The writing process explained

Blink, left eye wink, blink, raise left eyebrow, long blink, short blink, raise right eyebrow.

The above is literally what I’m doing as I write. After the ‘accident’ the eyes are the only part of my body that still move.

I rely on carers to transcribe my thoughts which I communicate via a blink/wink/raise eyebrow code. Julie’s currently the one writing my thoughts down. Hello Julie.

It’s a slow process, with each individual letter taking several seconds. It took me a long time to slow down my writing speed to the speed I blink/wink at. My mind would be whizzing through a complete story while my eyebrows were still on ‘The dog’.

‘The dog’. It was the dog story that I was writing when I had my ‘accident’.

It wasn’t really an accident at all, of course. The doctors call it 'worderation', when a writer becomes so engrossed in the story he or she is writing that their body experiences every sensation, every emotion, every incident, every smell and every physical experience transcribed on the page.

My worderation was particularly severe. I’m the sort of writer that likes to make my characters suffer. It’s why I write comedy. You take a character, think of a situation that character would hate to be in, and put that character in that situation. Preferable with physical harm inflicted on the character at regular intervals and lots of poo. The ‘joke’ of the dog story was that the dog would drag his owner into ever conceivable scrape, and drop a lot of turds along the way.

In the dog story my character fell down three flights of stairs into a ditch being used as a makeshift toilet. In a later scene a wall the character was leaning on collapsed and he fell into a latrine on the other side. The wall then fell on top of him, burying him in the latrine, where he remained, unable to move, for several days.

Because I was so engrossed in the character, my body experienced everything I put my character through. As a result I was unable to move, I broke nearly every bone in my body.

It wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but the ambulance staff refused to take me to hospital, because I smelt so much.

It’s been two years now. In all that time I’ve been trapped in this bed. At least for the past few months I’ve been able to blink again.

Ironically it’s been a super-productive time for my imagination. Countless stories pass through my brain. Looking for distractions I form them into mini masterpieces, every word chosen with the care a murderer takes picking their poison.

Of course, no story ever stays in my mind, there are too many new ideas pushing to be created, and every story I’ve composed in that time, literally thousands, has been lost in the rush and fervour of my mind.

This is the first story I’ve managed to have written down. It’s taken all my time to devise a communication system and hire the staff to transcribe my thoughts.

Unfortunately Julie refuses to show me what she’s written down. I can only hope she’s captured ever word as I envisioned it, not made any errors, that she’s had the code properly explained to her and hasn’t got so much as a comma wrong.

Oh god! I’m assuming she’s been told the code. What if she’s not been told the code? What if she’s just writing down what she sees.

Short blink, raise left eyebrow, wink right eye, long blink.