Every writer bangs on about what happens when the words don’t come. It’s called writer’s block.
But no one talks enough about what happens when too many come for you to know what to do with, and the air is alive with the little buggers shouting for your attention. These situations are worthy of your understanding, too.
I am writing a book on a very specific subject at the moment, a seabird who a large number of you won’t have heard of yet, let alone seen. So I sit in university libraries and hover over natural history websites harvesting what I need to learn the subject and get my point over. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and I drift off to the cricket scores, or Youtube ‘fail’ videos. Other times, like now, it works all too well, and the words are tripping over themselves to get via my head into the book.
Many of them are miserable little frauds that have no right to be there. Others I easily find room for, like a picture of a slightly sniffy maiden aunt you might find in an attic that would look nice in the downstairs loo; some I shoehorn in to a particular section, an overt challenge to the editor to subsequently locate and destroy them in time. Sometimes, even I know they have no place, and the pain that follows is pure separation anxiety.
A good example of this happened yesterday on the third floor of Waterstones in Piccadilly, where I was using a spare half hour to forage in the nature writing section. One of the things I increasingly find is that the pure gems lie on the outskirts of the main subject, little treasures that pop their heads up and announce themselves as being suitable for sliding in to the narrative edgeways, as if with a cake slice. You pick up a book on a tangential bird, for example, look for your own in the index and then discover a nugget that none of your own bird’s scientists had ever thought about. Bingo.
Sometimes, however, it is almost too challenging a jump, as with yesterday, when I found myself looking at a book on sloths, an animal that generally lives in an area, habitat and vegetation, and at a speed, attitude and posture that my bird has never even heard of. You might think that this all disqualifies it from sticking its little nose into my book, but you are probably a mere amateur in these things. To be fair, I was content to pass on to the next when my eyes suddenly lit on the fact that sloth science has recently been riven by the question of whether or not they fart.
Apparently a 2017 book (Does it Fart? The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence.), which I have of course ordered, says it doesn’t, a challenge that every sloth specialist in Central America immediately sought to debunk. And not just with one sloth, but with all 86 species of them. And one by one, species by species, they have: the sound and smell related hardware of scientific research dangling off every Cecopria tree in the primary jungle, and bespectacled PhD researchers gravely noting down the results in their mess tents each evening. It turns out the sloth, with its slow digestion and epically reactive diet could give the wind section of the London Symphony Orchestra a run for its money. For crying out loud! Isn’t this what science is for? Doesn’t the knowledge of it make us all better people? Can this fact not be legitimately included in a book about Manx Shearwaters?
I left Waterstones a happier man, of course, watching the stony expressions of the grey-faced commuting herd sweeping towards me, thinking how much their benighted lives could be ignited by knowing this one tiny, simple, gorgeous fact, instead of worrying about trivia like December elections.
I am working on how this can get into the shearwater book- possibly in the global warming section- but I suspect that, in failing in that task, I have unwittingly stumbled on the identity of 2022’s oeuvre.
This has been a public service announcement.
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