When writing time is scarce, it helps to have some sort of ritual, something to mark the transition from ‘not writing time’ to ‘now we’re writing’.
Joanne Harris starts the day with a Tweet about her Shed. But I don’t have a shed, and I know that if I were to look at Twitter then I’d lose the rest of the train journey – and my writing time. So instead, I write a line in the back of my exercise book about my train, or about where it’s going.
Some of them come out better than others; but that’s not the point. It’s the writing of a single line, a single line that doesn’t matter at all, that bypasses the bit of my brain that thinks I can’t write the ones that do matter.
I thought I’d share a few of them:
The 0729 toils through a burning desert, over sand dunes a mile high, through strange landscapes that might only be a mirage (but best not to bank on it). Keep the window closed at all times.
The 1742 stands still while the world moves around it. Its passengers run, run, run on the spot to turn the earth.
The 0729 runs between rock strata, and chips of quartz glitter in its path.
The 1742 stops at a weathered halt in a village in a forest, where no birds sing, and no passenger waits on the platform.
The 1340 never runs at all. Also it’s a bus.
The 1742 flies noiselessly, without bump or friction, between the galaxies, guided by a pinprick of starlight.
The 0754 drifts from cloud to cloud. We’ll get there when we get there.
The 1712 bounces from wall to wall of a fibre optic cable, miles beneath the surface of the ocean.
The 1742 is a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of a train on it, and if you shake the box hard enough it might assemble itself. Or the lid might fall off, sending pieces flying across the room.
Kathleen Jowitt 