Plodding on

Some weeks it’s just hard. Balsam-control season has just ended - hurray! - and we’re into the post-breeding season work. Brushcutting and raking off rank vegetation on heathlands is hard but satisfying work. Over the last few years the heather and western gorse have been slowly spreading; it's really satisfying to see the tiny feathery heather plants popping up away from the main patches.

I don’t know if the physical tiredness is to blame, but my imagination has just curled up in dark corner and gone to sleep, presenting a moody posterior to me all week. I’ve plodded on with my wake-up scribblings at breakfast and a couple of leaden paragraphs of stories in the evenings, but it’s been difficult. Nothing flows. Every sentence is earthbound, turgid and lumpen. It’s been the sort of week where I’m terrified I’ll die in the night and my sisters will find this twaddle on my desktop and be mortified on my behalf. I can trust them to do the right thing and burn the lot, but the thought of anyone reading what I’ve written this week makes me prickle with embarrassment. 

There’s an exercise I came across in a creative writing book a few months ago. Take a favourite book, open it at random, and copy out about half a page. That’s it. Pencil, pen or keyboard, it doesn’t matter. The exercise is about the physical effort of writing and the time it takes. 

It's one I’ve come back to a couple of times, because it reminds me, in a visceral way, that every author of every book ever written wrote it by doing just that: sitting down and getting the words on the page. On weeks like this, when I’m staring at what I’ve written and the internal editor is saying ‘That is RUBBISH, who are you trying to kid?’, it really helps to picture the authors of the books on my shelves beavering away in their rooms, at their desks, in libraries, at the corner of the kitchen table or wherever they managed to make time and space for their writing.   

They all wrote their books the same way, the same way I'm writing this post. One word at a time.