Ron McMillan's Blog
A Troubled Conscience
My conscience is bothering me. What’s the use of a blog if you don’t write it?
I have never had any problem with mitigating circumstances. With generating and reaching for and spouting them without shame, I mean, and these days are no different. Distractions? I embrace them with as much passion as I apply to that which is evidently more important. And so I sit at my lovely big walnut desk - did I tell you about my desk? - wondering why the list of things achieved in recent weeks looks so threadbare, and consider another escapist tootling session on my much-tinkered-with mandolin. I must have told you about how much fun it is to learn mandolin from scratch, and how satisfying it is to reduce one to its constituent parts and rebuild it, manifestly - albeit imperceptibly to all but myself - ‘better’ than it was before.
I have of late been involved in the latter stages of a novel-writing process that has gone on for a lot longer than I care to admit, and that was only revived from flat-liner status last year by the welcome intervention of powerful figures at Sandstone Towers. Revisiting a text that for a long time has been growing in the dark like a mushroom is a process inherently interesting (and there is a word even less tolerable than ‘nice’), yet at the same time fraught with insecurities real and imagined. Was it in the dark because it was not worthy of limelight? Perhaps so, but the editing process applied in recent months has surely transformed it to full attention-worthy status. Right?
I long ago stopped buying newspapers, and have for years relied on the Internet for extensive daily feeds of what qualifies as news and commentary. Yesterday’s Guardian had a feature that was not exactly timely. I’m in the last few weeks of polishing a novel and they take time out to re-hash Elmore Leonard’s famed Ten Rules For Writing Fiction. Naturally, and without a hint of irony, in an antithesis of anything Mr Elmore ever wrote, they commit the sin of never using only one word where they can squeeze in five. It is likely that none of the authors quoted managed to add much to the master’s original thesis - but I confess that I didn’t manage to wade through the whole article to find out.
But where was I, apart from avoiding getting on with my editing?
Now the wee mandolin is calling out for attention. From just here, next to the impressively grand, albeit at times underworked, desk.
Big smile. After a hectic weekend, I have the Grauniad Review plus the news-section article about Martin Amis on the unread mountain by my bed. All the other sections lie pristine in the recycling bin. I don’t buy newspapers either. My weekend guest buys them but doesn’t read them - a phase I managed to put behind me a few decades ago.
By bobbie on Monday 22nd February 2010 at 1:28pm
Your battles with distractions reminds me of similar skirmishes I had with the Unfinished MS. back in the late 80s when I was writing the dissertation (which I’m sure has not had anywhere near as many readers in the intervening 20 years as this blog has had in the past 20 days). In particular I recall having to talk myself out of painting the walls of our apartment.
Right. Enough o’ your backsliding, McDuff. Back to the editing! Your reading public is waiting.
By Mark McTague on Tuesday 23rd February 2010 at 5:35am