We’re in the protracted and painful process of trying to move house and I’ve aged ten years in two months as a result. I spent most of this last weekend in the attic, trying to dispose of things that should never have been stored up there in the first place. It was a cobwebbed holding cell for unwanted detritus; objects too good to throw away, but not useful enough for everyday display, once-hopeful items waiting for the mythical moment when they might offer importance, brought down, polished up. And then, of course, because we’d gone so long with such and such a thingamajig out of sight and mind - an ancient toaster, a browning lampshade, that Goldfinger print - the true nature of its redundancy became obvious. We’d lived without it for this long, let’s live without it forever. And off it went, to the tip, or the charity shop, or the dustbin.
While I was up there, surrounded by disjecta membra that had nowhere else to go, shelved and unwanted but once full of possibilities, I was put in mind of forgotten computer files, where all those old pieces of writing go to die without dignity. Rooting about, turning over calcifying pots of paint and unbagging ancient curtains, I decided to perform the same autopsy with yesteryear’s snippets of long-lost writing on my laptop.
I probably shouldn’t have bothered. It languishes for the same reasons - largely - as the spider-festooned rolls of wallpaper and spare kitchen tiles.
There’s older writing, far worse stuff, on corrupted disks and dead harddrives, and printed out twenty-five years ago and left to crispen and spot in shoe boxes in a cupboard at my mother’s house, but I’m not remotely intrigued by that. We all have our juvenalia. What I was interested in - because I’m lazy - was the more recent writing I might be able to repurpose, the spare parts and scraps I could reassemble with minimal effort. But, like the attic overspill, most of it has had its day. I’ve moved on, no longer feeling its lifeblood the way I once did. Which is perfectly natural; I’m not going to fight for every line of writing I’ve ever written. The time I spent on it has gone, but it wasn’t entirely unrewarded. Not if I've learnt from the process. And not when I’ve come across some of the unintentional first-draft howlers I once hastily typed in now-unloved stories and unedited novel attempts.
Take, for example: ‘Sunday was the day Danger came knocking, like a recalcitrant Jehovah's Witness.’
Dreadful.
I see what I was trying to do, but the simile doesn’t work. Yes Jehovah’s witnesses might well knock on a Sunday, but they’re hardly synonymous with Danger, at least not with a capital letter.
Or, ‘She slapped his face and his eyes fell to the floor.’
That metaphor might have worked if I’d written ‘his eyes dropped’ but all it does in its current form is conjure an image of some poor bugger getting slapped round the face so hard his eyes fly out of his skull.
Or, after a girl’s been scared out of her wits on the way home and, putting on a brave face, tells her boyfriend, ‘My heart’s beating double time but I’ve no faith in omens.’
Oh yeah, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW PEOPLE SPEAK.
But there’s some good hidden away. I was quite pleased with ‘the yellow flesh of the village crumbles under the weight of its sun,’ to describe the weather damage to a Portuguese fishing village and ‘the glaucoma of tears,’ when trying to explain a character’s sudden welling of grief. Similarly, I appreciated a sunset’s description as the day being ‘robbed by the west.’
So those hours spent writing weren’t all entirely wasted.
But, generally speaking, I’m happy to carry most of those pieces to the tip, although there's undoubtedly some bric-a-brac I’ll be dusting off and displaying in a new home some day.
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