The death of Terrence Oblong

Mrs Oblong called me a few days after Terrence died. She didn’t know what to do with his stories and asked me to come round and help sort them out.

When I got there Terrence’s computer was still on, exactly as he’d left it when he died a few days previously. The screen was empty but for these few words: ‘I’ll beat this blank page or die trying.’

Last words worthy of a great writer. A pity they were wasted on Terrence.

Terrence’s computer was full of unpublished stories and the room was littered with notebooks, post-it-notes and scraps of paper all full of stories and ideas for stories. I dedicated a couple of days to the project and eventually managed to sort the pile of papers into two boxes. ‘Ideas that will never be written up’ and ‘completed stories that will never be read’.

It may seem cruel to mock Terrence’s lack of readership and his non-existent success at writing, but he was perfectly relaxed about the fact he’d never make it as a writer. I remember the last time I saw him, he was sat at his writing desk, the same chair he died in, surrounded by mugs of undrunk coffee, with tissues scattered all across the floor (hopefully souvenirs of his recent cold). On the screen in front of him his latest soon to be forgotten short story creation.

“I don’t write to be famous,” he said, “I don’t want to be the next J K Rowling. I write because I have to, because the stories are there, demanding to be let out.”

“You’ve never thought about self-publishing?” I asked.

He shook head. “That’s not why I write. I don’t care whether I’m published or not, why go to all that trouble just so that my friends can spent money they don’t want to spend on a novel they don’t want to read?”

Plus, of course, he didn’t have many friends anyway.

“I write for the same reason that a hamster in a cage gnaws away at the bars for hours on end, or the same reason that a zooed gorilla smears itself in its own excrement.”

“You’re not in a cage.”

“Writing is my cage. Writing is what turns me from a sensible, run of the mill ape to a gibbering, shit-covered monkey. Writing is my self-smeared excrement.”

Terrence, for all his faults, always had a way with metaphor.

“Writing isn’t some natural, healthy creative process, it’s a curse, some horrible thing I go through. It’s as if my soul has been eaten away and all I can do to fill the void is fling words at a page.” He paused, turned his chair the computer and typed out another line of story. Conversations with Terrence were like that, he’d walk off mid-sentence to write something in his notebook, or even phone himself and leave a message on his answerphone, a hint to himself like ‘Remember the spoon’ or ‘lose the monkey’.  

“At least I still write,” he said eventually, turning back to face me, “at least I still get inspiration, still have ideas. When I lose that I might as well drop down dead.”

And of course, just a few weeks later that’s exactly what he did.

His final words on that otherwise blank screen: ‘I’ll beat this blank page or die trying.’ It’s how he’d have wanted to go, losing a fight to the death with writer’s block.