5. The procrastinating writer

The procrastinating writer had quit her job in order to write. Such a radical move she (the procrastinating writer) reflected, with more than a little secret satisfaction, placed her perhaps among the 1 or 2 percent of the population that did not follow, sheep-like, conventional norms. This was a promising sign already of the unforseeable leaps in form, structure and perhaps even in the very etiology of word construction she would pioneer - without yet having written a word. The very blankness of the clean, white, pristinely untouched sheet of paper in front of her was promise of that, more than any scrawling black letters could have been.

Though she had, for the past 22 years, worked at an insurance company where she processed claims for workplace injuries and wrote, for that whole duration, nothing more strenuous than sentences such as, ‘likely cause: whiplash to the lower spine’, finished work at 5pm and had evenings and weekends entirely to herself (having resolved to ‘marry’ her calling, i.e. writing, rather than a man), she had saved her creative genius entirely and unreservedly for the day she would be able to fully and joyfully, surrender herself to it, rather than insult the idea of what it could have been by plonking down half-baked sentences in her 19 hours of free time weekdays, 48 hours on weekends, 120 hours of bank holidays and 600 hours total annual personal holiday (which was generous at the German firm she worked at) in case they turned out, in hindsight, to be hideous.

Instead she had, during those 19 hours of free time weekdays, 48 hours on weekends, 120 hours of bank holidays and 600 hours total annual personal holiday, prepared thoroughly for her pending writing career by talking about it with a select group of creative individuals in her ‘milieu’. These creative individuals were sourced carefully from a wide range of extra-insurance activities which she had researched, trialed, then selectively invested in, at great personal expense, energy and time, as a sign of her commitment to the craft. In addition to being in-touch with their ‘inner creative fountains’, which was of course non-negotiable in this select group of individuals, she had painstakingly sought out a more elusive and indescribable quality: that is, an unreserved support for and faith in that which is yet to be realised, since what is art if not unrealised - as every piece of art was at one point - particularly those truly pushing the boundaries, because they could not have been conceived by the limited and plebian imaginations of the prevailing zeitgeist.[1]

This (the accumulation of her select group), of course, was a subtle pursuit, requiring great tact and delicacy on her (the procrastinating writer’s) part and it took much of the last 22 years to identify and bring into her ‘milieu’ those individuals with the right ‘understanding’ to whom she could really and authentically talk about her prospective writing career. This spiritual support was particularly crucial given the un-affirming cruelty of her family. She had four boorish siblings including a doctor, lawyer, banker and engineer, respectively, who at various family gatherings never failed to make a show of supporting her dreams, making lavish proclamations of wanting her to do well, offering financial and other forms of help, such as introductions to their successful publisher friends, and plied her with various tired, clichéd tropes about ‘reaching for the stars’ etc., together with regular, annoying, insensitive, wholly unnecessary, hurtful and counterproductive proddings about when she would start.

But - she was sure - behind her back these materialistic brutes (i.e her siblings), who could really see no further than their next six-figure bonuses, saw her as nothing more than an insurance clerk and was delighted at this pathetic, tangential and largely accidental path she was on, as it made their own achievements that much more (conventionally) impressive by comparison, and so secretly wished she would fail. She refused all their help. She would show them.[2]

TBC...

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[1] Indeed, it could be argued (and she often did argue) that even art that was seemingly finished was, in its most important aspects, mostly unrealised and unfinished. Anything that could be said to be truly, completely finished was, to those with less limited and less plebeian imaginations, definitively mediocre.

[2] Then there was her cruelly unaffirming father who laughed openly a few years after she accidentally became an insurance clerk and told him of her dreams of being a writer. Over one particularly miserable family dinner he, with his mouth full of food, had burst into a (for her) catastrophic fit of laughter, finishing after only what seemed like five, full minutes with comments to the effect that she had never written a word and had just about more aptitude for taking up space as a shapeless blob. She would show him too, when she was published and rich and famous and her book had been made into a Hollywood movie.