Not wanting to write, note making, The Wall
I was just settling down in the usual corner of my home office last week when I suddenly realised I didn’t quite want to. It’s a condition as dangerous and disturbing to us as shaky hands to a surgeon, this “not wanting to” — and so I did what any other self-respecting writer would do faced with this situation: tried to implement productivity hacks.
Desperately, I tried to set up a Pomodoro app on my phone, calibrating intervals of efficient work and brief rest, which I thought, would be the way of unblocking my passivity. It took hours, it felt — searching for, and selecting the right app that would serve up perfectly portioned slices of productivity, then changing the settings and the colours of the user interface to something I found soothing, something that would get me in the mood for creativity. This took me just close enough to lunch to knock off early and go and see what was in the fridge.
There’s a holy grail we fondly refer to as being “in the flow.” We’ve all felt it: when the writing just seems to flow out of us, when we — not exactly want to work, but aren’t thinking about not wanting to — and the memory of these periods gloat at us when we’re having weeks like this week.
When I’m feeling this way, I take refuge in making notes.
It took me a long time to realise the joy of notes. When I was in my early twenties, I had no interest in them. Unlike the people around me who furiously scribbled notes during university lectures, I — desperate not to be thought of as overzealous — self-consciously sat there, head up, staring down the lecturer — hoping, I suppose, to absorb the knowledge through some kind of osmosis.
I reasoned it was the experience, rather than the words themselves, that were important. Of course, when exams came around, I wished that I’d taken more notes — though I never really thought much of exams either and took this more of a challenge in improvisation than a means of proving what I’d learnt over the course of the term. This strategy, I should say, brought me very mixed success.
Later, when I was attempting to break into screenwriting, I thought that writing preparatory notes was a bit of a waste. I outlined, of course, just like I was told, otherwise everything would fall apart. But these outlines tend to be the slightest of shorthands for what was going on in my head. When it came to writing, actual writing that is, I assumed that I would be able to transparently put down all of my thoughts in print without too much going awry. Notes were a scaffold for what I was going to write — not a means of exploring the thing itself.
The idea of ‘a character exercise’ I thought, was frankly ridiculous. Why would you write anything down things about a character that did not exist in the play, or the story, or the screenplay itself? Why would you write something that no one would ever read? It comes down, I think, to a very confident belief, that the things I had in my head would always be there, always accessible, and that they would flow, unheeded, onto the page when I needed them.
I only realised later — and I’m sure this has something to do with my memory shortening as I grow older — that thoughts are extremely transitory. If they aren’t captured anywhere, they may be lost forever, echoing down as they fall into the abyss. More than that, for me note-taking has become a way of navigating and negotiating my thoughts in a more refined way. It was a way to prove the thought: something I believed was rather good in my head seemed empty and pat when written down, and one that seemed gnarly and difficult flowed with simple, graceful lines when in a notebook.
Thoughts either moved further or stopped abruptly when written. Jotted down, ideas were in motion on the page. Even if the notes were later abandoned or even never read again, there was a chance they’d taken on their true form.
I’ve just finished a really wonderful book: The Wall, a haunting and moving novel by Marlen Haushofer, an Austrian author, written in 1968. Apart from two shocking, unexpected and unexplained events that serve as bookends at the beginning and the end, it is a slow, painstaking report of two years of the narrator’s life living radically isolated in an alpine valley.
The woman’s only companions are animals: a cat, a dog, a cow. She slowly goes through the motions of keeping herself and the creatures alive, tilling the fields to grow potatoes, milking the cow. In her isolation, she grows apart from the franticness of modern-day humanity.
The book is a meditation on loneliness and aloneness (not necessarily the same, of course) and how the central character comes to terms with both, as she — though she does not give much away about her previous life — hints that even before enforced isolation she had started to cut herself off from her past. The book, quietly and without showiness, delves into what it means to live alone: the loss, the heartbreak and some of the hope.
The pull quote on the back cover calls the book “by turns utopian and dystopian,” but I’m not so sure that’s quite true; this is neither an unusually good nor bad world. What the novel does portray is raw, unfiltered life — that is life shorn of its pretensions and its adornments, life as an inevitable, plodding forward motion only disturbed by the sudden eruptions: of death and grief.
By the end of the novel, the narrator — for good or bad, and we’re never sure which — has started to see through the attempt to bring a metaphysical meaning to life, and broken through to what, I think, the author believes is the structure beneath. Life does not care for us other than as an object, one that time carries forward.
Yet, it still offers some hope for those of us whom the narrator has left behind. She writes —
There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognised in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life…