Reading William Styron

I had one of those restless days yesterday when I couldn't settle down to anything. After a productive morning I spent the afternoon trying to find my way. I couldn't. At one point I returned to a story I had been writing but found I was creatively bereft. I turned out pure drudge. This added to the sense of restlessness, which in a way becomes self-fulfilling. When there's nothing there it's hard to do anything.

I felt particularly sour about my effort to write. In many ways I'm absolutely impervious to doubt, but my writing is something I feel less certain of. When I think about it it's the things I take for granted that worry me least, which is no surprise. Though the nature of my work often throws me into complex situations I have confidence that I'll manage them - I've done it before after all, and any doubt is quickly quashed by actually doing it. By and large that's pretty characteristic of the rest of my life. If I don't know something I'll find a way, and I never doubt it.

My writing is different. For a start it means much more to me. I might take a lot of confidence from my professional abilities, and some small part of my identity, but my writing really is who I am. I am much more intimately engaged with it, and so when it fails it gives me cause to question something of myself.

Writing is so much harder as well. It's not necessarily difficult to turn out a well crafted sentence - but it's hard turning those into chapters and stories that are actually coherent and mean something. It's delicate work and I've not mastered it yet.

For want of a better word I felt a little despondent yesterday afternoon - an unusual emotion for me. I was restless and so felt lost. I thought to go for a walk but as I did it began to rain. I stood at the window and watched the rain pour down and then the hail, small balls of frozen rain bounce from the deck of the front courtyard. The sky was dark and low and streaked occasionally by lightning which a moment later ushered in the low rumble of thunder. I watched some people hurry by covering their heads with their jackets and knew the sensation. By my side Rigby stood similarly fascinated, unpeturbed by the thunder. Then I remembered the clothes on the line.

As is so often the case I felt myself energised by the rain and the lightning. It had become dim inside without light and it was warm and cosy as I looked out, grateful for the shelter and for the unexpected pleasure of watching the rain fall.

For once I went to bed early last night and as I reached for the book I was reading I paused. Instead I went to the bookcase and got a book of stories out by James Salter, and another - A Tidewater Morning - by William Styron. I lit a tea light and set it up beneath the oil burner in my bedroom. Then I climbed into bed to read while the sweet perfume of the scented oil infused the room.

I read Salter first. Though I admire his writing I felt uninspired. Then I opened the Styron.

Styron is an author I greatly admire. I guess he is best known for Sophie's Choice, which is a marvellous book (a million times better than the movie, though Meryl Streep is perfect as Sophie), but he is the author of many other very good books.

A Tidewater Morning is one of those, a kind of fictionalised memoir of his early life growing up and going to war. It is an immensely intelligent and beautifully written book - it is authors like Styron who both intimidate and inspire my own writing aspirations. It is also the book which has become a talismanic touchstone to me. I read it when I wonder about things, I find myself reading it when I find my own writing go off track.

More than anything it is the quality of writing that draws me back again and again (though I find myself identifying with the sensibility of the young Lieutenant in the first of these stories). I read taking it all in as if it is a gorgeous piece of art. It reads so easily, so artlessly, so authentically, and with nothing left out and nothing out of place. This is how to write I think, simply, economically, honestly. It feels so true, so lived, that afterwards I sit back and watch the shifting shadows on the wall and simply ruminate on all I have read.

As I hoped I found something in the reading, found myself reconnecting to what I really wanted to say in my story, rather than what I thought I wanted to say. I turned and began to write in the notebook I keep by my bed the scene I had been trying to write so unsuccessfully earlier in the day. This time it flowed and felt real rather than contrived. Whatever I had lost earlier I had regained in the night, and I slept feeling content and with all my restless urgings vanished.