They say we all have a book in us. Don’t they?
Well, they do, where I come from. It’s a strange place, but it’s not one I can turn my back on, particularly with nowhere else to go. So, I shall continue to hunt down the book. The idea I continue to be fascinated with is the space; it’s not the story, but the place between the people, the missing pieces in the jigsaw, the things I never did, the people who were never born. But this story is not that exactly; it’s the story of the girl with a book in her, fighting to get out. It begins on a Friday.
She stood by the mirror, exploring her teeth in great detail. She was always one for spending far too long looking at her teeth, and today she became aware that the recent trip to the hygienist had revealed those glorious gaps. The spaces where the curly kale wanted to take a mini break before falling into her alimentary canal and doing its work. The space. The space, now filled with the wholesome. The space where, however much she flossed, the sensation of absolute purity could only reside for a few days before the spittle would wreck it. It was gone. And this damned kale was taking its vacation in that one place she held for herself, at the cost of the dentistry trip. Kale. Not juicy, glorious liquorice, but greens.
If we do have a book in us, it can’t be about this, she thought, as she tried to steer her glance away from the little green gremlin.
The gremlin winked.
"Follow me," he said, and he chuckled—a light but guttural chuckle that seemed to resonate in the bathroom and said he knew best. She didn’t want to listen to a gremlin, so she turned to her iPhone and selected music. With a choice from banging vibes to lift music, she decided that whatever she chose for herself on a day like today would feel wrong. She began the process twice. She gave up, knowing full well she had been going to, and went back to the mirror, and the teeth, and the space where the gremlin lived, and the gum on which the little green man appeared to be sitting.
And the book. The book she knew she must have in her.
The gremlin, small though he was, knew his immense power and was perfectly ready to use it to get what he wanted. The girl, however, had been here before, and her half-baked literary stabs clogged up far too many fifth-of-a-notebooks to want to do this yet again, at the start of a new year, on a Friday when she could burst into the weekend like a new literary imagineer, all witnessed by a green gremlin.
But she knew that this gremlin wasn’t operating alone. He had a tribe. They had been out to get her before. They may be small, but they were almighty powerful. Could she get to the book before they knew she had started?
She wanted to know there was something more pressing—some work that needed finishing, some work that might need starting, some texts that needed a response—but it seemed that today that wasn’t the case, and she was scuppered by the greater plan. God’s, if he existed. Which she doubted. But the God of Liminal Literary Creation, perhaps. And he was likely hanging out with a bunch of other gods in a place she couldn’t get to because she couldn’t see it, because she didn’t believe. And perhaps this was holding her back. If she didn’t believe, then how could the gods help her to create? Why would they be onside?
She wasn’t doing a great job without them, and they had certainly done a great job of creating for her an all-working body, so they knew that much. Pretty impressive, really, the human form, and the bits you can’t see. And the imagination. Pretty incredible, really.
But the book.
The gremlin shrugged.
“Jealous?" She asked.
"Nah. Of you? Nah. No way."
He turned away—a sure sign he was just a little bit. Nobody was jealous of her. They had no reason to be, so this was big insight, brought to her by a little kale squatter.
If the gods couldn’t help her, she really was going to be doomed, so she might have to give this one a chance, just for once. Trust.
But first, maybe she could brush her hair. A good day began with 100 brushes. She might not get to the core of her reason for writing, but she would look less like an animal slept in her hair. That, in turn, would perhaps lead her to less self-doubt, and a better headspace, and that to the clarity of vision that every good writer needs to write a succinct number-one bestseller.
She didn’t care much, to be fair, if anyone bought the book, but just imagine if she could climb up onto the rooftop on a cold, clear, crisp night and shout out, "I had a book in me." and someone might holler back, "Mazel Tov," and instead of feeling misunderstood, she might just for once feel worthy and heard. Her mind had wandered once again. If they actually shouted their congratulations in Hebrew, she really should have some celebratory roll-mop herring on standby. That would give the kale a run for his money.
In order to continue the journey, she had first to address the gremlin because he was getting in the way, and she hadn’t even created a first line, let alone a theme or a story. What was the point of a great idea without a concept? She loved a concept. It’s another thing you can’t see. You might be able to see a plot twist, and if you have half a mind, you can pass a few red herrings, but what does a concept look like? Themes you can see, at least sometimes. But...
