A Day in the Life of a Writer

A Day in the Life of a Writer…

It all starts as most mornings do – with great promise.  The sun rises, the birds’ chatter comes alive and suddenly the light drifts across the shadows and elbows them out of the way, leaving a brand new day stretching out before you.

With the first cup of coffee you are responding well to the characters who have taken up residency inside your head (this isn’t the same as the voices living inside your head – that’s something completely different!).  These characters hang around with you and are constantly poking you in a Facebook-kind of way to tell their stories – yes, I believe there are bits of myself in these people.  They aren’t entirely strangers.  I know some of them quite well, and there are some of them I’d rather forget.  Some are figments of an over-active imagination, and some have plodded with me through time, reminding me that history is always there and can’t ever be forgotten, no matter how much wine you drink.

I like them all.  It’s not like I’ve invited them to stay with me – I don’t really like people living in my space – but I feel obliged to do the best I can for them.

I’m still thinking about that when I grind beans for my second cup of coffee and load the washing machine.  Write.  I tell myself, as I prepare some breakfast and look out of the kitchen window, catching sight of some flowers that need to be dead-headed.  Write.  I think, as I start to potter around the garden, enjoying the first glimpse of sunshine in spring and wondering if it might be a good time to go for a run.  I hear the characters in my head sighing heavily.  It’s the last thing they want to do, pound the pavements with Lana del Ray crooning loudly through the spaces in my brain that need to be filled when I’m clocking up miles.

I try to focus as I switch on the computer, technology thwarting me as it starts to configure Windows updates without having been invited to do so – how rude, I think, looking at the circles spinning round on the blank screen. I hear the washing machine purr to a silent end as it crosses its own finish line.  I’ll just empty it while I’m waiting, I think, getting up from my chair and leaving the computer to configure.  The characters in my head shuffle with me, still clinging to the hope that they’ll find a voice today as I start to unravel the mystery of rolled up wet underpants and socks.

I hang it all out, like a damp wardrobe story that tells me how my week’s been in a clothes diary.  Write.  I’m beginning to get a bit irritated with myself now as I think about a third cup of coffee – or even worse, replacing it with a small glass of wine – I check the clock and it’s only dinnertime.    The characters in my head perk up.  They love to be fuelled by wine so early in the day!  They know how outspoken it makes me and they start to limber up in anticipation of smutty scenes and dialogue dripping with an angst and honesty that rage against everything deemed normal in life.  I decide against it and sit back down at the computer.  WRITE.

I open up a word document and look with trepidation at the blank page staring accusingly back at me.  I hate its attitude problem.  Go on then, it goads me.  Fill me up.  Do your worst.  What’s wrong with you?  Can’t you hack it?  Write.  Go. On.  Write.  I’ve made the mistake of opening up my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flickr accounts and am distracted by what’s happening around the world at the exact same time I’m trying to write.  It’s all much more interesting, I think, as I open up iTunes to download a greatest hits album by Prince.  I think this is what it sounds like when doves cry.

The characters in my head sit back down.  Write.  I can hear vague whispers down dusty corridors in a house where shadows are starting to creep back under the cover of darkness.  The sun scarpers off to Australia to enjoy a bit of surf whilst I go off in search of a sock drawer to re-arrange, the blank page staring at my back as I go, nodding its head in a knowing fashion as I try to ignore its empty eyes boring into me.  Write.  One last attempt, a pleading little voice inside my head.  Write anything.  They say just put words down on a page.  It doesn’t matter how many.  Oh no.  I know different.  When these characters start living, there’s no stopping them – and then what about my life?  I am bemoaning the loss of my domestic dross.

As I climb back into bed, my characters slope off to the great big waiting room of live fiction inside my head, languidly smoking cigarettes, some of them actually lying on the floor, dying, gasping for any kind of breath or life that I can offer them.  Some of them have been here for years and they’ll tip-toe into my dreams as I fall asleep, trying to infiltrate my subconscious mind as I dream. Write, they tell me.  Just write.