I had written
little bits before this moment. But every child does. Every
child tries to write a book at some point. Only a few are
still doing it as adults. I had started a satirical novel
about near nuclear war with all my friends in it. I'd also
started a very boyish story about an illegal car race.
I don't look back at either of these as being significant
at all. They weren't. They were silly attempts and I gave
up on them.
This particular morning I was bored.
I think it was about 1988, so I was 14. It was
the middle of the school holidays and I had nothing to
do. I wandered into the dining room and stopped in my tracks.
I felt like an archaeologist that had stumbled into a tomb.
The mysterious artefact that had caught my attention was
a typewriter.
My mum had been typing out the church
magazine and had left the typewriter sat out on the table.
It was a very
old clunky typewriter. It wasn't rusty or corroded, but
the metal was tarnished and looked sort of bronze-like.
The metal was all slightly warped and nothing looked straight
on it. It was as if the whole thing was organic and had
grown rather than been manufactured.
The arms that actually punched the
letter shapes were very noisy and swung like sledgehammers.
You could always
hear mum typing from anywhere in the house and it was a
big house. Because the metal was so warped the arms would
often clash and get jammed together, so to save time mum
had removed the casing completely. This meant that all
the twisted-tree-root inner workings were exposed - little
wires and cogs, pulleys and levers, smoothed over by caked-on
layers of dust.
With the array of arms all laid flat
across the front, it looked like the carcass of a dead
animal, but there
was something very much alive about it, or at least something
dormant seemed to lay within --waiting to be awakened.
No one else is in the house.
I pull out a fresh white page and slip
it into the rollers. The typewriter grunts and protests
as I feed it through
its jaws. The edge of the page spools round and emerges
at the front, cutting through the dark brown visage. I
roll the page up so more is on display. The page is clean
and white, it is square and smooth. It sits in absolute
contrast to the curvy dusty fussy detail of the machine
around it.
It looks like an inviting snowdrift and though it is beautiful
in its unspoilt purity, I am longing to make my own footprints
across it.
I stare at the page and get lost
into it... the whiteness burns and blurs my eyes until
I can see nothing but a white
fog. There's a much quoted saying from the writer Gene
Fowler that sums this up perfectly: "Writing is easy.
All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops
of blood form on your forehead."
I come to the conclusion that I have nothing worth saying.
There is nothing remotely sensible or meaningful that I
can think of with which to mark this newborn page.
I stare at the page all the same, still captivated by
it.
There is still nothing that comes
to mind and I say to myself, "Anything I try and
write now will be totally useless and utterly pointless."
I sit back and sigh.
All around me, away from the hypnotic white glow of the
paper is the boredom of summer holidays when you're at
a loss how to amuse yourself, but the page is still blank
and I have nothing to write.
I had no idea until years later, only
very recently, how significant a moment this was. Logic
says walk away. I
have nothing useful to write so write nothing. But the
page is still so inviting and the desire to write something
is burning within. I wonder what would have become of me
if I'd walked away, phoned a friend or gone for a bike
ride.
Still, sitting there, the only thought
I have is that same true fact... "Anything
I try and write now will be totally useless and utterly
pointless."
It seems like a dead end. A closed door. But as that was
the only thing I had in my mind, that would have to the
foundation. It was not necessarily a dead end, it was a
perfect beginning.
I thud the Caps Lock key into place and I type without
even thinking...
THE TOTALLY USELESS GUIDE TO UTTERLY POINTLESS SUBJECTS.
What logic deemed to be a non starter
is now my title and the typing doesn't stop. I have no
plan or idea where
I'm going with it, but I just keep typing.
Was it silly? Extremely! Was it the
best writing in the world? No, far from it. It covered
topics such as 'Where
do turnips go after death?' and other such non-life-altering
discussions. Some of it is probably very embarrassing,
but I am certainly not ashamed of it.
In fact, a long while later I photocopied a dozen copies
and started selling it at school.
And it was that moment, staring at
the white page, realising I had remotely sensible useful
to say, but then coming to the conclusion
that this was a potential start rather than a dead end,
that was the first step that triggered off everything that
followed.
