I’m not sure if this is the same for all writers, but I have to really feel what I write. I suppose it probably is the same for all the best writing, otherwise fiction is just churned out soullessly. That’s kind of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s well-written, no doubt, but I didn’t really get any feeling from it, like he didn’t feel anything when he wrote it. If I don’t feel anything when I write, my writing becomes lifeless, and lately I haven’t been feeling anything.

You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.

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This is a short piece I wrote over summer, also on the theme of puzzles. I thought I’d already posted it. Apparently I hadn’t.

Puzzle

It was a handful of weeks into the summer break. Already _ had become apathetic. Joblessness was perhaps his problem, or maybe only a part of it. Without somewhere to go, something to get up for, he had become, over the recurrent days, acutely aware of the myriad minute sensations that pervade everyday lives. No longer was anything just that which it had once been. No longer was paint around a light switch just paint around a light switch, or a calender unchanged since February just a calender. Now everything was a part of some grandiose puzzle, a puzzle so complex and incongruous that even its final objective was unknown, let alone the steps to its solution.

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This is just a quick experimental piece. Let me know what you think:

Jigsaw Puzzle

Do you want to do a jigsaw?

What?

I want to do a jigsaw. I brought one. Do you want to do it?

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