Most of the time, I’m not writing. I am not writing a book about dust, or a poem about stealing shoes at twenty two. I am not writing an article about engine oil caps, or about painting cherries on my nails. I'm not writing about the peaches with burrata and tomatoes that I ate with my best friend in the garden of her London home, or the decaf coffee afterwards, or the honey on toast after that. I’m not writing about the dinner we’re cooking together later on, or the bedsheet we’ll share tonight as we sleep. These things are all part of my (not) writing – the subsidiary bits that feed the writing, sometimes with direct references but mostly with a quiet, hidden wink. The way we spend time when we’re not writing is just as much a part of our practice as the writing itself. This is pretty frightening, but it’s also freeing. That everything, means something.
Last week, the light was flat, with the sky in every corner. I felt it on my elbow through the window and the carpet looked like toasted bread. We were rendered cinematic as we made breakfast in the morning, with a bitter humour in the way our angled bodies looked. I went to the co-op three times and spent three times the amount as I would have liked to. Oscar wanted bacon –“the streaky kind”. It lay in the pan in resolute dismissal. I suppose I could fry. I suppose if that’s what you want from me today.
From my desk between the two windows in his flat where I’m living, I tried to write but imagined my body rendered flat instead, with all of my fat melting away to my bones. It was a thought that comforted me, and comforts me still.
When Anne Boyer speaks about not writing in Not Writing, it is as though the thing she doesn’t write is just as worthy as the thing she does write. This thought that the peripheral stuff, away from the page – the laziness or inaction or distraction or cooking or healing, resting, sleeping, doing the laundry, feeling the bag of revels in my pocket between my wiggling fingers on the way home from the swimming pool – is all part of the practice. That (not) writing is writing, too. As though the burnt slices of toast I scrape in the morning are crucial to my output, even when they don’t find their way onto the page. The acridity of them influencing my tone, perhaps.
This is where I come to you from. A place to honour this (not) Writing. Come and sit at these empty chairs and tell me about your day. How you spent it. Why it will change the sentence you write tomorrow. Sit with me as I ask you, them, whoever will join me, about their own (not) Writing practices. To celebrate them. Interrogate them. Unravel them. Laugh about them.
What a joy to uncover, like the root of a calloused plum tree.
Expose! Expose! Expose!
Welcome to (not) Writing.
Very beautifully expressed. My non-writing writing days are very important to me, but I think it has to be deliberate. That is, if you don't write because a bath tap leaked and you wasted hours dealing with a plumber, that's kind of frustrating even though it will all end up being grist to the mill. I like the advice of a Zen master called Suzuki: a Zen student must learn to waste time conscientiously.