The Plight of the Mired Novelist

 

 

Ending with a sentence which I think may turn out to be the besst in the book, I finished Chapter 25 late Friday morning.  IT was one of my really good days, full of spirit and flow, the secret liquors with which I water my garden. 

 

Naively, I expected that this weekend would be a mad frenzy of writing as a consequence, but it seems that novels don’t work like that: at least mine don’t.  I write a chapter full of juice and later on, two days or two weeks later I know exactly what it points to, but the day after, I always have a creative hangover:  I can’t find the sense of the chapter, I can’t find the write words, I can’t even find my socks. I suppose I should just roll over and play dead, read a book or something, but like I said here yesterday, I feel the mass of this project growing within me and it wants to be out in the world where people can read it and I can move onto the next project, God be praised.

 

So I’m sitting here staring at the screen, which I remember now is how a lot of this writer’s writing time is spent, and writing a blog entry which is probably a little silly and probably a little obvious, but which keeps my fingers moving and the birth pains from being quite as sharp.  It all puts me in mind of the bit from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”:

 

Eric Idle:  I want to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  You can’t have babies; you’re a man.  What’s it going to gestate in, are you going to keep it in a box?

 

Eric Idle:  I want the right to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  (Outraged, the way only John cleese can be outraged)  What’s the point in having the right to have babies if you can’t have babies?

 

 

Well, I’m telling you that this man can and will have a baby, and the sonogram says it looks to be about five hundred and fifty pages from head to toe.  I just wish the miracle of childbirth were happening TODAY.