A simple, repeatable joy

My last email was grumpy. Bah humbug. A silver cane waved menacingly at orphans.

This email is festive. A Merry Christmas to us all! A shower of sweets for street-children, a fat goose for chilly clerks.

Just two things to say:

One, aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we as writers lucky, to have this thing we love doing? Laying down sentences on an empty sheet. It’s free. It’s creative. It’s reliably joyful.

And yes: this whole game has its arduous aspects, of course. All good things do. Getting an agent? Hard. Getting sales? Hard. Writing well enough to deserve either of those things in the first place? Yes, also hard.

But that’s not the core of what we do or why we do it. It’s writing things like this:

I’m Homer, the blind brother. I didn’t lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out. When I was told what was happening I was interested to measure it, I was in my late teens then, keen on everything.

Or this:

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of her head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I didn’t write either of those paragraphs. (EL Doctorow did in Langley and Homer, and Gillian Flynn did in Gone Girl.) But imagine the joy of writing those things. Not all at once, of course, but getting there slowly, chipping away at a paragraph – chip, chip, chip – until the exact right pattern of words made itself felt.

We get that pleasure, you and I, and all we need is a laptop. Lucky us.

That was number one. My number two thing to say is, are you a member of our Townhouse community? If not, you ought to be. It’s free and it gives joy and companionship… and, as it happens, it’ll give you useful feedback, support and encouragement too.

Just go to the Join Us page on our website and select the FREE option.

If you aren’t yet a member of Townhouse, you are genuinely missing out. You have friends there; you just haven’t met them yet. Make that a little free gift to yourself this Christmas.

That’s all from me.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:

Your Feedback Friday exercise this week is simple: eat so much Christmas pudding that your EYES BULGE. In my view, it is perfectly acceptable if you get the same effect from eating mince pies. My wife likes Christmas pudding so much, she buys 12 of them at a time. They line a whole shelf and wink at me each time I open the cupboard, whispering softly of puddingy secrets.

When it snows, at any time of year, we get a pudding from that cupboard, walk up into a snowy field and eat it there, with squirty cream from a can.

And so, as Tiny Tim said: “A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!”

Til next year.

Harry