Days On A Burn

By Karen Liebreich

Karen Liebreich

Hemingway said ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’

Well, perhaps it was easier when it was a typewriter. Now, first thing, I sit down and check my emails. Even if the obvious spam is sifted out, there are various spammish messages to distract me. Maybe even an interesting or relevant one. Then the dog needs walking. By the time I get back from that I’m feeling peckish. The kitchen is a mess, so I move some dirty dishes around, unload the laundry. Then perhaps I sit down and think about what I ought to be writing. But if the sun is shining, I’d much rather be outdoors… and if it’s raining it’s too depressing to work.

A writer ought to have a website. A schoolboy friend of my son’s has been running mine, and I feel it is time I paid it more attention. So I spend a few weeks trying to learn html and uploading material, and wondering where it went – it didn’t upload to where I meant it to go, ah there it is on a completely different page… Days pass in happy distraction. Each day I check the stats. Are people visiting, are they clicking on the ads, are they buying my books? I’m impressed that Google ads can match its offerings to my books. I’ve written one book on paedophile priests (Google offers adverts for legal services and domestic abuse counselling), one on kitchen gardening (buy your own hen), and one on finding an anonymous love letter on a beach (hot water bottles, genies in bottles). After a month, Google ads announces that I have made my first website revenue – 0.007p. I am ecstatic.

A couple of times a week I can distract myself with a fan letter. The Letter in the Bottle came out in French last year, and made a big media splash there. People now write to me about their own experiences – often tragic – and I feel if they have spent time and trauma writing to me, they deserve an answer. And searching for French accents on an English keyboard takes extra time.

So if I’m lucky I actually start real work – writing – around 3 o’clock. Not much time until the kids get back from school… I think about trying to write the novel, but that is going badly, so it would be easier to do something else. Shall I try and write another piece for Private Eye? I write about parks in danger, but it is so depressing – another park being concreted over for housing, or parking, or whatever other rubbish reason. A complex tale has to be squeezed down to about 100 words. And even then, there is so much material on rotten councils that often my piece gets held over, month after month, which is discouraging for me and the campaigners.

Shall I abandon the novel and start work on some of the other ideas that are floating around? Or shall I go and dig up some bindweed at the allotment?

I remember going to a do at my daughter’s school and one of the mothers saying to me. ‘I’ve got a fantastic idea for a book. It’s all ready. It’s all done. All I have to do is write it down.’ And she smiled smugly. But of course it’s the writing down that takes the time, that takes the discipline, the self-belief that it’s worth doing, that someone might want to read it. The research is easy, reading other people’s books, surfing the sites, taking notes, talking to people. It is forcing oneself to actually sit and write something – ideally something original, well-crafted, beautiful, interesting – that is hard.

Looking at the other offerings from writers on this website, I see that I am not alone, and suddenly I feel a bit better. Other writers out there are avoiding writing by noting the bird species visiting their bird feeders! Perhaps writers are only those of us who run out of distractions and suddenly have nothing else to do than turn to their keyboards. Perhaps it is lack of application or concentration, perhaps it is nervousness at what others might think of one’s work, but perhaps it is simply a very natural reluctance to bleed over the keyboard, to lay bare a part of oneself out for inspection.

But the days when it clicks into place are great. The days when you are on a burn, when you forget to be distracted, when email is an intrusion, when the coffee sits there undrunk, those are the days when it is worth it. I just need a few more of those.

About the author:

Karen Liebreich has a history doctorate from Cambridge University and a research diploma from the European University Institute in Florence. While researching for the doctorate she discovered documents in the Vatican archive and elsewhere that resulted in Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy and Scandal in the Rome of Caravaggio and Galileo (Atlantic, 2004), the exposé of a religious order suppressed in a priestly paedophile scandal involving the patron saint of Catholic education. In a previous life she was cultural assistant at the French Institute in London and a television documentary maker for the BBC and The History Channel. Between 2005-2009 she ran a community garden at Chiswick House Kitchen Garden, which resulted in The Family Kitchen Garden (Frances Lincoln, 2009). When a friend found an anonymous message in a bottle on a beach in Kent, she set off on a quest for the author, a quest that took seven years to accomplish: The Letter in the Bottle, a cause célèbre when published in France last year, will be re-issued by Atlantic Books in July 2010. www.karenliebreich.com