Writing in Cafes
I’m always drawn to the idea of writing in cafes until it comes to the moment to actually do it.
Leaving aside my inability to consume large quantities of caffeine without suffering stomach cramps, I simply mean to place myself in a public space and self-consciously start to write. I find it impossible. Not to sound precious but I think I demean myself when I try to be something that I’m not.
The problem is that I doubt common assumptions about what is to be creative. It’s like the very notion of what it is to be (or attempt to be) a writer. To write is an utterly lonely existence. I cannot think of my life without writing, and yet to choose to continue to succeed in it means huge sacrifice and too many hours in my own company. This is somewhat alien to the public concept of writers (and indeed, any kind of artist). There’s an implied flamboyance at the mention of the act of creation. Artists are slightly odd souls who just have odd ways about them. I walk through my local town on a sunny day and the park is full of what I would suppose are ‘the creative types’; their wrists wrapped heavily in beads, noses pierced, navels glistening. Occasionally, one or more of them will be strumming a guitar. In other words, they are being creative, and creative in a very open and honest way.
I am none of those things. My heroes were none of those things. I read poetry but doubt the form once it lost its form. I enjoy art but, for the same reasons, doubt those people who lampoon its structures. Great art (and great writing) usually amounts to great structure. Da Vinci copied nature to find those structures, and the same is true of much (if not all) of the art that we cherish. Joseph Conrad’s novels are masterpieces of structure. So too those of Virginia Woolf. Our best modern plays and screenplays work because they are structurally sound. The assumption is that ‘art’ is something done by the people with only a slight notion of the real world is ludicrous. Art is not floppy. Art is usually produced by people with imaginations capable of fashioning the apparently chaotic into something that has form. A story is not simply a sequence of words, but has a deliberate shape. Creating shape is the hardest thing a writer can do.
I wish I could grow my hair long, get a tattoo, and live in a commune where we eat nothing but goat cheese. But I’d probably do very little writing, just as I couldn’t write in the café today. I sat there, over my decaffeinated cappuccino, and felt only impotent feelings towards the script I had planned to revise. Writing like that feels like a pose. The acting gets in the way of the work.