Wet Wednesdays

Watching paint dry
I’m feeling irritable on-the-verge-of-tears. It’s the opposite of ‘flow’ – blockage, like a drain that’s full of hair and scum and food waste. Arghh! What it makes me want to do is anything rather than keep writing. I want to make a cup of tea, play computer games, even – god help us – tidy my room. Anything but put one word after another till the page is filled. But that’s what I’m going to do nonetheless. Even if it’s the old stratagem of writing ‘I don’t know what to write’ over and over.
You know, even as I wrote that I could feel it easing slightly. I had given up on writing anything interesting. That took the pressure off.
And I had begun to externalise the problem, to stand a little aside form it, to view it slightly askew. There is a moment in every Agatha Christie story when Poirot is “seeing the case the right way up for the first time”. All the elements have been presented, the information is all there, but until that moment he hadn’t been able to form a picture. It’s like the act of stepping away from a painting or sculpture you’re working on – walk around it, look at it from above, below, to the side. Suddenly something strikes you. Because in the real world there are always more elements, always thongs you have ignored because they didn’t fit the picture in your head – and now they seem to suggest or point to something different.
This is how you get unstuck. I’m now in full steam. I don’t feel that sicky self-irritation. I feel I want to illuminate this small area of writing practice. To draw attention to it, as if it were a discordant brush stroke or glaring chisel-gouge – which when you look again is the thing that makes the piece, the thing that opens it up to interesting possibilities.
This is what Wet Wednesdays is about: stepping back from the irritation, the dry scratchings, and looking at what it says about the writing process (or any deep practice).
There is a phrase “as interesting as watching paint dry”. But have you ever done that? It *is* interesting. It happens at different rates according to the minute properties of the surface – whether you’re talking about a wall or a canvas. The still-wet area is generally darker. Why is that? The wet surface absorbs more light I suppose. You’d expect the opposite. Large bodies of water have a glassy reflective surface. Why is it when it’s on fabric that the surface is rough? I guess it’s the difference between a puddle of water on a rock depression and a thin surface wetting of the same rock. In the first the water clings to itself, forms a body with its own reflective surface. In the second, the water clings to the rock’s surface and amplifies the irregularities. That’s my explanation. I may be wrong. I think it’s quite interesting. QED.
The process of writing about boredom and irritation can be similarly illuminating. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Music: paint it black

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