"Oi." He was blocking the way to her story, and she knew she had one, because if she didn’t, why would she have this constant nagging feeling that rarely left her across much of her life?
Today. Today she would begin to excavate her story.
She would begin after a jolly good flossing.
Have you ever noticed when you’re cleaning your teeth a dark, looming shadow over your left shoulder? When I was a kid, I assumed it to be the coal man, waiting for me to throw salt into his eyes. I mean, how would a coal shadow know the difference between a tube of toothpaste and a salt cellar? Forgive this digression. Part of the way to discovering a story—the only story, perhaps, that we have within us—is to just keep digging. So, that’s my process today.
Behind her left shoulder, a dark and silent giant, foreboding, breathed. His heavy in-and-out, like yoga breathing, catching in the back of the throat, warm and wavelike. But unlike yogic breaths, he felt a little intimidating,. She didn’t want to look. For fear, of catching his eye.
"It’s alright, you know," he might have said. "I got you. I’m part of your story. I’ve been following you around for donkeys' years. I’m not gonna pounce. I mean, look at me. Do I look like—or behave like—I’m impulsive?" She didn’t wish to find out or to challenge a shadow, omnipresent or not, so she tilted her head slightly, realigned her vision, and hoped he would disappear. He didn’t, so she supposed he must be some sort of spirit guide. But please—please don’t be part of the book that she would have in her. He was bound to cause some kind of stomach issues. He was dark and foreboding. The idea of him and a green kale passing through her life for long enough to write a book was bringing on a touch of anxiety. In fact, he was way worse than the kale, so she didn’t even want to introduce them. But as two parts of potentially the same world, she might not be the chooser. They might be part of her story.
How do we explore the story inside ourselves? Until it is written, it doesn’t exist. An idea, a space, a possibility. We cannot assume it is already there just because we know it will one day show itself, and even this, to say we "know," well, can that be true? No. It may never manifest, so it is not so. But somewhere in that space, that possibility, is a real thing that will be one day, if there is a space for it to exist. So it is in the emptiness that the magic occurs. So we must permit the void.
Refer, please, to the early moments of my chapter, and you will be reminded of my interest, my obsession with the space. In the gap, the chink, the flaw. In the moment between the question and the answer, that is where things are actually intriguing. Once we know if he says yes or she crosses the road to get away from him, we know, and we are no longer interested. But there is a time that hangs, like a small intake of air, a momentary suspense, a space.
It is in the space we can create. The story emerges. There is a book in there.
The gremlin waited. He had no choice, really, because he belonged to the story, so he had to wait for his creator. It’s not how he wanted to spend his Friday, but when your options are to end up on a toothpick or to star in a piece of fiction, he chose the latter and gave himself the name Dave. Because Dave was a perfectly good name, and didn’t make him sound like a murderer or like some kind of spray-tanned superhero. Dave could be anyone. So, Dave the protagonist was born. He was chuffed to bits.
Later that day, the gremlin realised why he had hung about for a while on the periphery. It was dark in there, and airless, and somehow it wasn’t what he had expected. But wait—isn’t that a bit like stories?
"What 'you doing?"
"Huh?"
"Dave?"
"Oh, just hanging."
Stories, concepts, ideas—they all do that, don’t they? They keep us awake at night. Where there was peace and balance, a story emerges and won’t leave you alone. And so it was in this case, with Dave, and the gap in her teeth, that wasn’t a gap at all, because...
"Kale. I mean, you can call me Dave if you prefer. Most of my friends do."
She realised she was having a perfectly normal, almost empathetic communication with a small piece of vegetation, and it was turning into a character, central to her book. And now...
"It’s too late. I can’t stop now," she thought. "Because it will kill him." She knew that as an auteur, she had little option now but to stand between the small green gremlin and the dark omnipresence that she didn’t really want to think about. But now that she thought about it—or him—again, he was there for sure, somewhere between her left ear and the wall. She was pretty certain they weren’t going to get along, and that was a bit worrying. One was barely the size of the cuticle on her little finger, and the other—well, certainly its head was greater than her own. But actually, in terms of scale, it was hard to be accurate. It was more a presence.
