Words words words

Where do they come from?

I finished a book last week. By which, I mean I finished writing one. Inasmuch as a writer ever dares say they’ve finished. You stand back from the canvas, find yourself unable to resist a closing dab here and a final dot there, but at last, a voice says, “It’s done!” and that is that. Now comes the envoi … “Go little book”, as Chaucer, Spenser, and other poets liked to say - conjuring the image of the book as a doughty little boat that is set upon a stream to float bravely off into its future, now independent of its author.

This book of mine has simultaneously been the quickest to emerge from my pen¹ and also the slowest. The quickest because it’s taken the fewest hours in terms of actual composition, the slowest because of the unprecedentedly long time between having it set before me as a book I had to write and my eventual sitting down to it.

Put it this way: imagine that your first book emerged from you after three months of intense writing when you were 25 years old. Your second book took you twice as long—six months—when you were 28 years old. In reality, Book One took you twenty-five years to write and Book Two, three years. Which is to say, you were writing those books all the time before and in between the actual hours you sat at your desk². Writing happens in the unconscious, in the hours trying to sleep, in the hours actually sleeping, in the hours listening to music, walking, playing with a yoyo or reading other people’s books. It might even happen when you’re watching TV, though I have a feeling less so than the foregoing pursuits – perhaps that is just the guilty echoes of those distant adult voices of my childhood, constantly accusing television of rotting the mind.

So, to my case (FWIW): I told my publishers the best part of five years ago that I was going to produce this book, the fourth and final volume in a series retelling Greek myths. The third volume, Troy, came out in 2019, and the idea was to give myself a year off and do my best to deliver number four, Odyssey, in 2021. You might think that the pandemic and its associated cascade of lockdowns from March 2020 onwards would have afforded me the most perfect opportunity to deliver the book early. But. Unlike many others, I was profoundly uninspired to write during Covid. Just couldn’t bring myself to sit and do it. Don’t know why. And when we were all finally allowed out, blinking in the sunlight, I was too keen to satisfy the other part of my professional life, performing this way and that on public stages of one kind or another, to turn my mind to writing. So the book, rather like its hero, Odysseus, was delayed and delayed on an Ogygia³ of abeyance and procrastination.

But all the time the book was germinating, sprouting and preparing itself for harvest in the vasty fields of my unconscious. I had the advantage of knowing the plot. Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Euripides and a clutch of Anons had done all that work for me a long time ago. For the next three and half years then, when I was not writing, when I was accusing myself of shirking and avoiding writing, the unconscious was nonetheless every day and every night, selecting, discarding, ordering, reordering, considering, ditching, tweaking and twiddling.

I sat down to concentrate on writing the whole book on March 2nd this year and flung down the final full stop on March 31st. To be completely square with you, I had already written two episodes - a fair section of what scholars call The Telemachy was done, as was Odysseus’s arrival on Scheria and his meeting with Nausicaa.

Odysseus stuck on Ogygia …

I could say that Odyssey took me less than a month to complete or that it took four years. Hence, the earlier statement about the book being simultaneously the slowest to come from my pen and the quickest. In fact, I could say it cost far more grumpy head-scratching and coffee-swilling to dream up and deliver the five Substack articles I have produced for you lovely subscribers in that same wedge of time than it did to complete the book itself.

We’re working when we’re not working. That’s about the size of it. It’s all so mysterious and out of our control that it makes more sense to invoke the presence of a Muse or Muses than to pretend it’s all one’s own achievement. I would invoke a Muse, of course, being a lover of Greek mythology, but you can adduce a djinn or genie if you prefer, or the elves in that fairytale who cobble the shoemaker’s shoes for him at night while he’s asleep… which is perhaps an allegory of the whole idea.

Which brings me to a fine Hollywood joke.

Elwood is a screenwriter, and he has been commissioned for a script, his first. The studio has set a deadline of two months. Seven weeks have passed now, and he is getting desperate. Every day, he sits at his computer and tries to type. But he isn’t a third of the way in. Completely stuck.

Elwood stands, sits, kicks the walls. Goes for short walks. Goes for long walks. Nothing comes. He realises that he is either going to have to plead for an extension or pay back the studio’s commission. The night before delivery is due, he sits in his armchair and stares malevolently at the computer. He knows he has to work all night at something, but instead, he falls asleep.

He is awoken at three in the morning by the sound of typing. He opens his eyes and cannot believe what he sees. Two elves are bouncing up and down on the keyboard. Five more elves take pages out of the printer and carefully stack them into a neat sheaf.

‘What are you doing? What’s going on?’ cries Elwood.

‘We’re elves, and we’re writing your screenplay for you.’

‘Wh … ? Huh?’

‘It’s what we do. There aren’t so many shoemakers around these days, so we help out script makers instead.’

‘Yes, but scripts have to have stories…’ Elwood picks up the top page on the sheaf, ‘…and characters and plot twists…’ his voice trails off. The script is good—very good. He takes another piece of paper and another. It’s better than he could possibly have imagined. In fact, it’s brilliant.

He tells them so. ‘Guys, this is amazingly good!’

‘Happy to help, sir.’

‘Can I get you anything? Food, drink?’

