What Are You Writing

• 

  When someone says: what are you writing? It sounds in my ears like they’re saying: I’m going to set fire to your hair. Or I’m going to kill your children. And I don’t even have any children. It’s like asking a man: are you still beating your wife? He is condemned by the question before he has a chance to answer.
  
  

  Asking a writer what are you writing is like asking a philosopher what are you thinking? Or a firefighter what fires have you been fighting? But, then, you wouldn’t ask a firefighter that. You’d ask: put out any interesting fires lately? To which he replies: Yes, I just carried a little girl and her puppy out of a blazing apartment building. That’s heroic. That’s awesome. You ask the writer: what are you writing, and its like asking a fish in which direction he’s swimming?

  Writers don’t immediately know what they are writing. The meaning evolves in the writing. They sense more than see that there’s a crack in the universe and feel a need to fill the vacuum. Rightly or naively, writers see themselves as society’s conscience; a safety valve.

  From this perspective, all writing is political: a mother murdering a child abuser; a mean boss sacking a pregnant employee; a group of wheelchair vets occupying a recruitment office. The drama will be layered in social comment. We laugh our heads off at the antics of Peter Griffin in Family Guy, but underpinning the humour is an intricate substructure of ideas, opinions: of politics.

  Newspapers and broadcasters dip their bowls in the great soup of concepts writers put into the public arena through surveys, reviews, blogs, tweets, Facebook posts. Writers are worker ants, always labouring, often without pay, for the good of the nest: the planet we all share. From now on, when friends ask: what are you writing, I’ll tell them I’m creating a story about how the people woke up one morning and discovered when they came together to save the last of the orang-utans, the last Indian tigers, they lost their feelings of apathy and boredom. They looked into each others eyes and began to see a way to bring about a fairer, better, more equitable future for the entire planet. First published at www.blogcritics.org

  
  

  Author : Chloe Thurlow is a best-selling English novelist and syndicated blogger. Visit www.chloethurlow.com