It’s been a while

Write every day.

That’s what they tell you. 

I don’t know who they are but I think there should be some sort of punishment for them because this is what happens.

1. You write every day. In a journal, notebook or pages that you never show anyone. It’s fun. You can write things you’d never say aloud. It feels good.

2. Your child decides they want to write for a living and so to encourage them you write rubbish publicly. It’s ok. The world doesn’t open up and swallow you. If you can’t be a good example you can, at least, be a terrible warning. 

3. They read your public ramblings and say, ‘Have you ever thought of writing a novel?’ You think, ‘That’s a novel idea.’ You laugh at your own wit. 

4. It’s not the first time you’ve done this. A few words on a page every day and you get a story. People emerge from your head and talk to you. Life is a little less lonely but because you’ve never shown anyone it still feels good. You can nod along sagely when men (and it’s always men) say things like, ‘Oh, everyone thinks they can write a novel but it does take a special kind of person to make it.’ Weirdly, they always think they are that special kind of person. 

5. This time, though, it feels different. Buoyed by people having read your words before you decide to edit the thing until you can’t read it anymore. You let a few other people read it and then, really stupidly, you send it to 7 literary agents.

6. The first symbolic dream in years appears. Your male dog is going to have puppies. There are 6 or 7 but two slip out as you are crossing a zebra crossing. You try to pick them up but they squash in your hands. You wake in a cold sweat and wonder what on earth you’ve done.

7. You wander, lost and lonely, reminding yourself that 1% of books that get written are published and asking yourself, ‘What were you thinking? Who do you think you are anyway?’

8. You feel a bit sick. You wish you hadn’t done it and you are missing something. You are not writing everyday.

9. You go back to writing rubbish publicly but you really don’t have anything to say. You want to apologise to anyone reading it but you can’t help it, writing appears to be an illness. I blame ‘them’: the people who say, ‘just write every day.’

10. You console yourself with the fact that Liz Truss has written a book, with less self-awareness than a lettuce and she can’t even hold it up the right way.