Yesterday I started writing again.
Not planning or preparing or making cups of tea or dithering around but actually writing. Miranda, my publisher, will be pleased, or perhaps relieved. My wife, Beatriz, perhaps less so.
I know I was really writing because the voices in the head started. In the middle of a yoga class, or whilst picking up the kids from school, I have that desperate urgency to reach for a piece of paper or a voice recorder and jot down a turn of phrase, an idea, a metaphor. I recognise that feeling and whilst it is a bit daunting it is also beautifully familiar. Like coming home.
In the writing itself I am at that interesting point of finding a new voice. A different voice from ‘Everything’s an Offer’. Still me, but a modulation or variation. Like an actor using the same body, the same person indeed, to represent a different character. Still them, but different. Which seems to me to be a universal, perhaps even eternal theme – how do we stay the same, yet be different enough to grow learn and develop?
