A couple of chapters in a book called “Write: A Step by Step Guide to Successful Creative Writing” by Sarah Quigley struck me between the eyes today. One was about the problem of being ‘gifted’ a story – too perfect, already formed, belonging to someone else with little else that can be added from you the writer, the second was about thinking about a story instead of writing it down – how drafting in your mind leads to uncertainties and somehow strips a story of its life force. “Yes,” I thought, “I do that a lot. I’ll think about the chapter endlessly and, by the time I write it down, it reads like a dodgy photocopy made on a knackered old Xerox.”
Essentially the chapters were about the same thing: the written word versus the spoken/imagined. My best work always comes from writing, never from thinking over an idea or being gifted one from somewhere else. They appear fifteen pages into a twenty page session, where I enter ‘the zone’ and my mind shifts gear; the characters take over and the word around me dissolves. They are often hidden from me until I go back to the work days/weeks/months later and say to myself: “Wow, did I write that?”
I have an idea that my greatest work can be achieved by writing and writing and writing and then cutting out all of the bits that I actually thought about or planned. Like a butcher I would ruthlessly remove the skin, bones and organs (and all of the shit and intestines) until I had left was the meat.
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Written by Adrian Robinson
8th December, 2009
