Thursday 29 June 2017

Another Failing.

On the basis of a statistic given in my Blogger stats, I estimate that I’ve written around 1m words to this blog since I started it in 2010. That’s the equivalent of seven or eight full sized novels. So why didn’t I write seven or eight full sized novels instead? I’ll tell you.

I don’t have the attention span to be a novelist. My mind is too disorganised and given to feeling fractured. I’m most reluctant to commit to any project which will take longer than a few hours, so something as long term as a novel doesn’t stand a chance. And I don’t have the planning nous which novelists need to make their opuses cohesive so that critics and academics can feel entitled to crow about real and imagined depths. I gather you even have to know what a plot arc is.

I’m just an inveterate chatterbox. I was told as much as a child and my informant was right. And I worked in an office once (back in the bad old days when the office environment was conducive to my undeveloped nature) where a woman colleague said of me:

‘I do so like to hear him talk.’

Her best friend who just happened to occupy the next desk retorted:

‘I don’t. I want to punch him on the nose.’

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