[writing] the incisors and the grinders

Samuel Johnson wrote, on April 6th, 1776:

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Maybe, Samuel J but this raises the spectre of the hack, Senancour's 1804 Obermann, Willy Loman, to shamelessly mix metaphors, the writer who writes because he is into writing itself, has visions of the poet in the garrett or else puts out a piece, just to keep the bread on the table.

Walter Bagehot wrote, in 1858:

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

To be a grinder seems, in my mind, to be a denial of the purpose of existence, a shaming epitaph to one's talent or lack of it. Like Roald Dahl, I'm terrified of mediocrity, of boring the reader and even at university, I've dropped, over the years, the lessons which don't go down well and retained those which were "winners".

I just cannot wrap the mind round the concept of Keats, from 1819:

All clean and comfortable, I sit down to write.

... although, to be fair, he was referring to a letter he was beginning at the time and he had already written, in 1818:

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Upfront I claim no literary talent and these words are of the process only, not the end result. However, I just cannot sit down, "all clean and comfortable" to write. I can't do it. It's more a case of waking up at 3 a.m. with thoughts storming through the brain and having to switch on the Mac [it goes to bed with me - truly], of waiting impatiently and then the fingers just take over and I have absolutely no idea where they're going to take me.

It's not even me - it's just something there and characters fly in, fly out, drop by, return and the thing just has to fly ever onward, up hill, down dale, until it stops. When it does, switching off is the only solution until the next time it happens. Usually I crash back to sleep and that's that.

This isn't literature, it's - well, I don't know what it is. Insanity?

So the result is raw, dotted with errors and then, one day, when a fine young chap quietly begins painstaking proof reading and all his suggestions have talent in themselves and when one stops to think of what he''s attempting in his own creativity and the literary persona he himself is and why the hell he is spending time on me, then the jaw drops and one wonders about life.

He makes constant corrections and all are justified, he suggests I develop the character of Konstantine the Cypriot more, he's glad the plot is finally opening up and so on. Can you understand how that puts you on edge, makes you go back and reexamine, rework, enhance, make smoother. It's a heady experience and to know there is a taskmaster on your tale* is a wonderful thing.

Surely these days now are what life is about. This is the wine you sup, the days spent productively. You have to forever feel, hurt, jump for joy, bask in the passion and then crash to darkest oblivion. And always the brute existence beckons, it's always just there behind you, wishing you to rest on your laurels and sink back to it, like quicksand, to become, once again, just another automaton.

Aaaagh, it must never be. Your talent or lack of it is a separate issue but the process itself is the thing and the day you stop is the day you die as homo sapiens.

Sorry, sorry - I've now taken my tablets and am once more feeling a trifle more "usual". Thus, I sit me down to write:

"Gordon Brown today harvested some organs ..."

* intended