Trickle

                My writers’ group have broken up for the term. I didn’t feel all that inspired at the start of the term. When it came to my evening, the evening when I was supposed to bring something to read, for the rest of the group to critique, I didn’t really have anything. Nothing that I was excited about, anyway. I nearly asked to pass. In the end, I brought in a story which I had lying about. Everybody was polite, but it wasn’t my best, and I felt like I’d let everybody down.

                There were days when I simply couldn’t face going. Racing there from work on the underground, bolting down a sandwich in half an hour. And I didn’t know what to say about other people’s pieces. The teacher would look expectantly around. I felt slightly like Arthur Dent having in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy having to be polite about the Vogon captain’s poetry. Actually, that’s not fair. We’ve got good writers in our group; but I’m the sort of person who finds it easier to say what I don’t like than what I do.

                Around the same time, I felt like I had less and less time to write. And I didn’t know what to write anyway. I’ve been scratching around looking for ideas for horror stories. At times, I felt like my whole life was hanging on coming up with the next story. And it doesn’t, of course. There’s plenty of good stuff around, just go to the Classics section of your local library. I felt that, if I could only start writing a piece of fiction, not only would it sort itself out along the way, but so would the rest of my life. The fun was ebbing out of it.

                I was supposed to be using this year as a fallow year, to replenish my unconscious’s ‘soil’. I was going to write nothing but Morning Pages and Writing Practice pages, I wasn’t even going to think about a finished project. I’d heard that Nick Hornby does this, has years when he doesn’t write anything, but gears himself up for his next novel. But somehow along the way I kept forcing myself to think of stories, and then the trickle dried out.