Nothing To Write About

It all started one perfectly normal evening in September. It was
raining outside. We had just eaten a dinner of pasta with tomato sauce,
cheese and bread. My dad was sitting in an armchair, reading some
scientific book. I was slouched on the sofa, idly pulling out my
hair.

'Dad,' I said, 'do you have any ideas about what I could write for my
English coursework? I've written two pieces already, but they're not
A*s, and I've tried writing other things too, but I just can't seem to
do anything good.'

'Well, maybe you're trying too hard,' my dad suggested. 'Maybe if you
just let yourself go and don't think about it it'll be easier. Writing
should be fun, you know.'

'Dad,' I addressed him, in that withering tone I use when I am
explaining something to my dad that is as obvious as the blueness of
the sky, 'it's English coursework. How can it be fun?'

'All right, all right,' my dad conceded, knowing he could never win
that argument. 'Why don't you do some travel writing about the places
you've been?'

'Done that. Wasn't good enough.'

'OK, how about a fantasy adventure? You like those.'

'Unoriginal.'

'Well, it's got to be something that touches something in you. It's
very hard to write something completely artificial. It's got to be
something you're interested in.'

'I'm not interested in anything.'

'Yes you are. Er? running - you like running. Write about what you
think about when you're running.'

'I don't think about anything.'

'Right? Why don't you do about an experience, something that's happened
to you?'

'Like what?'

There is a long pause while we both look at the ceiling and scratch our
heads.
'Shall we see what's on television, then?' my dad says finally.

So I forgot about it for a while. I had work to do in other subjects
and my dad's suggestions hadn't helped, so I thought maybe I would just
have to settle for what I had already written. Then, one perfectly
normal afternoon in September I was struck by a sudden inspiration. I
was in the middle of a run, not thinking about anything, when I
suddenly thought: 'If I don't have anything to write about, I can write
about not having anything to write about!'

It may not appear to be a flash of sudden genius, on a par with the
invention of the light bulb or the television, but to me it was
amazing. I had once before had a great idea for a piece of writing, and
I was beginning to believe the saying that lightning only strikes the
same place once was also true of inspiration. But now it seemed this
was not so! I would have run around naked shouting 'Eureka!' if I had
had a very large hole to crawl into afterwards. As it was I ran home,
switched on my computer and began typing furiously.
For the first sentence, anyway.

After that I realised this was going to be quite a challenge. Much as I
would have loved to hand in a piece of English coursework saying 'I
have nothing to write about', I couldn't imagine this producing gasps
of wonderment at my originality and depth from my English teacher. I
thought about writing my daily routine, as evidence that I have nothing
to write about, but the vision of a snoring examiner, finger poised
over the line '08:30 - 08:32: brush teeth', stopped me.

So what was I going to write about? Well, I'd already written a page
before I even stopped to think about this, so I wasn't doing too
badly.

I supposed I had better write a bit about myself and my life, to
explain what exactly I mean by not having anything to write about.
After all, I must do something to fill the time, so why couldn't I just
write about that?

Yes, I do things, but they're the same things that everyone else does.
I wake up, get up twenty minutes later, get dressed, go to school,
arrive late, come home, eat, watch television, do homework, go to bed,
get up ? I am sure you have quite a clear picture.
Nothing interesting has happened to me. I am not special in any way. It
is as if when God was handing out individuality and specialness, he
somehow missed me.

Sometimes I think I wouldn't mind if it was a bad characteristic that
made me different. I could bully someone, beat someone up - that would
get me noticed. But I couldn't do that. It's not who I am.

So if I can't change myself, I can hope something in my life will
change. Occasionally I catch myself thinking, some black part of me
that I immediately handcuff and lock away, that it would be nice if,
for example, someone in my family died. Then everyone would be
sympathetic and nice to me and I would be special. I would have
something that would mark me, give me an identity. People walking past
me would whisper to each other: 'There's that poor girl whose brother
died.' Even though I lock these horrific thoughts away, for some reason
I still keep the key.

I suppose a positive change would be better, but people seem to be
noticed more for negative changes. On Thursday my friend spent the
whole day crying in the toilets. When she was asked why, she said
nothing. My theory is there is nothing wrong. Call me callous and
cynical, but we live in a callous and cynical world. I'm just keeping
up with the times. I think she is doing it simply to get attention,
because like me, she wants to be special. Unlike me, however, she is
prepared to sit in the toilets all day to achieve that status. I don't
know how she can stand the smell.

As I don't have confidence in myself, it might help if I believed in
something else. But I don't. I'm not at all religious. It is as if
everyone has been thrown into the sea, but the ones that believe in
something have a rock to cling to, something solid that never moves so
they don't get washed away. But I don't. I am left to swim. And I am
not a good swimmer.

I was wallowing in all this self-pity (I could have beaten a
hippopotamus in a wallowing championships) while I was reading the
newspaper one day. I did the crossword, like I always do, and skipped
through all the usual junk about square watermelons and various
celebrities' clothes (or lack of them). I was about to fold up the
paper and go and do my geography homework about poverty in just about
everywhere when a picture caught my eye. At first I wasn't sure what it
was. It had eyes and a nose and looked vaguely humanoid, but I didn't
think it could be a human. Perhaps it was an alien? I was
intrigued.

I began to read the article and discovered that the 'alien' was
actually a four-year old girl. The reason for my mistake was that the
girl in the picture is suffering from a rare disease called Progeria,
which means she ages at four times the normal rate.

Before her fourteenth birthday she will be dead.

You may wonder what relevance this has to me not having anything to
write about, which was what I said I was writing about. Well, apart
from giving me something to write about, it made me realise how much I
really do have to write about. Hayley Okines, however, will certainly
not have anything to write about when she is my age, because she will
be dead. And yet she was smiling.
As I read more of the article, I began to cry. I have not cried since
the time when, as a five-year old, I watched 'The Jungle Book' and
thought Baloo was dead. I was still crying half an hour after the film
had finished, as my mother and I were walking down the street.
Observers must have thought my mother was an exceptionally vicious
perpetrator of child cruelty.

Anyway, back to the article. One part, a quote from Hayley's mother,
was particularly poignant: 'Although we tell her she's special - which,
of course, she is - we make sure she has a normal lifestyle.' Here was
a girl who had a twisted form of what I wanted, and she wanted what I
had. The saying goes 'The grass is always greener on the other side',
but I was beginning to suspect the grass was really greener on my
side.

Not wanting to read any more, I closed the paper and went to do my
geography homework. I opened my book to be faced with the statement:
'You have a better standard of living than 90\\% of the people in the
world.' Ignoring this, I turned to the page I was supposed to be
studying. A crying African child with a swollen stomach stared
mournfully at me. In the background were more children like this. I
looked at their faces, dirty and sad, and realised they were not
unique. There are only 36 people in the world with the same condition
as Hayley Okines, so she is special in a way, but there are millions of
people like these African children. They really do have nothing to
write about. It doesn't help that they don't know how to, either.

I think I have just about finished writing this now, and I have to stop
anyway because it's time for dinner. Tonight it's pasta with tomato
sauce, cheese and bread.

But this would be a pointless exercise if I hadn't learnt anything (I'm
not just doing it to get a good grade), so I'll summarise what I have
learnt.

Firstly, English coursework can be fun.

Secondly, I have a lot to write about.