Write What You Know...

I can’t sleep. I’d dropped off easily enough, despite the day’s residual heat that gathered in the upstairs bedroom. We leave the window open to catch any breeze and a fox’s shriek woke me about 3am. Or maybe foxes. Difficult to say but it, or they, made a racket loud enough to wake me. My wife slept on, I could tell by her breathing; regular and gentle. Try as I might, sleep refused to return. I turned my hot pillow over, but the new side soon lost is soothing cool. I turned over, slowly so as not to wake my wife…nothing. I turned back, equally slowly and cradled my head on my arm. Didn’t work. Onto my back to stare at the ceiling, the dangling bulb in its shade clearly visible. The full moon cast shadows of the window frame onto the curtains and taunted me with its wide-awakeness, a beautiful sight I would usually have welcomed, but which now told me only that sleep would not come.

It's my fault. I’d gone to sleep thinking about Reedsy’s latest writing prompt. What could I write? The problem had been going around and around in my mind as I drifted off, and the thing was still there when the fox yelped me awake. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, and turn each prompt over in my mind. None of them inspire me. I fling the duvet off, grasping for sleep. It does not come. May as well do something. If I get up, the squeaky floor boards will wake my wife. Not fair. I can have a proper think about the prompts. What could I write? What did all the writing books say? Write what you know. Trouble is, my job as a civil servant does not lend itself to drama. I am no spy tracking down agents of a hostile power, intent on destroying our way of life; the arcana of tax disputes are not the stuff of stirring stories; the tedium of management meetings are more likely to drive a reader to hurl the book out of the nearest open window, where at least it might scare the fox away. Round and round, round and round, my thoughts circle like, I imagine, the damned fox around our fox-proof food recycling bin.

Write what you know… What did I know? I enjoy writing my stories. I actually enjoy the creative destruction of editing. The advice is to read widely, so I’d put aside the history and fantasy and sci-fi and picked up something serious; 2025 is the one hundredth anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway, a book renowned to be a ‘difficult read’. One click on Waterstones was all it took; the delicate clatter of the letterbox announced the arrival of the slim volume, cradled in corrugated cardboard. I ripped its protective coat aside and riffled the pages, revelling in that distinctive new-book smell. In half-an-hour I had managed only two pages. I persevered to the end, because I don’t like admitting defeat. Others see much in it. I did not. My fault. But I did admire the way she’d created those long, long sentences with those glorious semi-colons, barely separating the ideas that streamed through Mrs Dalloway’s mind as she crossed Victoria Street. Victoria Street! How I knew that road in London, that connected Westminster to Victoria Station and the train home; a road I had tramped down alongside –or so it seemed— all of London during the seemingly endless summer tube strikes, the hot tarmac smell, so reminiscent of summer exams, mixed with the sweetly repulsive fruit smell from someone’s vape ahead of me; plod, plod, plod, hoping I had judged the time right so as not to miss my train, hoping it would be one of the air-conditioned ones instead of the old sweat boxes with their tiny windows that opened just a tiny amount to tease us packed commuters with a breath of cooler air. Around and around the thoughts circled, sleep no nearer.

But that circling, what was it? The conscious presence of what the neuroscientists called, according to New Scientist, the “Default Mode Network”, that network of neuronal connections in our brains that is most active when we are not focussing, simply letting our minds wander, just as mine was now wandering, following its own stream-of-consciousness like Clarissa Dalloway had followed hers (or rather, that Virginia Woolf had so wonderfully described on the page) as she walked to the florist to prepare for her party. Only for me, no party to prepare for; fir me it is a short story to write. I remember how, a few years before, I had trusted my subconscious to solve a particularly knotty work problem, before I had ever heard of the DMN, how the idea mine had presented to me on my early morning walk to the station had stood the test and become the bedrock of the best work I had ever done. I trusted it. I had delivered then. As it had delivered numerous times since, when I was writing my novels. As I lay awake, eyes making patterns of the darkness, ears catching the distant thrumming of the cars speeding over the gaps in the concrete surface of the motorway, had it just given me an idea for the story?

A circular idea to match the circles of my thoughts; could I write about how I found a story to write? These short story prompts are a gift now that I had finished the second edit of my novel and was waiting to hear back from my beta-readers. Put the draft to one side. Forget about it for a month or four. Let it marinate in my subconscious for a while, but still find something to write about every day. The books said I should, but it was so difficult! And here was an answer! Read widely, the books and blogs had said, and here was proof positive that they were absolutely and completely right. I may have struggled to finish Mrs Dalloway, I had missed the subtleties that the Guardian columnist raved about, but the science behind her stream-of-consciousness had led me to an idea. And maybe I could try to write some long sentences with lots of semi-colons, just for practice; to show myself I could; to show myself this probably is a style ill-suited to my voice (whatever the hell that is, I’ve never yet been able to pin it down!); but maybe that idea of writing about that idea was an idea worth writing about. All I had to do was give it a go. Oh, and don’t forget to remember this cracking idea in the morning! No problem there, as sleep was still teasing me from the darkness in the corners of the bedroom. Turn the idea over in my head, sleep would never co…

The open window welcomed the ferocious twittering of the dawn chorus; I didn’t. They may have well been sitting on the windowsill outside. And from downstairs, the cat was yowling to be let in and fed. I jerked upright, eyes wide open, awake in an instant. I had it! A brilliant idea for this week’s short story.

If only I could remember what it was.