Valley of the Trolley Dollies

This is what writers do: They remember.

Sometimes, they remember it exactly as it was. Sometimes, they remember exactly how it felt. Sometimes, it’s an incomplete memory – sensory flashes of scent or taste, or the way the light fell across the wooden floor of a vast and decimated kitchen, highlighting the dust motes on the Aga on the morning after your first ever teenage drunken party.

And sometimes, they remember how it should have been. This is called fiction. Occasionally, they remember how it should have been with such total clarity and conviction that it becomes (in their mind) how it was. This is called mental illness, but should not be discouraged.

And having remembered, they translate the random series of electronic pulses – the light, the smell, the taste, the emotion – and via the medium of print on paper (or screen) make the reader experience the same thing.

I always wanted to be a writer. As a kid, my dad read me stories back when I was just a kicking bundle lying in the cot – or, more often, lying in his arms as he paced the room with me. (See: I couldn’t possibly remember this, but I know it’s true. Not fiction; not mental illness. Truth.

My dad took me to the library. I can’t remember how young I was, but I was small enough for the tiny chairs in the huge children’s section to be huge club armchairs. We’d walk, hand in hand, me chatting all the time and asking such deep philosophical questions as “Where do I come from”, from our house, up past Donore Avenue Church, over the bridge, along the canal to Dolphins Barn Library, and there I’d have the whole children’s section – the stacks filled with ‘book books’, the divided boxes filled with oversized or picture books – as my personal domain while he browsed the adult section. Or sometimes, we’d walk in the opposite direction to Kevin Street Library. We didn’t like that one so much: It was smaller, and the stock was sometimes a bit tatty.

And I’d read all the time. All the time. Never without a book in his hand, or his head in the fridge was how my mother described (and still describes) me as a kid.

Then at school, something happened. Something simultaneously fantastic and terrible: I wrote. In response to instructions from teachers to write, say “What I did on my holidays,” I’d write. And I guess some of them saw it: The ability to remember, to translate, to transfer the memory to another. And they praised me. And I wanted more. I was, and am, a total praise whore. If you praise me, I’m your bitch. Took a long time to stop seeking approval. Correction: Will have taken a long time, when it happens. I’m still working on it.

So the more I wrote (essays for English, well crafted pieces for History classes, French Homework), the better I got. And the more distanced I became from my school ‘friends’ (except, of course, ‘friends’ is the wrong word; we were school ‘colleagues’). But that’s all grist for a writer, right? Except, of course, if asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d never have said ‘A Writer.’ I famously, once, said ‘A shop boy,’ and meant it.

Then, after school, I fell into the wonderful world of finance, and stopped writing. Until, in late ’99 I decided to try to write a book. My parents and my friends, had been saying for so long “You should try.” And I wrote a book, called “Joy to the Dead.”

I found it again this week, and started re-reading it: It’s a bit clunky, but, like a beautiful piece of natural wood, I still think that a decent bit of whittling will produce something that shines like polished amber.

I gave D (who had never read a book in his life) the finished piece. I gave my father (to whom the entire project was dedicated) a copy. And D and I went on holiday to Egypt (where the book was set).

I called my parents to say hello, and my dad said he’d sat up half the night to finish the book, and cried at the end.

D shook me awake in the middle of the night as our boat sailed down the Nile, past the landscape I’d written of, kissed me with such tenderness and love, said, with tears in his eyes, “I’ve just finished it; it’s fantastic,” and let me fall back to sleep.

And, two weeks later, on September 11^th, the world fell apart.

And I stopped writing for a while.

I tried to sell the book to some agents, tried a couple of competitions, but nothing happened, and I let it drop.

I tried to write another book – finished it in fact. It’s totally different. Not bad, but not as good as the first. I started a third – the sequel to the first - and, for some reason, stopped.

I found that this week, and I have to say, it’s really good. Much better, much more immediate than the first.

I blog, I write little pieces of fiction (but obviously not today) for the blog, I write memos for my management in the bank I work in (not fiction, but not always the unvarnished truth).

I guess I was wrong: I didn’t stop writing. I just stopped feeling like a writer. I stopped believing I could be a writer.

I still remember how it felt – the ‘do I have to’ before sitting down in front of the keyboard; the almost-euphoria as the words start flowing and the page fills up; the joy when a first draft actually looks good. The pulse racing as a new direction appears, a new idea comes, seemingly fully-formed from nothing; the ‘do I have to’ as the alarm bell rings to let me know it’s time to stop writing and start making dinner.

I remember it all; that’s what writers do. I think it’s time I became a writer again.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.