A Few Brief Notes on Sitting Down to Write Again
Agnès Madrigal
Having drifted away from writing for a while, a writer does the only thing she can: she breaks open her notebook again and presses her pen against the paper pages. In these brief notes, she asks questions about what it means to write and what it means to live—and, as always, how those two acts conspire together.
How does she begin? First, by placing herself in the third person. Then, by trying to forget—let go of—the first person, and everything that first person would bring to the small wood table, the coffee shop corner with its wine-colored wall, the street outside, in the shadow of the distant cathedral with its tall yellow spires.
Eventually, no matter what her other intentions may be, the writer is pulled back by the writing, the writing has a life of its own. Photograph by Klara Kulikova
Everything, it was such a big word. Everything: the to-do lists trapped inside another notebook, clamped shut on the dining table at home; the office work, even on a day off, it swept through her busy mind; the drafts of other stories, stories she was past now, looking for the new plot that would break her open—was that what stories were? Breakages? Openings? She had always wondered. One would grip her for a while, forcing her through the characters, the backdrops, the dialogues. They would manipulate her until they ended. And then they ended, the stories, and it ended, the sometimes-awful and sometimes-ecstatic prodding.
Now she looked for one: a new story. It darted, like a forest animal among the trees; it flitted, like a pigeon briefly appearing at the window. A story for now, for this moment. What was her life? How would the story beg to show her, gradually revealing its secretive sparkling parts, like jewels glinting on a dresser-top in a darkened night room, like the night sky as dusk and its feeble glowing gently fell away. Nothing was ever abundantly clear. Or, if it was, it wasn’t a story.
“What were stories for? [Were they] breakages? Openings? She had always wondered. One would grip her for a while, forcing her through the . . . sometimes-awful, sometimes-ecstatic prodding.”
—Agnès Madrigal
Now, now, she wrote. A tangerine-colored moped was parked on the street, a bright blue plastic tarp hung down the side of three-story building behind it. A white paper bag blew this way and that across the same few sidewalk tiles, never going anywhere. Years ago, a piece of blowing litter such as this changed her perspective of the world, made her believe that everything moved on such delicate invisible threads—even herself, even her story.
“Now she looked for one: a new story. It darted, like a forest animal among the trees; it flitted, like a pigeon briefly appearing at the window. A story for now, for this moment. What was her life? How would the story beg to show her?”
—Agnès Madrigal
This belief was not the problem—she believed it still. It was her reaction to the belief, her giving up in the face of its power, her paralysis in the face of any will of her own. How far she was now from her juvenile then. She would write the story now, late, but not too late. She would begin the story here, in this cold coffee shop, with this final sentence. The story was the antidote.