling left out ensue. W, not being a tomfool idiot, can sense this. Or, worse, W, being a tomfool idiot, has no idea and keeps inadvertently rubbing it in by saying things like ‘Oh, I won’t bore you with it,’ or ‘Well, I’d rather ask so-and-so’s opinion on it, he has read such-and-such and you haven’t.’

- SO longs to be the most important thing (not just person, but thing, of any kind) in W’s life. This is the raw deal to end all raw deals.

- SO is filled with shudders of embarrassment every time they have to explain to someone-or-other what exactly it is that W does all day. Because someone-or-other is often baffled and tends to make jokes about SO being taken for a ride.

- SO does indeed feel they are being taken for a ride.

- W is indeed taking SO for a ride.

- SO has appointed themself Editor-In-Chief [And how many of those can one writer stand? - Ed] and spends the evenings kicking W’s sandcastles to bits in the name of Being Supportive and Getting Involved.

- SO has appointed themself Chief Whip and Cheer Leader, and now Expects Results.

- SO is also a Writer. Sibling Rivalry knows no bounds of sense, age, or actual relatedness. It is enough that The Other is muscling in on your turf.

- SO is happy to be supportive as long as they get to be a Martyr to the Cause as well, and Suffer in a Long sort of way.

- SO is happy to be supportive, understands the risky nature of Making Things Up for Fun and Profit, knows nothing may come of it, loves W dearly, gets most of the jokes, likes the genre, and likes boasting about W at parties. W is actually really truly a tosser.

You may be asking yourselves where the heck I’ve been. If you find out, do tell; I’d quite like to know myself.

[Is that it? I thought you had some profound point or other to share - Ed]

Oh very well. I’ve been staying with my parents. The menage includes an assortment of siblingery, cousinage, nuncleness and auntification, and a toddler, of whom I am the proud aunt. And as a proud aunt, I of course spent thundering great chunks of the week on hands and knees pretending to be a cat visiting a post office.

[Adorable. Now, about that point?]

The cat thing was relevant. [To whom?] To my point. This profound point you want me to write about. [Get on with it then]

Fine. I was getting on with it, thank you.

Anything to add? No?

As I was intending to say, I discovered that creative writing Does Not Happen in the presence of large quantities of family (or in the presence of Inner Editors. [I am still here, you know]). Especially family that photographed you in nappies, flicking porridge across the walls, grinning from ear to ear and squeaking ‘fuck!’ in two-year-old glee. Or family that has just seen you scampering up and down the hall on hands and knees that very morning, twittering ‘miaow miaow, I’ve got a letter!’ to what you thought was a highly appreciative audience of only one. There were a couple of quiet evenings, with no guests to be polite to. I had planned on borrowing a smidgeon of my mother’s broadband and feeding the blog therewith. Somehow, I cooked dinner. Oddly enough, I ended up watching movies with a bunch of morosely giggling teenagers (how do they do it? How on earth can one creature be morose and giggly at the same time? Is it hormones? Is it drugs?) because the computer and the TV share a room. I finally got to the computer and midnight found me playing Tetris and discussing the family’s current crop of bellyflopping marriages with my mother. I even tried to explain about the blog, but my mother was far more interested in my week in the office. In which I merely disembowelled photocopiers and accidentally [why, do people normally do this on purpose?] glued my hair to a copy of Virgil’s Eclogues.

At the end of the visit, I realised I hadn’t written a damn thing. Not so much as a To-Do list.

Now, I wanted to make a deep and poignant point about the self-consciousness our families wittingly or unwittingly inflict on us. I wanted to discuss the impossibility of taking myself seriously when surrounded by people who still have that (short) poem about furry bumblebees I wrote age seven. How can I give your time and attention to, of all things, writing? My sister has been telling me how pretentious I am since I was eleven. My mother thinks I am fuzzy-wuzzy-stripy-buzzy adorable. My aunt reminds me of my childhood chronic inability to spell ‘whether’. And obviously, being pretentious, adorable and stupid as a bucket of pig-nuts, how could I possibly think I could write? I wanted to make quite a big deal of the emotional scarring this extensive lack of faith in my abilities has had on me. I wanted to weep, and announce that they had all given me Writer’s Block, and quote Douglas Adams*.

But the truth is, really, that when you come right down to it, I am a lazy cow. Watching the Matrix (again. Crush on Hugo Weaving. Sorry) and gossiping won.

Sorry.

*I paraphrase, but he used to describe the work of a writer as “staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank screen until your forehead starts to bleed.”