Thursday 27 October 2011

Head space

I've been out and about a lot recently - Plymouth, Dorset, Yorkshire, Cumbria, Norfolk and Suffolk, all in the last month. But this week the family table was turned - I stayed at home while everyone else went away. From Sunday morning till Tuesday evening I had the whole house to myself, and ate alone at that turned table. It's the first time that has happened in almost twenty years.

Normally I cram my fiction writing in around daily life. Which means - because I do need eight hours of sleep a night - that there's never enough time left for it. It's frustrating. I have stories buzzing round my head that I simply can't get on paper because I'd have to be up at three in the morning.

So for two days, I got up late. I ate, drank coffee, cleaned the loos, put vaseline on the hens' legs, and didn't speak to anyone. I just let the story I've been trying to finish for ages swill around inside my head, along with the muesli crumbs and the leg mites.

And at about lunchtime, I sat down to write. I got up only to drink tea, eat chocolate, and pace around the house and garden. If I got really stuck, I went for a walk. Mid-evening, when I came to a place in the story where I needed to leave it alone, I made an omelette, drank a glass of wine. Then I returned to my desk and wrote again, till I was too tired to look at the screen.

I'd take a book from my pile and sit and read for another hour or two before bed. Hilary Mantel's A Change of Climate, Gabrielle Wittkop's The Necrophiliac, and Richard Platt's Smuggling in the British Isles have finally made it from the unread pile to the shelves where books worth keeping go. I read short stories by Tove Jansson, Fay Weldon, Barry Unsworth, Janet Frame. I began Alice Oswald's collection The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile.

I watched no television. I didn't tweet, check Facebook, or phone or email anyone. I did listen to Radio 4.

And I finished my story, in a way that I really couldn't have predicted two days before. I began another one too, in the final hour before I collected my daughter from the station.

Yesterday I returned to writing the magazine piece that's due in next week. I went to the supermarket. I cooked dinner at the usual time. I resumed communication with my family and the outside world. But there's still a space inside my head where the new story is swimming vigourously.

If I can finish the magazine piece, I'll write the new story next week, when everyone's out, before I start the next piece of work. I won't have the same luxury of complete silence, and absolute focus on the story - I'll cook, I'll talk to people, hug some of them, I'll have to go to bed at a sensible time. But that space is still there and I'm guarding it carefully.

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