Asleep

            Last week, I took annual leave. My wife and I had one day at the seaside, then I spent the rest of the time decorating our bathroom. The heat was fierce. I went through the whole week half asleep. I listened to radio dramas (there’s an excellent free podcast called Unforgiven on the BBC’s I-player) plus an online lecture by David Harvey which was meant to simplify Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (it didn’t).

            I kept playing that Tears For Fears album SongsFrom The Big Chair. I don’t know what that was about. Surely nothing as banal as: it sounded good and made me happy? I remember when it originally came out (on a vinyl disc- remember those?) in the 1980s. I thought then that it was Prog Rock, which was to be detested. There were only eight tracks in it, five of which they released as singles, which was a rip-off (we used to care about such things back then). But, well, the songs are good. They seemed to speak to me. I’m not even sure what the lyrics mean. A lot about overcoming mental trauma, I think, caused by families.

            The seaside was a bit irritating. There was a long walk from the station to the beach, which featured nothing but buildings and motorway. The heat stored itself in the concrete and the sunlight reflected in the glass. Or perhaps it was simply the fact that I wasn’t really writing. At times like those, my life seems to lose its savour, even if everything else is going well.

            Every morning when I wake up, the fact that I’m not writing hits me, along with the knowledge that I can’t stand my knowledge and that I haven’t got a lot of money. I’m a storyteller. If I’m not telling a story, what’s the point of me? I’ve been writing Morning Pages and doing Writing Practice, but I still feel like there’s something missing.

            I bought myself an A5 spiral notebook which I called my working-out book. I hold it lengthways and on each page I write words or phrases as they come to me, drawing a bubble around each one. It’s something like Mind Mapping but not nearly so organized.

            On one sheet, I wrote that I wanted to write a novel, and then jotted down things like “80,000 words”, “contemporary”, “straightforward”.  On another sheet, I wrote “An obstacle to love”, which is one of Polti’s 36Dramatic Situations. That’s pretty much as far as I’ve got. I don’t know who is going to fall in love, or with whom. I don’t know what the obstacle is, or whether the story ends happily. I can’t even say that I’m burning to write a love story. I could have picked another of the situations at random, such as Discovery of the dishonour of a loved one or Revenge for the death of kindred. I’m challenging myself to come up with something, hoping that, at some point, my muse will join in.