She found herself thinking deeply about this, because if it wasn’t a presence, then it was an absence, and that was a void, and if there was nothing there, then where was he? She chose to name him, partly because then she might be able to acknowledge him and maybe send him away. But in fact, the moment she gave him an identity, like a story, he began to exist.
Names are important. They tell us so much, but it’s strange that when a child is born, we don’t really know them, and yet they adopt a certain identity and carry that with them, for better or worse, for all time, even after death. So to identify this dark sense of foreboding as "Shady Geezer" might weaken his ability to drive her story, and she did want the story to be of some literary value. So she put that idea away—blocked it, chose absolutely not to acknowledge it—and nicknamed it "The All-Consuming Darkness," while she worked it out, and this sent a chill.
Given the opportunity to create anything that didn’t exist and turn it into something that would then "be," she had now brought to life a small bit of chewy, oven-baked roughage, and something that was going to freak her out, if it existed at all. And if it didn’t, then the notion now of its possibility was enough to destroy her afternoon siesta—something she had taken to since she had lived alone and no longer had to justify her thinking time to her harder-working, or at least fully payrolled, trainee sales exec flatmate, who had just been given a shed load of bonus based on spending her waking hours convincing companies that they needed a new ladies' toiletry dispenser (simply because it flashed when it was empty). A life worth living! It bought that woman freedom, holidays, and handbags, but very little space. It was the space—and only the space—that allowed for stories to take root.
That time to percolate as an auteur is important, and can be compared to the time a chef takes to prepare a dish that is worthy of eating. She had often been accused of not spending enough time even on the most basic pasta boil-up. A so-called meal of convenience was more a heavy mass than a delicious and wholesome stomach pleaser when her mind was on other things. A 7-minute pappardelle when she was distracted and restless became a 5-minute jawbreaker, and she really never learnt, and would undercook it almost every time. So she should, but didn’t, comprehend why other people also found her undercooked writing practice a bit tiresome. But she had a book in her. A book in her. And some time soon, it simply had to show itself.
The gremlin and the coaly shadow were now fully acquainted, and like those awkward characters that are invited to the house party, not because they blend and have great "people skills," but because the host sympathetically thinks, "Well, the poor singleton doesn’t have a significant other, so they will be no trouble." But this couldn’t have been further from the truth for this newly acquainted mismatch who were beginning to control the potential story, the only one she might ever pen.
"I know where this is leading," she thought.
It’s actually about time we gave the "her" a name too, really, as Dave clearly isn’t going away, and the old coal face, albeit yet to be given a better identity, has already assumed the status of a large and forbidding godlike entity with eyes and a lack of humour, so someone’s going to need to shout her name to save her from his deathly grasp in the midpoint.
So let’s call her Gail, if for no other reason than the first name that popped up in my head wasn’t working, and this works pretty well. Gail, apart from being the name of a great chain of coffee shop outlets who also stock a great granola, doesn’t identify with anyone or anything at all. Gail was ready to take these guys on and had fallen into submission as she knew that sometime soon she was going to have to give way to stories that were outside of her own experience. She definitely wasn’t up for penning any more death poetry or articles that might as well be written by a chatbot.
And so, like a long haired lover who has been round the block and decided it might be time to settle down at last and maybe get a haircut, she was prepared to compromise a little, and to freefall, and she did. Straight into the story. Moment by moment, knocking over as many red herrings as flapped their devious, lying torsos into her moon-shaped face as appeared in the opening paras, and there she was. She was in. Inside the world of her story, but secretly still knowing she was close enough to the entrance and half tempted to step back and make herself a cup of chai. But she stayed, reluctant but mature, still staring for fear of losing the thread, still hearing the ujjayi coming from the as-yet unidentified shapeshifter who was blowing on her left shoulder, or was it her own existence she was hearing? If this was it, the one story she had in her, what had all the years been leading to? Surely it was supposed to be more than this. Surely her sole life’s literary purpose was not to share the knowledge of the existence of day-old kale.
