Sun shining today. Will I venture out for a walk? Or to do some gardening? Hmmm. The eternal conflict between what I ‘should’ be doing (what would ultimately be better and more positive for my wellbeing in a general sense) and what I ‘feel like’ doing (back to the su doku again). Living alone gives me enormous freedom to ignore many of the ‘shoulds’ without suffering under anybody’s judgement except my own – until such time comes as I’m forced to interact with the outside world, or even (god forbid) allow anybody from outside into my home.
What am I saying here? What am I trying to say? I decided that writing 500 words a day would be a Good Thing for me. So I am trying. Because I know I can do it. This is what I always say (I’ve said it many times, in many ways, to many people), I know I can do it, because I’ve done it in the past, but nothing good has ever come out of it – well, wait, is that strictly true? If I look back fifteen years, I could argue that it has changed my life fundamentally in startling ways – but never in the way I once hoped for, ie turning me into a professional novelist.
So much of the advice I’ve received down the years has stressed the need to write, write, write regularly, write often and write at great length. Write spontaneously, do a brain dump, draw up all the rubbish from your writing well and that’s how you make yourself ready to write the Good Stuff. But, congenitally lazy as I am, all I ever want to do is keep writing the easy stuff. I don’t have the self belief, tenacity, staying power – let’s face it, guts – to face the difficult stuff, the hard work. And however much of this easy, spontaneous stuff – this drivel – I write, it’s not going to miraculously open the way into the source of ideas that I need.
I don’t think like a novelist – or a short story writer, come to that. Sometimes I think like a poet. Mostly I think like a confused woman approaching the end of life with the sense that I’ve never worked out what I should be doing, never made use of whatever talents I might have had to make a difference to myself or others or the wider world, amid the consciousness that I am now running out of time and options, and without the energy, enthusiasm or motivation to follow any of those options even if they were pointed out to me.
That isn’t quite 500 words. Do I keep going for the last fifty or so? It’s just an arbitrary challenge I’ve set myself. I can say I’ve done it, but like the 50k words I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2018, it’s worthless because there is nothing there – well, nothing I haven’t said or thought or written a million times before. That’s the story of my life.