Nothing much

On days like these I go through my old notebooks, hoping to stumble across a story idea I’d forgotten to write up, a priceless gem just sitting there, forgotten, waiting to be rediscovered and written up into a masterpiece. I allow my imagination to wander, visualise the fame the soon to be found story will bring me, the interviews on serious culture programmes where my work is discussed as an all time great, where I cause great amusement by recounting the fact that my masterpiece had sat gathering dust for so long. 

But no matter how hard I scan the notebook I can find no masterpiece, discovered or undiscovered. Every story in the book worth writing up has been written up, even my pile of random post-it notes lacks inspiration – all the ideas there have been written up, or deliberately not written up – hopeless first lines or just titles – ‘The Eaglewoman has got massive tits’. 

It’s the frustration I have when, after weeks of one busyness after another, I finally have time to write, and find my imagination is bare. There is nothing in my mind, nothing in my notebook, I engage my memory with a view to plunder my life for stories, but they have all been used, or forgotten, or both.

I could work on my novel, of course, but all I see is an enormous great elephant sitting on the bottom step of the staircase demanding to be pushed all the way to the top. ’60,000 words to go’ says the elephant. 'Another day' I reply.

I could do a writing exercise. I choose three words at random from the nearest book – plumage, jigglebug and waspish. Okay, I’ll give that a miss.

I try another notebook and halfway through I finally find an idea for a story I haven’t written up yet. It consists of the following words: “cat, missing girl, arrested.”  I try to recall my thoughts when I wrote this, to piece together the story I had in mind, but there is nothing left of the idea, just four words, meaningless, I’d be better off with plumage, jigglebug and waspish – what is a jigglebug anyway?

No, there is nothing to do but stare at the blank page on the screen, or the scribbled madness in my notebooks, hoping that some time soon inspiration will appear.

Meanwhile, the elephant sits on the stair, looking at me expectantly