literary non-fiction - writers reflect on their methods
miranda iossifidis
It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well. When it's going badly, then you feel it: there's the gluey fumbling of the attempts to gain traction on the empty screen, there's the misshapen awkwardness of each try at a sentence (as if you'd been equipped with a random set of pieces from different jigsaws). After a time, there's the tetchy pacing about, the increasingly bilious nibbling, the simultaneous antsiness and flatness as the failure of the day sinks in. After a longer time – two or three or four or five days of failure – there's the deepening sense of being a fraud. Not only can you not write bearably now, you probably never could. Trips to bookshops become orgies of self-reproach and humiliation. Look at everybody else's fluency. Look at the rivers of adequate prose that flow out of them. It's obvious that you don't belong in the company of these real writers, who write so many books. Last, there's the depressive inertia that flows out of sustained failure at the keyboard and infects the rest of life with grey minimalism, making it harder to answer letters, return library books, bother to cook meals not composed of pasta. All vivid, particularised sensations, familiar from revisiting though somehow no less convincing each time round.