“There’s no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
Ernest Hemingway
It’s been really easy to let the days pass by with the doing of the things. Time can pass so swiftly and, before you even know it, it is the end of the day of good intentions, where you are surrounded by chocolate wrappers and fighting sleep into the wee small hours to watch the last moments of a streamed TV series you’ve just binged. No productivity, having only the unsatisfactory sensation of having lost the time without even feeling it.
In the warm the time passes on a glacial but heat-stifled gauge during the days, until the sudden realisation that the sweeping in of darkness is when they call time at the nearby public house. Even sat at a desk in front of your keyboard in the sunlight leads to easy distraction – my mind often tethers itself to the lone cloud in the sky, soaring beyond the horizon with my attention. I’m learning even a brightly coloured top can prove a distraction to my brain, the reflection in the screen alarming to my eyes as I push through to see the display beyond and it becomes difficult to reign myself back in and push on.
This is where discipline comes in. You have to sit down and just write. Just get on with it. I have made the space of my desk and tidied, then re-tidied the area. I just have to write.
Just write.
Hemingway was right. Some times it flows easily. A few weeks ago, after fitful and anxious sleep, I woke and felt an urge to sit and write. I was emotional about the passage of time and, feeling myself so very small and powerless in the forward torrent of time, I was able to anchor myself and weave the upset into words. It flowed and was release. Happy enough with the piece that emptied itself from my fear, I took courage and put the story forward for a competition.
At the moment I have set aside my drilling equipment and I’m having to lay the charges. Not an idea to be seen and all efforts feel disingenuous and full of artifice. But I am writing.
As long as I have the passion enough to get up each day and sit down before the computer screen, to open the file and to set down words to tell a story, even if it is just my story, it is enough. It is all I can ask of myself.
Just Real Ruby 