Quality Content.

A kind person asks if she might recommend my work because she wants to support quality content. I think she said quality content. (I should really go back and find the message and quote it precisely.) It might have been quality writing. Anyway, I am very touched.

Now I think: I have to do more quality writing.

Actually, it made me think a lot about internal and external validation. It was such a lovely thing - a marvellous starburst-boost from a complete stranger - and the loveliness of it lasted for a whole morning. I smiled a lot. I had a witness! (I read somewhere, years ago, that the whole point of being married was to have a witness for your life, because everyone needs a witness. I never fancied the idea of being married, but I have my friend and compadre who has been with me since we were nineteen, and we speak on the telephone sometimes five times a week and we’ve been to weddings together and funerals together and that’s an awful lot of witnessing.)

It was a lovely thing and then what I suppose the scientists would call hedonic adaptation kicked in and the starburst wore off and I was just a normal writer again.

Something in me wanted more of that sweet acknowledgement. Something in me wanted to be more brilliant, more of the time.

The annoying thing is that I don’t entirely know how to make my content more quality. I mean, I’m a writer, and we tend to be faintly obsessive, so obviously I am writing every day and every day and trying to be more like Joan Didion and Scott Fitzgerald and thinking that if I blast myself out of the comfort zone I might one day write a sentence as shimmering as the sentences in Mrs Dalloway.

I write thousands of words in a week and I try to reach higher.

I try to think better.

I don’t even really know what that means, except to throw open all the mental gates and let my imagination and creative self and intellect gallop over an open plain. As much as possible.

Is that a metaphor that even works?

I think better when I’m working with my neuroscientist. (How happy her undergraduates must be, when she strides into the lecture hall or laboratory.) I think better when I’m with my old friend. Sometimes I take my thinking to the trees and let them help me. There is something about the trees which lifts everything up - the heart, the mind, the spirit.

I read writers and I know they are very good - I can see they are very good - but they don’t touch me. I grow bored and wish they would break up their paragraphs a bit, or find an editor.

I read writers who appear to be on some kind of strong hallucinogen but who still are garlanded by the bestselling lists.

I saw one writer the other day who dangled a modifier, right out into space, and neither she, nor the editor, nor all the subs, seemed to notice or give a damn.

So I really don’t know what quality content is.

Do you just learn your craft for forty years and show up and do your best?

Maybe it’s something like that.

The swallows have been flying low over the field because they are getting ready to go to Africa and they have to practise their low flying. The red mare was lying down when I arrived yesterday morning, making little noises of pleasure. My dear old Stanley the Manly, who is very old, is still, amazingly, alive. Every day I have with him is a gift.

Sometimes, when I write this for you, the wood pigeons are singing outside my window, but they are not singing now. There is a strange, muted, distant flutter of birdsong, very subdued, as if everyone knows it is a Sunday. I hope you have a literal or figurative flutter of birdsong. That is quality content, for sure. And it is all around us. Isn’t that a little bit of magic, to take us through to Monday?

PS. I like to have a marvellous ending, even when I’m just musing. I like to go out with a bang, not a whimper. But I absolutely cannot find that grand final sentence. Can’t do it. You can see I was looking for it, with the birdsong and all. It wasn’t there. The muse is laughing at me. ‘Ha, ha,’ she says. ‘I’m not a performing monkey.’