Writers at Work
Never A Luxury
To the panicked masses running through the street, soot on their faces, smouldering koalas clawing feebly at depleted human breasts, embers hanging in the air like a jury’s verdict, we say ‘It’s going to be ok. We’ve brought criticism with us, some literature.’ The koalas miraculously stop smoking. One of the huddled masses looks at you and wells up: ‘Oh thank god you’re here.’
La Vida
How’s the writing going? Robbie would ask, sometimes, on the way home, and I would smile and tell him, Not bad, though as the days wore on I would imagine that pathetic, half-sketched character who was not me but who closely resembled me lying on his half-sketched bed holding his half-sketched head and that voice in my head would call me useless, a failure and, while, mostly, on the surface, I would remain enthusiastic, jovial, quietly, underneath, I had begun to occupy a space close to mental paralysis because I did not know how to tell Robbie that I did not know how to build the world that Oliver required – although, after a while, I would simply say that the writing wasn’t going, or that I did not know. Give yourself time, Robbie said, and just relax! But deep down I couldn’t relax because without the trains and without writing I knew, or I told myself, that I wasn’t anyone or anything at all.
Sure Ground
To closely examine a writing process is to make writing seem possible where it often seems impossible. The impossibility of writing is the impossibility of the apartment I live in, that I am writing these words in, part of a building that was decades ago conceived, designed, constructed. I cannot think of this building as anything but inevitable, whereas this analogy, as I write it, seems unstable, weak. I deleted and rewrote it several times, unsure of its quality. But as you read this paragraph, secured on the published page, even if you agree that it leaves something to be desired, you will still read it as if it had been sealed with lacquer, my hesitations smoothed away.