‘No, no, we’re ok. Just have three more scenes to finish and then we’re done and we’ll leave you be.’

They are as good as their word. Twenty minutes later Elwood has in his hands a completed screenplay of dazzling quality and originality.

He sends it off to his agent first thing in the morning. A day and a half later, he hears back. The studio is beyond impressed and pleased, and they want a five-picture contract with Elwood. They offer a sum of money that knocks him sideways with joy.

Six months later, he is sitting in his armchair watching script number three chug from the printer. There is now an Oscar on his mantelpiece. Elves are bouncing on the keyboard. All is well.

‘Guys,’ says Elwood for the hundredth time, ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can get you? Coffee, cookies, marshmallows, anything?’

‘Seriously, we’re good … just happy doing our job.’

‘But money. Surely some money? I’ll give you half, two-thirds of what I’m earning. It’s only fair.’

‘Kind thought, but we don’t use money…’

‘Tell you what though …’ one of the elves on the keyboard stops bouncing up and down, ‘I suppose there is one thing …’

‘Name it!’ says Elwood, thrilled that there might be any means of repayment.

‘You might consider …’ said the elf, ‘that is to say … if we could have, maybe, a screen credit?’

‘Are you out of your fucking minds? Fuck you!’

Muse or Muses, elves, genies, djinns or sprites, no matter how mysterious or even mystical the process of writing may be, no matter how varied the sources of ‘inspiration’, we will take all the credit going, thank you very much.

I’m not even sure that I am correct in this claim that there is all this work going on in the unconscious. For all I know, I could be exactly wrong. Maybe it is only when were are chained to our desks consciously wrestling with it that writing truly happens.

I remember getting stuck on a plot problem while writing my second novel. I just couldn’t sort it out. I tried everything. Walks. Swims. Crosswords. Even rounds of golf. Seriously. Nothing. This was a devastating block. Finally, in despair, I started a diary, a journal, into which I poured all my frustration. It went something like this.

“Dear Diary, I am mad. Hopping mad. I just can’t solve this problem. I have to get x to do y without z knowing. I have tried making sure that z is out of the way, but that doesn’t work because …”

On and on like that, typing furiously at this diary, until …

“Of course I could always do something mad like have x go out of the house late one night and … oh my god, yes that would work. And then a could tell b that y was not there and z would be none the wiser. Actually that would make complete sense and I could…”

The details are irrelevant, but the point is I solved a writing problem by writing. If you see what I mean. I couldn’t solve the problem by talking to myself, by muttering curses, by walking or approaching the 5th green with a nine iron. But I could solve it by writing about it. Priming the pump if you like.

So maybe writing only happens when you are physically producing the words, whether by pencil, biro, pen or keyboard.

Maybe.

The very fact that one doesn’t know is the damnedest thing, don’t you think? That something as primal, basic and ancient (well, 5,000 years old is fairly ancient) as committing thoughts, stories and ideas to a written medium could still be so mysterious.

I used to have on my Twitter bio the phrase, “How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?” I could equally as well have had “How can I tell you what I’m going to write until I’ve written it?”

So, while I can celebrate the lifting of the yoke from my shoulders and cry, “The thing is done!” I still can’t be sure that next time, if there is a next time, I’ll be able to do it. Because I don’t know how I did it in the first place. Or have ever done it. That is sometimes said to be a defining difference between the artisan and the artist, the craftsman and the creative. An artisan/craftsman can make the same chair/pair of shoes every day - their skill is to know how to make. An artist / creative is faced with a blank slate every day, their curse is that they don’t know how to make. It makes me cringe to dare suggest that I am an artist, but I’m not a craftsman certainly.

Which brings me to another good Hollywood joke.

Bob, the producer; Jane, the director; and Elwood, the screenwriter (yes, him again), are walking along the beach in Malibu discussing Bob’s next picture, which Jane will direct and Elwood script. Jane picks up an old bottle lying half out of the sand. She wants to use it to illustrate a point. She brushes the sand off it and … Whooosh! From out of the neck pops a genie!

‘Hi. I’m the genie of the bottle. You can each have one wish which it will be my pleasure to grant.’

He turns first to Jane, who says. ‘You know what? I’m just about done with this profession. Too much work, too much pressure, too much interference from the suits—no offence, Bob. Just take me away from here, drop me on an island in the Caribbean with a yacht and enough income to see me out in happy retirement.’

Whoosh! Jane disappears. The genie turns to Elwood.

‘Well,’ says Elwood, ‘I’m pretty much with Jane. This business. I’m through with it. Underappreciated, underpaid. Your best work is vulgarised and trivialised. So much tedious rewriting. I’m done with it all. A nice reconditioned villa in Tuscany, please, with a vineyard and swimming pool.’

Whoosh! Elwood disappears.

The genie turns to Bob, the producer. ‘And what is your wish?’

‘Get those two assholes back here, right now.’

Thanks for stopping by. Until our next merry meeting.

1. For which read keyboard, obv.

2. Or stood if you write standing up like Churchill, as doctors, in fact, recommend these days.

3. That’s Calypso’s Isle on which Odysseus was trapped for seven whole years.