Writing, and not writing

I gave a talk on Friday night about my writing. I spent a good deal of time worrying about it beforehand, and preparing for it, and on Friday morning I woke up with a realisation – yes after all these years – of the reason why I first began to write. And it’s this. I started writing in order to say:

This is what my life is like

This is what’s happened to me

This is how I feel about it

And to ask –

Is this what it’s like for you?

After a while, other motivations crept in: the desire to make people laugh, the desire to have a book on the shelf with my name on the spine, the desire to write a successful novel in the third person.

But at present I’m not writing, which means I have time and mental space to do things like play my sax more than once a day, to read all of the bits of the weekend papers I am interested in, to catch up with The Archers, to go out and start work on the garden only to be rained off after half an hour.

My desk has never been so tidy.

And it spooks me a bit to see it like that.