Writing

The Girlf wants me to write a book. The compulsion to story-tell grips her often and she hides her self away with my laptop, churning out thousands of words at a sitting in search of that first book that will get her published.
She’s a great writer. The snippets I’ve been allowed to read are very, very good but she’s protective of her work. In its embryonic form it is fragile and precious and secret. Only when several thousand words are in place, several thousand that she is happy with, only when the story has condensed from the swirling cloud of ideas and starts to take form am I allowed to look and give an opinion.
An avid follower and inspiration of my blog she wants me to take things a stage further and actually start working on a longer piece, a fiction but I’m apprehensive. It isn’t the workload, I could probably churn out in excess of a thousand words a day, it is the actual story. What would I write about?
Blogging is easy. I’m writing about myself, it’s a cosy warm retreat for the narcissist, an hour and a thousand words of me, me, me is very relaxing. The difficulty would be translating this style, this form into a fiction. There would have to be a semblance of autobiography for it to work but I would have to actually invent characters to fill this world. That’s where I blank, much as I like writing I have no story and no protagonists and even though I’m in no doubt that I could ramble on for eighty thousand words what would be the point. My opus, my Tropic of Cancer wouldn’t even get looked at, the modern publishing world being light years away from the fiction I grew up on.
Still, the egotist in me is rather enamoured with the idea of writing a book. I wrote a lot as a kid, clanking away on an old typewriter, supplementing my lack of experience with a hefty dollop of plagiarism. Back then I wanted to be a horror writer, I wanted to write ghost stories and I’d churn out a few hundred words here and there right up until the day of my first hard-on on which a lot of things fell away.
I’ve tried to get back into it since but it is only this blog that has borne fruit. I suppose the format suits me. Short, completely open ended and public. It’s easier to write knowing at least one other person will read it. It obligates you to write.
The month that the internet was down I started getting withdraw symptoms. I missed the act of writing, the act of editing and the act of posting. I missed the re-editing once I’d posted because I have a tendency to overlook punctuation or grammatical errors.
That month certainly showed me how much I enjoy writing and maybe, quite maybe I should push forward and try and write something longer but the stumbling block is still there, the subject matter.
The Girl is full of stories, she bursts with them. When one takes her it’s akin to being pregnant. It gestates inside her. She’s careful and secretive. No-one can know until it’s safely imbedded within her, no-one can know until it is viable and has started to take shape, until it has a life of its own and begins to grow effortlessly. Only then will she open up and announce the prospective arrival but even at this time there is still the chance of tragedy. The chance the life will ebb and it will die.
I few months ago I finished a first chapter. I liked it, I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, it worked and it was subtle but even though it opened up avenues for the tale to unfold and ideas swirled around me I never wrote the second chapter. Two and half thousand words hang in perpetuity on my hard drive waiting for me to return. My protagonist taps his foot and drums his fingers, the orbiting characters, their foundations established, await me to flesh them out. I’ve been neglectful.
However the story isn’t dead, mainly because there isn’t one yet. All there is is a starting point, some characters and an event that ended chapter one so theoretically I could pick it up at anytime and continue but I haven’t. I should really if only to see where it goes. I should.

The Girlf thinks it’s crap.