I walk into the corridor. It’s long and bright, with glass walls to little cubicles on either side. He walked slowly, balancing carefully on the soles of his feet, as he made it towards the kitchen area just like he had done so many times before.
Brian Eno’s “Under Stars” from the Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks album still plays in his ears. It has that track on it from the BBC programme so many years ago. The Arena music. The bottle floating sideways on the ripple of water. Arena. Something gentle and welcoming about it all. And of course “An Ending: Ascent” which made itself known to the public again in the 1990s featuring in the Trainspotting soundtrack.
And this is the point with Eno, he is gentle and all-encompassing. Unlike the abrasive soul of Eno himself – spiky, knowing, smart, sharp. All the opposites of his music. But if you listen to his early music you get a sense of the younger man, the firebrand and the pompadour. The one who stands up to the superegos of Bowie and Gabriel and all those quivering British legends of the prog and glam and time they were born.
Are we to see these types again? Not until the technology moves on in as big a step as we saw.
The technology was what drove them all into the future. They were intoxicated by it and incapable of doing anything but express themselves through these expensive artificial noises.
The end of the corridor is a land that I don’t pass. His sandalled feet take a left turn and then a sharp right to reach the kitchenette. It was clean this morning. The temporary receptionist has done their job early today, or perhaps I was later than usual.
The work surfaces are clean. The glasses are ready on the shelf to accept the hot water. I don’t usually like drinking tea from glass mugs, but here it’s different. The glass is always very clean, not like at home, where we have older glasses and everything seems grimy and second-hand.
Here, the glass is clean, and the coffee machine serves boiling water instantly at the touch of a button. For a year or so, I waited for the kettle to boil, but that was unsatisfactory for so many reasons. Firstly, the kettle takes a few minutes to boil, and I would have to wait in the kitchenette which might mean awkward interations with some of the other office dwellers. We all come from different places and didn’t mix. I didn’t know what the person across the way from me did. He didn’t know what I did but I guess he could probably make a guess. IT guy, two laptops. Occasionally having meetings, but most of the time I was just sitting there with my headphones on listening to music or staring into space or playing a game. A snooker game on my laptop.
Eno was always the soundtrack, or, occasionally, Erland Cooper. Sometimes it was jazz, but that caused my brain to percolate too quickly. Eno provides a slow, long, steady rolling boil of thoughts. Like the water, the thoughts scuttle under the surface for a while before sinking below, lying on the bottom before rising quickly again, breaking the surface and diving back underneath. The thoughts popping at just the correct pace for me to place them through my fingers onto the screen. If I wrote longhand, I wouldn’t be able to read it, or more worringly, I would misplace the book or the piece of paper where the thoughts were written.
As a writer, you need to have a system. Mine was always computer first. Use the computer. I started, like so many others, with Word, then perhaps Google Docs. But the single document format quickly becomes unwieldy. Being a computer type, I looked for solutions, and I found Scrivener. Scrivener lets you create scenes and move them between chapters. It gently allows you apply a structure to your writing. I found this gentle, supportive approach useful once I’d understood it. To begin with, though, I fought it. I wanted to write everything in one blob, still, a single chapter. And anyway, how long should a chapter be? How long should a scene be?
All these are valid questions, and you can only answer them for yourself. The process of writing is the process of working out what you’re trying to say, but also a method of coming back to it again and understanding where you left off.
Perhaps that goes too deep? The mystery is deeper than that, but perhaps you are not interested.
Novel writing is a pleasure, there is a bit at the end of the Murakami, let me find it.
In many ways there’s a major difference between a novice writer holding down two jobs and an experienced professional writer. But when it comes to the natural affection one has for the act of writing novels there shouldn’t be much of a difference.
The natural affection one has for the act of writing novels. That is something that connects with your soul, and once it has connected, a little like the shadow in “The City and Its Uncertain Walls”, it’s a little difficult to detach. I feel the same urge, but I am not 36, the time that Murakami wrote his first novel, and I’m not 76, the age he is now in 2025. I am 54, and I am a debut novelist, and I will be writing again, now, because I have a natural affection for the act of writing novels.
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