Mediocrity/Satisfaction

For some reason I got up at the ungodly (for a Saturday) hour of 8 this morning. Woke up suddenly, fully alert, and unable to do my usual stunt of rolling over and going back to sleep for another three hours. Anyone who has seen me in the mornings knows that I generally wake up dead, so the fact that I was able to not just get up, but to navigate my way around the detritus of my last holiday still scattered on my bedroom floor shows that something was up. The past couple of mornings have seen me staggering to my bedroom door, semi-blind and nearly falling over every two steps as I trip over a sock, a shoe, a rain coat.

In honour of my unseemly rising, I headed for my laptop. Can't do anything too noisy, there's a flatmate still sound asleep next door. So to the interweb, that rescuer of people everywhere who should be doing other things. And I discovered that Stephen Fry has posted another mini blog. It seems he's been busily writing away. It must be the season for it. I've been attempting to work on any of the half finished novels I have floating around, but seemingly only able to shift a few commas in what I've already written. But there are some gems in that mini blog that make me feel better about the fact that every time I get around half way to the finish line I get a chronic case of writers block, and have done so since my first attempt to write something longer than a short story at age 11 (it was a re-working of S. E. Hinton's Outsiders, my favourite book of the time) fizzled off with me having filled about 20 pages of an exercise book in a mad flurry, then crawled through another five before giving up in disgust.

I've heard before that satisfaction is a sign of mediocrity, and if that's the case the one thing I'm not is mediocre. But that could mean that I'm either appallingly bad - not impossible, when I read back over some of the things I wrote when I was younger - or really, very good. Obviously, I hope it's the latter, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's the first one. Until I read the Thomas Mann quote that Mr Fry so kindly included in his blog. It's almost like he knew that there are would-be writers out there who crave the knowledge that this writing lark isn't as easy as some make out. I had already had some inkling, largely drawn from the experiences of Emily Starr in L. M. Montgomery's semi-autobiographical books (the one who wrote Anne of Green Gables. She also produced a host of other books about girls growing up in Canada).

Fry writes in the early hours of the morning; Montgomery clearly did similar things, writing in a fever until the idea was on the page. Colleen McCullough had to change her writing style when her eyesight began to fail and she could no longer manage to write long hand in exercise books as she had done for entire career. Her production rate seems, to me at any rate, to have slowed as a result. There are stories about struggling authors working twelve hour shifts in a post office, then going home and writing for another five. So I feel better about the knowledge that I really only manage to write anything that wouldn't fit on a postage stamp when I'm supposed to be doing something else, and that I'm never entirely happy with it, always tweaking here, adjusting there. If some prolific writers have also struggled, it makes me feel that one day, I may just succeed. And given how many other things I have to do at the moment, I have to be headed for a particularly prolific time. Fingers crossed, I'll manage to finish something. In the mean time, I'm back to re-working the first half of three different novels, for the nth time since they were started - coming up on five years ago now. It has to end sometime, surely?