Creative Process

Creative Process

He’s stranded on the platform strapped to his backpack and clutching his laptop bag and looking at the sky because he can’t stand the sight of the rumbling train anymore. A passer-by brushes past on her way to the stairs. “Do you fucking mind?” he shouts. She turns and he sighs. “I’m sorry…” He deflates before she can retaliate. “It’s just –” He trails off and holds his hands up before his eyes point floorward.

She deliberates. The rush of the crowd is apt for a nod-and-walk-away. She’s also well within her rights to tell him to fuck right off. She could even apologise too - say ‘No, I’m sorry it’s my fault', give a faux smile and move on. All these options flash by, but a force not belonging to her says “Are you alright?”

“No.” He answers briskly, sharply, then looks up. “I’m sorry. It’s just- You’re lovely to ask- Am just havin’ a right royal fuck-up of a day.”

Her smile is therapy. “We’ve all been there.” The platform is sparse now.

“I’m lying actually.” He blurts.

“Come again?”

“I’m lying. My day’s not been a fuck-up. Not in the slightest.”

She waits for an explanation. He’s looking at the sky now. “Then why did you–”

“My day was silky smooth sunshine until about a minute ago. Everything was grand. I’m actually a month off the booze today. Longest I’ve gone since I was fifteen. I woke up early, did my exercise, went to work, made ten sales, had Thai curry for lunch. I even saw this promotion on my lunch break - twenty grand prize for a short story. But the short story has to be about someone coming across twenty grand.”

“Wow that’s–”

“But the deadline’s to-fuckin’-morrow, so between calls at work,” he’s pacing now, “I’m scribbling all these ideas down in my notebook – my black basset beauty.” He closes his eyes. “Leather-bound. A5–”

“There’s nothing like a notebook.” She chimes in. He’s pacing now and stops to see her as she speaks, surprised she’s still listening. “The scratch of pen on paper, notes only your own eye can understand.” She leans on the wall.

“Exactly!” He exclaims, arms raised. “It’s dirty, but clean.” Pacing again, facing the floor.

She nods. “Analogue.”

He wags a single approving index finger without looking up, then decorates his next words with shakes of his (now conjoined) thumb, index and middle fingers. “And you’d think that was a bad thing.”

“But it isn’t.”

“For some reason, no.” Step. Step. Turn. “My mind just can’t splurge into a keyboard.” Step. Step. Turn. “It’s too – I dunno – It’s too…” Stops.

“Final?”

“Yes!” Pacing again. “But also, no! It’s the realm of finished work, of course. But also, it’s just so fucking easy to delete stuff. When you’re at the ideas stage, this seems like… waste!”

“Like you could be erasing ideas that seem bullshit at the time–”

“But could be,” The veins in his neck are showing. “next week’s new obsession. Or next year’s!”

She exhales like a horse. “If you keep hold of a notebook that long.”

“Well here lies the problem.” He leans on the same wall, looks up, sighs, slumps to hug his knees on the floor.

“No.”

“Yep.”

She points a limp finger at the empty train track. “You…” Her voice trails off as she feels his eyes glance up at her from below. “That’s a wounder.”

“Tell me about it.”

They both look out. The air starts to rattle as a train begins its arrival. The sound grows and they wait. The tracks squeal. The train growls. The industrial drone ruminates through each person’s eardrum and out the other and back again. It fills their heads and tickles their jaw bones. They both wait in silence for the fading of the engine, the wheezing of the breaks, the slow chudder of the train as it slows for the alighting passengers on the opposite platform, some of whom have already left their seats in anticipation. But the noise only rises. Silenced by its abuser, the track’s screech is now drowned by the sheer cacophony of the engine. The roar puts winces on commuters’ faces as it finds a stable level of boom which melts into its own reverb and finally, reaches a crescendo. Blues and whites and rusty browns pulsate in front of them, drone now turned staccato. The noise skips and cuts in disjointed fragments as the freight train scampers by. Her eyes follow the last carriage around the bend. The sound retreats. The train is gone.

She looks at her watch. “I’m really sorry about your notebook dude, but I’d better–”

“I can’t remember anything.” His eyes are glazed over, focused on nothing, space, gaps.

“What?”

“Not a single thing.”

“Your name?”

“I’m talking about the fucking ideas!”

“But you only just got off the train?”

“I know. But I just can’t, for the life of me, remember any ideas I’ve been jotting for the past half an hour. Not one.” His knees drop and his legs straighten.

