Thoughts !

            Thoughts are often such fleeting things.   If you don’t capture them and take a firm hold of them they will slip away and be lost for ever.

            I wished many times that I could have had my mind wired to a recorder to catch my thoughts as they entered my head.   The words that came with the thoughts were often so profound that if I didn’t write them down at once they would be lost and no matter how hard I tried afterwards I could never spin those thoughts into words in the flowing terms of their original context.

            As a writer this reality would quite often become my worst nightmare and the frustration that goes with it doesn’t always make me a nice person to live with.   Only a writer can understand what another writer goes through in the process of putting thoughts into words and to have it there in print for others to read.   Just the teeniest interruption can shatter one’s thoughts into a million pieces, like an explosion shattering fragile glass.   Poof!   It’s gone!   The words, the structure, the mood … all gone!   And to recapture it could take hours of sweating blood.

            When something like this happens you’re really not in the mood to think about what to give your family for dinner.   But – because you’re a woman – you have to think of these things.   You have to be there for your husband and your children, it’s your duty as a wife and mother, but deep down inside you’re a smouldering cauldron ready to boil over at the slightest provocation.   And why not?   Isn’t it every creative person’s right to focus on their work and to distance themselves from the mundane?

            Yes, it is.   But there’s a different set of rules for men and women.   Now that’s another story that could fill several pages.