The yellow notebook I write in – too occasionally – is half-full of half-finished pieces. What should I call them? Essays, opinions, stories, scribbles – whatever they are doesn’t matter as they will probably never make the move from hand-written page to blog. Every single one of them started out with the stimulant of a new idea, and every single one was interrupted by something: a conversation, an empty stomach, the drying-up of inspiration, and more often by my most familiar nemesis, distraction.
Once again I’m trying, leaving the house and its temptations to do anything but write, to sit in a little restaurant in St. Paul-en-Forêt, a village whose single bakery is shuttered and where the only traffic is on its way through to somewhere else. From a second-story window, a baby’s fretful squawks issue; it’s close and hot, and my hand sticks to the paper. Wooden planter boxes stake out the boundary of the cafe terrace and separate it from the road, but my table is only a few feet from the passing cars. A coffee-stained copy of a StoryFix post called ‘The Thing About Sub-Plots’ slips from my notebook. I must have thought it important enough to print and so re-read it, wondering for the zillionth time what stands between me and fiction-writing. I suspect my poor spatial reasoning has something to do with it: planning the details, seeing the big picture, holding onto an idea long enough to develop it, that sort of thing. Lack of imagination is not the problem, if my dreams are anything to go by. I’ve stopped describing them to my Belgian who, at the beginning of our association, was intrigued by them, but who I suspect might now just think me mad. And so we become accustomed, even inured, to each other.
A portly cyclist pedals by, so close I can see the rivulets of sweat on his determined jaw. His cohorts are a common sight here, all colourful latex and hard-muscled legs pumping along the narrow, twisting roads. Approached from behind, they look like thirty-somethings, but in my rear-view mirror the grizzled faces and grey hair tell the true story. This one must be a tourist, given his girth and the fact that he’s riding alone. It’s an idle game, spotting the tourists who invade the Côte d’Azur between June and September. That they’re not locals is obvious, but to assign them a nationality is trickier. The stereotypes help: the Dutch are tall and fair, the unilingual English look anxious and apologetic, the Germans sturdy and competent, and the Italians behave like they just bought the place at a fire sale.
An interview in this morning’s paper has given me some impetus to write. An 80-year-old woman has just had her first book published, a memoir of growing up in a ‘dysfunctional, Communist family’ and the further unconventional turn her life took when she followed her mother out of the family home and into a peripatetic existence at the age of fourteen. The author – whose mother also published her first book at eighty – felt ‘frozen’ and unable to tell her story for most of her life, intimidated by the writers in her family and the weight of her responsibilities to others. It sounds familiar.
While I was hanging out with the laundry after breakfast, I was thinking about the curious effect that praise has on the unmotivated and uncertain writer. It supplants, in my case, the gratification that should only come with real accomplishment. It takes the edge off the hunger for success (for which my definition is ‘the successful completion of a project’) just like a six o’clock snack cuts my appetite for dinner. And if praise is effusive enough, the writer fears never meeting the same standard again, although it must be pointed out that her own laziness comes to the rescue, stepping in to save her from having to prove the truth of her own suspicions.
I also blame ‘The Secret’, the premise of which I knew without knowing it from the time I was old enough to rest on my laurels. Just think and believe and visualize and as surely as there is a man in the moon, you shall realize your dreams. But Laurie Lewis, pragmatic octogenarian, knows that you actually have to do something to make that happen. She revels in her new status as a published writer because she also knows that it’s never too late as long as you’re still breathing. I like this idea. It’s not new, but it’s still reassuring.
A gust lifts the terrace canopy, surprising me. I look up to see thunderclouds piling up over the tiled rooftops; there’s weather coming in and with some luck it will mean rain and not lightning-sparked fires. But too soon, there’s my Belgian back from his errand, come to pick me up. Should I say I’m disappointed to see him? No, better to just apply the lessons of Ms. Lewis and finish what I start.