Life in my writing room
The walls are covered with quotations, this is one of my favourites: 'A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.' Thomas Mann. My head is always full of words but, this afternoon, they seem to be mixing with each other and making a grey sludge, rather than mixing with me and making black marks on white. So I'm avoiding writing the short story that I'm somewhere lost in the middle of, and posting my first blog instead.
The thing a writer learns the quickest (and probably knew even before she knew she was going to spend her life putting one word after another), is multiple avoidance techniques, or MATs. These, when listed end to end, would circle the universe at least once, but of course they are never listed, that would be too much like writing, they are simply done. (I never knew how much I liked staring through the window, for instance.) Posting a blog, you could argue, is a MAT, but it's not a true MAT because it requires me to put one word after another, even if in the wrong direction.
Anyone else out there suffering from an acute case of the MATs?
2 comments:
I'm an expert on MATs and have been since I was at school, so lots of experience. I want to write, but find there's always something else that just has to be done - until I found out about blogs. But sometimes reading all the other wonderful blogs becomes a MAT too.
It is, I suppose, a universal truth that everything that a writer does to stop her writing is a MAT. The only thing that stops me MATting is the horror of finding myself at the bottom of the stairs at the end of the day completely and utterly pissed off with myself because I haven't written that day. And only myself to blame ...
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