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No mood to write

‘But what should I write?’

I was swivelling in a desk chair at Shandy Hall, Laurence Sterne’s home in Coxwold, addressing the curator, Patrick, between despairing rotations. Patrick, admirably stationary in his own armchair – not swivelling at all – said: ‘Write about the process.’

‘What process?’ I said.

‘You type very fast’, he said, ‘to get the writing out of the way.’

‘Do I?’

‘You told me that yourself.’

Had I? Now my memory, as well as my ability to write, seemed to be failing. I felt a chill on my mind, like a mist rising over fenland.

Presently Patrick went over to his study to check his email, and I (taking a break from the museum collections) continued to sit oscillating to and fro, staring at the ceiling. Chair, desk, paper… I had all the appurtenances of a writer except the most fundamental: an idea.

It was the same month that we’d received at the museum an inspiring artefact. Laurence Sterne’s own chair had recently been rediscovered in the archives at Jesus College, Cambridge. This was a rarity: something that we knew he’d used and touched and which had, we imagined, aided his own writing process. It certainly had something of the look of Sterne’s spirit, its witty Chippendale curves calling to mind some of the carefree flourishes and twisting plotlines he embedded into Tristram Shandy. On the back of the seat was a small brass plaque: Hic sedebat Laurentius Sterne; here sat Laurence Sterne. Or, as someone with better Latin than I pointed out, here used to sit Laurence Sterne. The wording suggested routine, repetition, a method. A regular, efficient ghostliness.

If Sterne were to haunt any one place, perhaps it would be this chair itself — his image, repeatedly sitting down to work, wearing thin a layer in time. This, I think, is the intangible stuff for which we reach at writers’ houses: the almost commonplace regularity of genius, or of success. But why, even though I found myself in such surroundings, wasn’t I writing? I started to wonder if my own spectre was, at this moment, rubbing a small hole in the future, so that one day someone would be haunted by a vague impression of a human shape vacillating, to and fro. Staring at the ceiling.

Thoughts like this wouldn’t do.

Patrick reappeared, and I asked him what Sterne’s writing process had been. Of course, he said, there were no remaining manuscripts of Tristram Shandy, so we couldn’t tell in what fits and starts he might have written; there were no changes of consistency where he’d dipped a quill, no spatters, no telltale inky accidents (serendipitous or otherwise). There was a manuscript copy of the first part of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, now housed at the British Library, with 500 insertions, deletions and alterations. This was used as the printer’s copy — but that was rather further along in the creative process. What did great works look like when they were in-progress? At Dove Cottage, another literary museum I’d worked for, we had William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s blotted notebooks, scrubbed with emendations, reconsiderings and marginalia; letters to Coleridge soothing any uneasiness should he be unable to finish a particular poem, entreating him to ‘instantly dismiss the subject from [his] thoughts’; and a typically slapdash manuscript of de Quincey’s, stained brown with what we’d all hoped had been opium, but really was a slopped relic of a visit to a London coffeehouse.

For Tristram Shandy we had none of these things. It was as though Tristram was born already clothed in waistcoat and wig, ready to entertain with his urbane, slightly mad perambulations. All we have is the printed text, the edited and ineffable product of all those presumed corrections — and without evidence of them, it’s tempting to believe that those corrections didn’t exist.

But – I remonstrated with myself – I was looking at this wrong! Isn’t Tristram Shandy, for all its digressive fluency, a meditation on the difficulty, the impossibility even, of committing a life, or even a linear story, to paper?

And, said Patrick, there is some reference in A Sentimental Journey to finding the process of writing difficult — when Yorick, Sterne’s alter-ego, attempts to reply to a correspondent and is lost for words: 

I begun and begun again; and though I had nothing to say, and that nothing might have been expressed in half a dozen lines, I made half a dozen different beginnings, and could no way please myself. In short, I was in no mood to write.

No mood to write. The phrase gave me a perverse sort of courage. Had Sterne, in fact, sat in his curvy chair and struggled?

