Appreciating Scribbling

The problem with writing a novel or even short fiction is the ego we carry with us. Some of us just like to watch the world rather than imprison it on the page. The art of scribbling is often forgot in the craft of writing. Awhile back during house renovations I placed several of my ‘on the boil’ notebooks safe. ‘On the boil’ means that I am using them, I have carried a notebook since I was fifteen; at that tender age I discovered after years of drawing comics, making up tales in my head and becoming the best liar in town that I had an ear, and a knack for telling stories. My teachers tried to put me off bar my wonderful English teacher who saw the opportunity like a speed breaker sees green lights; to say she heaped books on me is an understatement, I still have the bruises where she backed her car up on me and flung book after book on my prone chest. She taught me an important lesson, that to be a writer, I had to read Anna Karenina – it would be many years before the penny dropped about this book but at fifteen I gave it a good go. I told my careers teacher and he got me work experience in a bleach works. My PE teacher called me a failed pansy. The list goes on. They all tried put me off. I suspect all this became fruitful in my subtext as I began to see the world in a different way, as an outsider. I had been outside it all for more years than I care to share, at the time I was bullied for it, then I became cool because of it and then I got bored, retreated back into books and writing. In recent years I have seen how writers beat themselves up about not achieving what they think can be done, perfection. It can’t but the art of scribbling, the joy of the sketch of a scene, an idea that may never be written, is. I have filled more notebooks, pieces of paper, serviettes and toilet paper with ideas than books I have read. I have many books. I have read many more. I will read until the day I die. I have desecrated anything I could write on and will continue to do so. Sometimes the paper is lost, the notebooks are mislaid but the desire to scribble continues. In it there is perfection, the tracks of an idea and of the mind. Finding these is like a time capsule, only a year has passed but there are the start of ideas here for my novel, ideas I had forgotten.