International style icon, siren of stage, musician and muse shares his process with you, dear reader. Know her secrets and rejoice!

How does a writer write? What sort of cabalistic processes unfold to open up the parallel pathways to those other dimensions of fiction and reflection? When a writer writes, she’s not quite lying, but it’s certainly not the God’s honest truth she’s spilling. Rather, it’s a chimera of those two ethical poles, which requires all of the daughters of Falsehood (exaggeration, omission, solipsism) to kneel in service of their age-old enemy, Truth. A writer stockpiles her arsenal of Satanic tricks and collages her literary devices, and somehow this composite android – built of half-truths, clichés, edits and inventions – becomes capable of speaking with candour. A truth (not a moral truth, but let’s say, an emotional truth) has to be dressed in scales of deceit and invention in order to seduce the reader. Nobody has time for the good word of Julie Andrews, so writing has evolved a repulsive new skin, which horrified readers cannot tear their eyes from. But how does such a sagacious monster come in to being?

Does it break from the head of its creator, fully formed like Venus from Zeus’ skull? Well, if the aforementioned creator has taken a huge amount of codeine, maybe, but usually not. The diabolic process begins when the writer catches a glimpse of the demon idea, briefly. Foolishly she lunges for it and so ensues a horrible period of flailing, of snatching at the empty air for hours, in an attempt to lay her hands on it. The room is plunged into tar black darkness, illuminated only when the mocking face of the flaming devil flares up: this idea which the writer is trying to seize, too bright to see, too real to grasp. So she has to bargain with the imp, offering the already immortal idea eternal life, promising it fame, admiration, and a guest spot on Oprah – gifts which are useless to the idea and are anyway not the writer’s to give. The idea toys with her, seems as though it may acquiesce, allows the writer to approach before vanishing again, with malicious glee at her frustration. Eventually, seeing that the writer is exhausted and on the precipice of a psychotic break, the idea evaporates, leaving her in the murky darkness, surrounded by endless scorched pages of notes, with only her 25 blinking browser tabs to keep her company.

A greenish, ghoulish light flickers. Thinking it to be just another pop-up, the writer instinctively reaches to hit the red X in the corner, only realising when her fingers disappear through it, that this is not a Flirt4Free ad, but in fact, another idea. This one, coquettish and amused, offers a mischievous little chuckle and dances along the keyboard, much to the delight of the terrorised, sleep-deprived, socially dysfunctional writer. Now, ideas being naturally jealous, her previous torturer flares up, like a scorned lover, irate and hysterical. At first, it spars with the gentle green giggler, but quickly realising this course of action may make it appear untenable to the writer, tries another tact. Taking a cue from its rival, the fiery suitor proposes a threesome, and the writer is suddenly spoilt with the caresses of two lovers.

The green light, the red light, the white light of her screen, stimulate other hidden horrors to come lurching from the corners of the room. Half-forgotten heartbreaks, unprocessed recollections, decade old ire that has yet to cool, all come creeping, skulking, crawling from their tombs towards this necromantic orgy bubbling up through Microsoft Word. Seemingly now, this is the writer’s great hour, as the images, propositions and evocations hurl themselves upon her, and she adeptly marshals them even as they threaten to consume her. Her greatest sadnesses are pressed like dried flowers between the big black pages of satirical humour, and her deepest losses are beribboned with crypto-pornographic imagery.

It is not exactly guesswork, but certainly it is no science – she folds the components into her cauldron guided by impulse and passion, knowing that too heavy-handed an addition could spell an explosive disaster. The primordial ooze, spilling from her screen, cools on her desk, and she finally bids this excretion, “Good night.” In the morning, the slime will have solidified into a fiend of its own. If it can raise its head to look at the writer and speak to the her in a voice she recognises as her own, it will live. So, she waits until dawn to hear whether her creature will whimper, “Mama!”, or not. 

Photo: Chris Jepson