I was, at that time, struggling too: with the plot for a children’s novel — my first foray away from poetry. The more I tried to write it, the more I felt it melting away; the ideal novel I had in my head slipped elusively around the next corner, then the next, as I stood calling after it and receiving no answer. My story, incidentally, has its seed in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and I wanted to capture something of Sterne’s voice in my narrator’s: something a little rococo, fourth-wall-breaking, unexpected. But if I had ever, in truth, had a plot, I’d now lost it entirely, and all I was left with were those writerly appurtenances: the ink, the paper, the chair.

I turned back to Patrick. ‘So what did Sterne do about writer’s block?’

Patrick said, ‘He put on a topaz ring.’

Again, he showed me a passage from Tristram Shandy. Here it is:

Now in ordinary cases, that is, when I am only stupid, and the thoughts rise heavily

and pass gummous through my pen — […] I take a razor at once; and […] without further ceremony, except that of first lathering my beard, I shave it off; this done, I change my shirt – put on a better coat – send for my last wig – put my topaz ring upon my finger; and in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion. […] A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloth’d at the same time.

His ideas get cloth’d… Next morning, intrigued to see if Sterne’s advice would work for me, I put on my best peacock-feather skirt and went into town. There I stood at a secondhand-jeweller’s window, contemplating the rings for sale, and wondering if a topaz would bring with it an idea, a sense of my writing self. I had no intention of actually buying one, and I left empty-handed.

The problem was that I no longer felt like the sort of person who wrote the sort of things I used to write. I’d had my routines, my own small-scale rituals and personal hauntings, which had always seemed to work: at first, it had been to write late at night, after midnight, when the blurred semi-dreamscape allowed me access to surprising images and unexpected paths. Later, the luxurious routine of a few residencies taught me that my best time was first thing in the morning; if I hadn’t sat down to write by 10am, the day was a spoiled sheet, fit only for the wastepaper basket. I liked an early lunch, a spell of reading afterwards, and perhaps a second wind of writing or editing in the evening. It had been easy, a joy — until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

I knew why, in part. The quick, shocking loss of my mother in 2020 had knocked me very badly. A kind friend wrote to me at the time, sympathising that losing one’s mother is like losing part of yourself, and I didn’t realise how much that would resonate until months afterwards. Sadness had jolted me away from myself. I could no longer write poems as I used to: I simply wasn’t the same person. Trying to write as I once had felt like an irrelevance, a form of self-parody — which is why I’d turned to children’s fiction. That was something new and untested; I had no preconceptions about how it might work for me. It was fun. And aside from that, it was a sort of tribute to my mother. She’d written stories for us when we were young, and somehow it felt important to continue this tradition — and above all to be writing, to be progressing, to forge ahead, to create an adventure for my characters.

But just now, it wasn’t working. I’d fallen into a plothole, or snagged on a spike of plotline, or snared in a story that looped and tangled so I couldn’t work out which way was right. Meanwhile, the clock was tutting on. I hadn’t finished the book. I hadn’t finished a draft. This was my life, and time was slipping on and through and behind me. It was a sort of relief, then, to know that Sterne sometimes felt the same, and to wallow in his words…

Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more.

Never to return more… I was still staring at the ceiling, still swivelling. Nothing had progressed except the clock.

Then there was a knock at the door, and – like a reverse Person from Porlock, interrupting not creativity but its lack – the man came to fix the Raeburn in the Shandy cottage. Patrick suggested I clear out — partly to avoid the stink of oil, and partly, I’m sure, to clear my head. I walked behind Shandy Hall to the gardens, and picked a fig off the tree growing in the crook of the drystone walls. It was early October, and the fruits were starting to turn, but there were still good ones to be found. I bit through the chilly green flesh into an interior of minute rubies. A new potential plot began to creep, mist-like, into my mind: something to do with treasures, and forgeries, and clues hidden in stone… Here, perhaps, might be something. The breeze picked up. Over my head, in a code of light and dark, flew clouds; with them, high up and unguessable, the hours, days, years.

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