“You’re a bit pissed-off. They’ll turn up. Give yourself–”

“I’m actually always saying it as well.” He doesn’t even notice that he’s interrupting and performs a high-pitched voice to say, “‘The act of writing ideas down makes you remember them anyway’.”

“Exactly!”

“Complete bullshit.”

“Chill out. It’ll be fine.”

“Honestly. They’re gone. I had infinity-twelve ideas and they’ve all just slipped right past. In fact, I’m sure I was just getting a feeling about one of ‘em. But now I can’t think. Now my brain won’t zero in and there’s zero in there anyway. My mind’s awash with nothing. Fuck all.”

She leans down and puts a hand on his shoulder. He squints but accepts it. “Look, I genuinely have to go. I have another train. You just need to take a breath. You’re angry, that’s all, feeling sorry for yourself. You can’t expect yourself to create right fucking now. Go home. Relax. Breathe. They’ll come back.”

He forces a smile and nods. “Thanks.”

“Here.” She holds her hand out. “Gimme your phone.” He hands it over. “Message me if you’re properly fucked.”

“Erm, thanks.”

“No worries.” She smiles and strolls down the platform and up the stairs.

Thanks? He thinks. Thanks? He groans, mutters and self-flagellates all the way home. Thanks? Really? Twice as well.

At home, he pulls out some paper and stares into the blank. It’s one thing being idea-less, another being full-of-ideas then having them all drained away. The void 2.0.

He types the word ‘story’, highlights it, underlines it, emboldens it, throws his head back until his neck cracks. He thinks about what she said and sucks up some air with his eyes closed.

This isn’t working.

What am I even doin’?

The fuck is breathing goin’ do?

Ah, fuck it.

He opens his eyes. I’ll just write the first thing that comes to mind and see where it goes.

Nothing comes to mind.

With a sigh he just writes about his day: the early wake-up, the full-body workout, the sales, the curry, the platform. Paddling against the stream.

With another sigh he stops and stands and leaves the room, opens the fridge, swigs a beer. Now sat at his lamplit kitchen table, he eyes the wine cabinet.

Lying fully clothed on the couch, he is jolted awake by his 7.30am alarm in the next room. He knocks a bottle over before his feet touch the floor and trundle towards the noise. Finally in the kitchen, he’s surprised to find his laptop lying there, open, with a page of incoherent scribbles on some printer paper next to it. He prods away the alarm on his phone, sees that it’s actually 8.15am and he has 4 texts from an unknown number.

He opens them and his aching brain reads them backwards. Confused, he deletes the message thread and gets to work on his hangover. And, after two pints of water, three paracetamol, one cold shower, one banana and one scowl of self-loathing into the mirror, he’s out the door.

He only makes 3 sales that day, and the day after, and after working late on Thursday, none.

The train is baron, so he has a table to himself. Staring out the window, his gloom is interrupted by a vibration. His phone.

He pulls it out, but the screen dims before he has a chance to read the notification. With a lazy swipe of his thumb the display springs back to life.

It’s an email, but the limited text of the notification only shows a fragment:

‘Re: Your Story: Congratulations. Thanks to the belief and intuition of your friend…’

His ears start ringing. He opens the email. His chest tightens. He’s won first prize. Twenty fucking grand. And he never even entered.

He checks his outbox and finds nothing but worthless work debris. But further down, from 3 days ago, there’s an email with no subject sent to an unrecognisable address. He opens it.

There’s one document attached, with one line of unpunctuated text ‘im such a shit writer’.

His mind leaps to the messages he deleted on Tuesday morning, and he forwards the congratulatory email to that unknown email address, to her from the platform, adding only:

Well, I think half this dough belongs to you.

He floats all the way home, laughing, shaking his head, scissor-kicking the air. 10 fucking grand!

Bursting through his front door with a whistle on his lips, he’s greeted by a brown envelope on the floor - first class stamp, handwritten address. He tears it open while leaning his back against the door to close it. From the envelope he pulls his beaten black notebook with a post-it attached:

My anonymous good deed for the day. You’re wise to write your address in things!

Wide-eyed and suddenly aware of his legs again, he flicks through the pages to get a glimpse of the ideas he’d scribbled on the train.

And there, despite two pages full of potential story ideas, it’s the second one in the list that’s circled and underlined:

The writer forgets all his ideas and doesn’t enter – still wins the money.