Writing and the Art of Self-trepanation 1. Getting Started

The eccentric Joey Mellen performed a self-trepanation in the Spring of 1970 in an attempt to enhance his consciousness. "He applied the drill to his forehead, but after half an hour’s work the cable burnt out ..... next day he set out to finish the job. ‘This time I was not in any doubt. The drill head went at least an inch deep through the hole. A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill. In the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the pulsation of the brain.' "

John Michell “Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions”.

Mellen could have achieved the same effect with much less danger simply by becoming a writer, which can feel very much like self-trepanation with the difficulty of starting the job, carrying it through, and the subsequent effect on the brain.

Getting started can be a major problem, as many writers have found. When Jean Tangye began to write about her life at Minack in Cornwall, she only got started after her husband Derek, an author himself, locked her in a shed with her permission, a typewriter, a pile of paper and absolutely nothing else.

Wendy hasn’t had to go to those extremes with me, but she certainly gets exasperated when I ask her to comment on the 50^th version of Chapter 1 before I get started on Chapter 2. It’s very important to do this sort of polishing when preparing a synopsis and sample chapter for a publisher, and an amplification of the old journalist’s maxim always to put a piece aside after you’ve written it, even for half an hour, and then come back and edit it. It really blocks the path of progress, though, when it comes to writing the rest of the book.

Or does it? Most writers are singularly coy about how they go about writing (Somerset Maugham, for example, in his “Writer’s Notebook” doesn’t say a word about the subject), but Bertrand Russell tells a story which indicates that my approach might have its merits. I polish, not to improve my prose, but because every time I read what I have written I find things that I have glossed over rather than thinking them right through. Then suddenly something becomes unblocked and I can write subsequent chapters much faster through having put in all that thinking. Compare Russell:

“Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my sub-consciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation. The most curious example of this process, and the one which led me subsequently to rely upon it, occurred at the beginning of 1914. I had undertaken to give the Lowell Lectures at Boston, and had chosen as my subject "Our Knowledge of the External World". Throughout 1913 I thought about this topic. In term time in my rooms at Cambridge, in vacations in a quiet inn on the upper reaches of the Thames, I concentrated with such intensity that I sometimes forgot to breath and emerged panting as from a trance. But all to no avail. To every theory that I could think of I could perceive fatal objections. At last, in despair, I went off to Rome for Christmas, hoping that a holiday would revive my flagging energy. I got back to 'Cambridge on the last day of 1913, and although my difficulties were still completely unresolved I arranged, because the remaining time was short, to dictate as best as I could to a stenographer. Next morning, as she came in at the door, I suddenly saw exactly what I had to say, and proceeded to dictate the whole book without a moment's hesitation.”

Actually, I don’t believe him. I think it was the deadline that did the trick. I need the rest of his advice like I need a hole in the head.