How do you write?
 
Writers are often asked about why they write, but often I find myself more inter­ested in how they write.

By ‘writer’, I mean a per­son who writes quite simply because they have to. They write because it’s a part of how they inter­act with the world. It’s as much a part of them as their freckles or per­ver­sions; it’s what they do.

I had a sol­it­ary child­hood. I had to make things up just to be. A lot of these ima­gin­ings stayed in my head, but inev­it­ably some of them began to spew out. In word images, as rebus trickles across the page like bird foot­prints in soot. One of the things I loved to do was to write stor­ies using pic­tures in place of words.
 
An eye for an I.
 
Very soon I was curi­ous about the writers I read. Curi­ous in a situ­ation­ist way. Curi­ous about the room they sat in, the pen they used, their sur­round­ings and the state of their mind. When I was ten years old, I wondered whether Lewis Car­roll stared at a chess board as he wrote, palm rolling the Queen while he con­tem­plated grown-up Alice’s moves. Or if Arthur Ran­some rowed and wrote. Stor­ies lap­ping in his mind. When I was twelve, I wondered if Harper Lee wrote in pen­cil or in ink, whether she sky-stared or scowled in silence at white pages. As I got older, as I read wider, I would love to have been a fly on the wall in a smoky room with Camus, a dog at the feet of Dick­ens.
 
To watch them as they wrote. To watch them like a voyeur. I would like to have seen them, hunched or stiff backed, sprawled or fren­etic. The shape they made while they wrote. Cur­licue or pre­cip­it­ous. And I won­der, does a room of one’s own pro­duce con­tained, argued prose? Is solitude a pre­requis­ite for cre­ativ­ity?
 
Pic­ture me now.
 
I am sit­ting, ankles crossed, back straight on a high fold­ing chair behind a small white wooden counter. It is littered with books, an old 1940’s film reel of the digest­ive sys­tem in a round flat tin, a mobile phone, a hair clip, two AA bat­ter­ies, a cam­era, a pair of scis­sors, a pen­cil and a biro. Inter­mit­tently I suck cof­fee from a take-out cup, and as such remind myself of a feed­ing baby suck­ling warm milk. The books, in no par­tic­u­lar order, are; A His­tory of Phal­lic Wor­ship, Kanga Creek, The Mind of Japan, Myth of the Magus and the Life and Explor­a­tions of Fridtjof Nansen. I don’t intend to read them; they are books I hope to sell. I am typ­ing this on a battered laptop whose speak­ers haven’t worked since I spilt wine over the key­board three years ago. I have to keep stop­ping writ­ing in order to talk to cus­tom­ers who are com­ing in and out of the shop. Sadly they are not real cus­tom­ers, as I have yet to sell any­thing. It is a sunny Thursday after­noon, the air out­side is cold, and even though I’m inside I am still wear­ing a long stripy wool­len scarf. Between typ­ing words and hear­ing sen­tences form in my mind, I lean back and put a sweater covered hand onto the radi­ator and enjoy the warm spread. I am listen­ing to music in a back­ground sort of way. Really, I prefer to listen to music in a fore­ground sort of way — just me and the music, noth­ing else.  The song I’m listen­ing to has an intro­duc­tion that reminds me of an old black and white film where the heroine is tied to a train track and mistily reflects on the vagar­ies of her life so far. If I had to choose between writ­ten words or played music it would be a hard choice. I ima­gine a huge medi­eval style battle. In full sun­shine the strings and sweet girls voices would charge against thick­set armoured words like BUT and NEVER, they’d harry resplen­dent and neces­sary words strung out like flags, radi­ant and sub­lime in their par­tic­u­lar order. I can love them both, words and music, filling my head, thick on my tongue, gentle over my body, but even­tu­ally, after much scream­ing and shout­ing, words would win. Every time.
 
I think this is a col­lec­ted piece of writ­ing.
 
I am neither emo­tion­ally high or low today. I feel meas­ured, which is some­thing for me. Nor­mally I write when I am unmeas­ured. Because writ­ing is what I do to get my bal­ance back. Legs akimbo, middle of a see-saw. To be rid of some­thing. To pre­serve some thing. Either way I’d be lost without it.
 
I am enjoy­ing watch­ing the people come and go; their dif­fer­ences seem to be greater than their sim­il­ar­it­ies. Often I watch other people as if they are alien to me, and I find this strangely com­fort­ing. Other times I look at a per­son and I think to myself, I  (eye) could be you (ewe).
 
There are many times when I write like breath­ing, gulp­ing down vast quant­it­ies of words in an out­pour­ing which feels like release, a blood­let­ting, an expir­a­tion. But today is not one of those times. Today I feel con­tained. Boxed and tucked up, safe inside myself. I wouldn’t want to feel like this all the time.
 
But today it’s just fine for this type of writ­ing.
 
And so, I’m won­der­ing, how do you write?

Isa­belle finds writ­ing in the third per­son both lib­er­at­ing and hor­rific. It reminds her of a ball of string, unrav­el­ling uncon­trol­lably like an omni­po­tent thread coil­ing out into an unstop­pable uni­verse. In the first per­son I live by a dark wood and some­times my favour­ite thing is feed­ing the animals.