A rumble. She had challenged the god of trust and pushed her luck way, way too far this time. It was not for her, a mere mortal channel, to question every reason, every nuance of the world of unpublished literature. She was just here to birth the damned thing, for the simple principle of getting it into the world to fill a space, an idea, if she was lucky, an inch of bookshelf, that maybe one day, one person might lift and interpret and pass on and just maybe make them feel a tiny bit better understood and less alone. That was all. Why did she think she was better than that?
Gail had a lesson to learn. But right now, there were a pile of smashed bricks where a wall used to be, and she had no choice but to rescue her soon-to-be knight, Dave.
We are all guilty of building people up to be something they aren’t, because that’s far more interesting than seeing the reality, so it was no wonder that Gail opted to see the best in Dave. The little, inconspicuous, narrow bloke you wouldn’t likely notice unless he’d been given a lot of help with his outfit was now centre as the protagonist in her one life-confirming piece of literary genius. She had little option but to big him up. They were about to challenge life’s demons together, to take on the world, to prove that good triumphs over negativity, and maybe to sort out getting the coal face a day job so he stopped following her about.
But stories with only three characters weren’t really her vibe, so she had to find a collection of characters she cared about, and if she didn’t care, they weren’t likely to breathe, and then, well, we all know that book wouldn’t live, and then her life might be worthless, and she would end up in therapy, which would be fine, except it was probably pretty expensive compared to the cost of a notebook and a blue biro.
Gail took a moment. She looked around and gave herself a rare pat on the back. She wasn’t one for bigging herself up much and spent a lot of her time either procrastinating for fear of getting things wrong once she started, or apologising for things not being good, or not being clear, or not having any relevance. She flagged over and over again that her stories would be better if she read more books. But she was lazy, and probably had more than one undiagnosed diagnoses and had the concentration of a peanut. She would occasionally download a book to her Kindle, in the full knowledge she wasn’t going to read it, then find it on Audible, download that too, and then find a great podcast where she would experience the comfort and safety of a familiar voice talking about things that she knew enough about to know they were true.
So why did she want to fall into fiction?
It didn’t feel like a choice really. More of a life’s purpose. She and Dave and "coal face" were now united with a challenge. There was a ruddy great broken wall now in the middle of their shared bathroom. It was a bit drafty, and as a result of that, anything might happen as the pages began to turn. It wasn’t a particularly safe space to leave a story hanging with an unpredictable antagonist in a windy room, alongside an ineffectual wimp and a girl who might take herself off for a shavasna if the going got tough. This gave over far too much potential storyline to a demonic as yet unnamed dark force and wasn’t going to achieve a happy ending, or any ending at all. It was likely to just come to an abrupt stop, like all her other stories, when most writers would be hitting the inciting incident. She was by nature structure-blind and didn’t have the staying power to persist in unravelling the first act. While most writers must find huge joy in this process, she held on to the idea that it was all about the characters, and once those came to life, they would take over the world. Well, it wasn’t happening now. Three disparate entities were currently standing on a building site without any sense of how they came to be there, what they might learn from each other, or how they might be changed. It wasn’t going well.
For Gail, this was soon going to become a problem. If she didn’t achieve a story, what even was she? She couldn’t pretend—and frankly, nobody cared except her about her lack of achievement. But what was she doing in this space, with this pen, on this planet, in this life, if she wasn’t able to fill this void?
Maybe there might soon be a twist of fate, and something could happen to the gremlin. She might then go on to show her true prowess and save his life. Having thought she was here on Planet Earth to share reasonably intelligent ideas, she would find that this was purely a holding bay while she was unsuspectingly waiting to save Dave, who would then meet his heroine—or his maker. Wait... she was his maker. She made him up, or at least pulled him from her mouth during dental flossing.
Maybe the austere badass as yet unnamed but veering towards being christened Vvvvernon would try to wreck Dave’s chances with his princess—or prince, perhaps—and Gail could grab a sword, fight the foreshadower to his death, and leave triumphant in the knowledge she did have a life’s purpose after all. Or maybe it wasn’t even that kind of story. She didn’t know and wasn’t sure she cared enough.
But if she closed the notebook, then she knew her life’s purpose was ended, so she went deeper, deeper into her story, searching for truth and the meaning of kale in her life.