Dorothy Parker once said that if you have a friend who is an aspiring writer, the second-biggest favour you can do them is to give them a copy of 'The Elements of Style'. The first-best favour is to shoot them now, while they're happy...This crossed my mind the other morning as I sat at home, in front of my laptop screen. Banished from the office to finish the screenplay of The Dreaming Spires, I was descending into a mist of despair as I realised I had forgotton how to put one word in front of the other. And it was only 9.30 am. I put on some music, trying to evoke the mood of lost love and mortal rejection being felt by my character at that moment. Now I was just missing Hanan. To take my mind of the vast distance between myself and my true love (about one mile, but that's not the point) I stared at my keyboard and realised it could probably use a clean. Did I dare abandon the moment of writerly struggle and go for the cleaning fluid and cotton buds? I rose from my chair...the phone rang. Hanan.
'How many pages have you done?' she asked chirpily.
'I don't know how to write any more!' I wailed.
'Just focus,' she said. 'Take your time. You have till lunch'
I put the phone down with renewed resolve. Tapped a few lines. Deleted them. Then watched emails floating in. There was one from a man in Nigeria offering to split $170 million dollars with me if I would just give him my bank account details. I considered whether I might get my cheque book out. I rose from my chair...the phone rang.
'How many pages?' Hanan wanted to know. I shifted uneasily, scanning the corners of the room. She has a webcam watching me, I swear.
'It's not like writing emails to Nigerians, you know," I replied, stung. 'It's hard.'
She said nothing but sniffed, a sniff that held in it all the meaning of 'Hard? Hard is waking up with no work, no food, no prospects and you are sitting in a lovely flat in peace and quiet doing what you always said you wanted to do...'
'But it's going fine,' I offered, into the silence. And you know what? After that, it did...