I’m in a period of creative transition alongside the seasonal shift into spring, and it’s volatile. Some days I feel very up, full of sunlight and promise, and other days I feel cloudy and bleak. I bought a new notebook and I’m filling it with ideas for a new novel. The notebook is green with golden flecks on the cover, and the next book is going to be the same, that same intermingling of green and gold. I can’t explain why. I’m still in the vibes stage.
You’ll have to excuse me. It happens to me when I’m at the beginning of something. It’s like when you know you’re getting ill, is the best way I can explain it. I get all the signs: blurring at the corners of the eyes, a loss of appetite, a sense of foreboding, heat and cold, shakiness, a sense of being out of joint with reality. It builds and it builds, until the moment when it erupts out of you, and you throw your guts up. (On the page.)
At least, this is how it is for me. Maybe a less horrible metaphor would be it’s like being a river in flood, rising further and further up the banks and until it takes over the whole town.
Either way, it’s not a pleasant feeling for me, this feeling of a book brewing. I don’t yet fully know what it’s going to be, and this unnerves me. I feel ashamed of these emotions, too, as if I have to hide them and pretend that my writing always emerges effortlessly and naturally from my keyboard at an even pace, as I sit here before you in a silk blouse, all poise and elegant sentences.
This isn’t true, not for me. I mean, I’ve never liked elegant sentences anyway. I prefer spiky ones, but making them is uncomfortable. They rise up from a well of questions and problems I have, and things that keep me up at night, times my heart has been broken, and stuff that made me laugh, and small moments of beauty that made me want to cry. It all makes me feel crazy, unreliable, stupid, crotchety.
And then when it all starts coming out on the page, finally, it’s like a bloodletting. It eases things. It restores the balance of my humours. I don’t know why I’m like this. I wish there was another way.
I look out at the garden and walk through the woods down the road and see it there too as the spring comes painfully, what Dylan Thomas called the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. It’s a force, not an ease. It’s destructive, almost more than it’s creative.
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