Quarantine Project Day 10
Day 10 was also slowed down, this time by a school visit, where I was invited to talk about my career as an author. I never know whether to call myself a writer or an author. Clearly I'm both. I guess a journalist would have a hard time calling himself or herself an author. The etymology of author is "one who causes to grow" or "to increase". I dunno. It seems a bit rich to try and deny that to journalists. Anyway when I'm being an author, visiting schools, talking on a public stage, I feel like I'm being an author not a writer.
"A writer is a person who writes" John Braine said with faultless logic. It was his book about writing that encouraged me to be a word-counter long before you could total up with a single stroke of a key. Each word is a brick in the edifice you are building, he said, so count 'em.
So things like these school visits - being an author as opposed to a writer - slows your productivity, but you wouldn't want to be a writer chained in the dark, never going anywhere.
I can read Kafka's fiction until my eyes bleed, but when he starts talking about writing you realise, like a lot of fine writers, he was also a twit. Here he is:
"I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar's outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up!"
Ugh! How can such a prat have written Metamorphosis???
I wish I hadn't dragged up that Kafka quote. It's seriously putting me off writing this blog. We've got an election coming up. I'd vote for a governemnt prepared to enact draconian legislation against actors and writers setting down their thoughts about their work.
Anyway, I got to talk to some schoolboys about the fun of a writing career and thankfully I got by without mentioning either my dressing gown or life in a locked cellar. So a slow day, but because of schoolboys with shining eyes, a good one.
Words: 1272
(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")
