Of winter, writing and empty spaces

Winter and isolation

Winter is the time of isolation. The tropes of writing about - and during - winter tend towards the same thing - hunkering down, a quiet place with a curved reading light illuminating the blank page as words plod across it, like Ted Hughes's imagined thought-fox stepping onto a snowy lawn.

There is a degree of truth in the myth of the loneliness of the writer's craft. That only you can type the words onto the screen or scrawl across the lined page. Somehow, I have managed to reach the 8th line of this piece without mentioning AI, but of course, machine learning has to come into it, because whilst the writer may still retreat to the shed at the end of the garden, the draughty attic in the loft, or the quiet corner of the cafe, they now have that new companion to share that lonely space.

Private universe

But, I really want to debunk the whole idea of the solitary writer regardless of AI. It has often been said that everyone writes with a reader looking over their shoulder. This is even true of the most private of writing - diaries, poetry that is never shared or read aloud, notes jotted down for a project that may never see the light of day. Recently, working on a textbook for international students, I had to explain the idea of 'audience'. Received wisdom is that a writer has a purpose and a target audience or reader. It's easier to teach that way: a letter to a newspaper is for that paper's readership; a speech to a class of your peers is for them only - so make sure you match your content and register to that audience.

But no text exists in that narrow silo. Even in the silent space between the completion of a piece of writing and its arrival, fully-formed, on someone's desk or in someone's ear, there is the possibility of another, invisible reader. This is both yourself, and all the other possible readers in the world. It's this imaginative gap, this private universe, which makes the act of writing magical. And it gives the lie, too, to the idea that a writer can control exactly what a reader feels or understands.

Pleasures of imagination

Writing is like the sudden monetary gift you receive and consider spending. Before you actually spend the amount, all the possible choices are there: the holiday, the electric bill, the leaky roof, the posh meal out, the hobby you can finally indulge. The money won't stretch to cover them all, but the possibilities of how you spend it stretch as far as you want them to. They are endless and therefore perfect. The act of actually spending the money is finite and disappointingly limited. Writing's great pleasure is that nothing is ever finite, not least the audience. In fact, it could be argued that the writing that never sees the light of day, that is never published or read aloud has the greatest potential and richness: it has all the possibilities that the published work does not.

I try to tell myself that in the depths of winter, beavering away on the latest idea. Does it really matter if it is published? This might seem like a mantra for the unpublished writer but perhaps the process is its own reward. You are collaborating with a vast choir of voices, ever-shifting, possible figures, benevolent ghosts at your own special feast. As writers we are also humans and exist in society. Our whole physical and emotional being is predicated on the communal.

I remember Peter Brook, the acclaimed theatre director talking about what is needed for a 'play' to exist. He argued that all you need is an empty space - and an actor walking onto it. We probably don't even need to see the audience. It is there the moment the space and the actor exist.

To paraphrase another work of art - 'if you write it, they will come'.