Ian McMillan: Trip round a block

I sit at the keyboard like a concert pianist about to animate some delectable Chopin; I crack my knuckles and I lean over to begin my artistic task. Of course, this is a laptop keyboard we're talking about, not a piano one, and I'm just about to start writing my column for The Yorkshire Post magazine. I take a long glug of tea and begin.
Ian McMillanIan McMillan
Ian McMillan

Or I nearly do. I almost do. The mug is empty, so I go and put the kettle on. As it boils I stare out of the window because the Leeds-born thriller writer John Higgins once said that ‘writers are working hard even when they’re staring out of the window’ and that’s a philosophy I find it very easy to agree with. Look at those birds on that chimney pot. Look at the way one flies off, then the other, then one comes back like birds in a nursery rhyme. The kettle boils and I make the tea. Time to start writing. Nose to the mindstone!

Then, just before I hit the first letter on the keyboard, I remember that Barnsley FC had played the night before and I could watch the goals on my iPad. So I do that. And then I say to my wife ‘Here, look at this; some brilliant goals from last night’ and she says, wisely, ‘You’re just putting off starting your writing, aren’t you?’

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I bluster and wave dismissively and go a bit red but only because she is right. I am putting it off. And yet, and yet…I’m not really. I’d had the idea for the column the night before and I’d written it down in my notebook and somehow, deep in the haunted wing of my brain, the column was taking shape, whirring away like a little sentence-machine.

Yes, that’s all very well, McMillan, but you’ve got to write the thing, haven’t you? I look at the Barnsley goals one more time on the iPad and make another cuppa and then I decide that the only way to start properly on the writing is to sneak up on it like it is big game and I am a hunter. It wouldn’t notice me and I’d have it in my grasp and before I knew it I’d have a paragraph or two wriggling in my keep net.

I turn round in my chair. I stare at the wall. I count down from twenty to one, and then, very slowly, to zero. I distract myself with thoughts about non-writing topics: the climate of Madagascar, the name of Henry VIII’s third wife.

I turn round suddenly and triumphantly, so quickly that I almost knock my tea over. I start writing, my stubby fingers pounding the keys so quickly that the words come out almost like car number plates or avant-garde verse or my name translated into Russian. It doesn’t matter. I can always correct the writing later on; the main thing is, as always, to get the words down.

I look at the first sentence, correct the spelling, settle down and begin to write. The prose ship is leaving the harbour for the open sea! Any more for a trip round Sentence Bay?