Korridorium

♫ Ásko­run ♫

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“I enter the cor­ri­dor,” read the index card I drew. Pas­cal had labeled ten index cards and fanned them out for me, face down. The sen­tence stood there scrawled and unfa­mil­iar to me. Pas­cal and I had already put away a fair amount of the hotel wine he’d brought, and I’d been bor­ing him with a long mono­logue about writer’s block and cre­ativ­ity, cul­mi­nat­ing in the claim—probably already slightly slurred—that you could over­come any cre­ative block sim­ply by demand­ing fifty or a hun­dred ideas from your­self instead of just one per­fect one. Pas­cal laughed at me.

A bit pissed off, I gave him exam­ples. Once I strug­gled to come up with a suit­able award speech for a pigeon breeder. Even­tu­ally, in des­per­a­tion, I hit upon the idea of trick­ing myself into writ­ing ten ver­sions of the speech—and just started writ­ing with­out tak­ing myself or the sub­ject too seri­ously any­more. After the sixth ver­sion, I real­ized I just had to com­bine the third and fifth, and I got exactly what I had envi­sioned. That’s how I’ve done it ever since when I have writer’s block.

Pas­cal seemed uncon­vinced.

“Instead of putting the one right thing out into the world with full qual­ity stan­dards, you force your­self to pro­duce a bunch of mate­r­ial first. And sud­denly, it flows. Sure, a lot of it is crap, but if the big win glim­mers some­where in there, it’s already been worth it, right?”

That’s when Pas­cal came up with the bet. He reminded me that I’d been mean­ing to write a col­lec­tion of short stories—partly to reflect on my some­times bizarre expe­ri­ences as a pro­fes­sional speech­writer, and partly to move away from these pre­sen­ta­tion texts con­stantly demanded of me under pres­sure by politi­cians, CEOs, fathers of the bride, event hosts, and so on—you know, how it goes when you offer your ser­vices online and work remotely. The requests come from every­where, even Malaysia once.

“Weren’t you going to write a dozen or so short sto­ries to make a name for your­self as a bel­letrist? And then fol­low up with a novel—or maybe seven like Rowl­ing?” I spared myself the nod and took another sip of red wine. “So, how many of those short sto­ries do you have already?” Pas­cal asked as inno­cently as pos­si­ble. I knew that look of his and counted on my fin­gers. “One,” I said, then cor­rected myself, “Half of one.” Pas­cal grinned, “So, basi­cally none.” I nod­ded resignedly and took another sip. I kind of knew what was com­ing.

Pas­cal: “Why haven’t you applied your amaz­ing writ­ing-flow prin­ci­ple to that?”

Me: “It’s not really writer’s block. But it would facil­i­tate the process, of course.” The lat­ter with a tone of con­vic­tion, except that my tongue stum­bled a bit over the word “facil­i­tate.”

Pas­cal: “I don’t believe that. How about a bet?”

And so, it sud­denly came down to four hun­dred short sto­ries. I’d bar­gained him down from five hun­dred, and shorter vignettes were also allowed. And to give the whole thing a frame­work, he scrib­bled some­thing on the index cards, shield­ing them from my view.

“I’ll write down a few first sen­tences for you. Every­thing always has to start with the same sen­tence.”

“What?!” I cried out. But Pas­cal grinned at me, remind­ing me of a mono­logue I’d given last month or the month before about writ­ing and cre­ativ­ity in gen­eral — con­clud­ing that it is only con­straint that brings forth true art. Those who have all free­doms lose them­selves in them—I had mused, per­haps also influ­enced by the absinthe we indulged in that evening.

Now my ver­mouth-blessed insight came crash­ing back down on me: “I enter the corridor”—as the open­ing sen­tence for four hun­dred sto­ries. Ouch.

What might the other open­ing sen­tences have been? Pas­cal pulled his hand with the index cards back.I man­aged to grab two more. Pas­cal couldn’t pre­vent me from read­ing them. “It all went down­hill after that.” And: “One Cal­i­for­nia Maki, please!”

“I could have done so much more with those!” I protested. Pas­cal non­cha­lantly shook his head: “The choice has been made, the die has been cast.” I imme­di­ately picked up on the phrase: “Even that would be bet­ter! I can’t write four hun­dred first-per­son present-tense sto­ries about some­one wan­der­ing around in build­ings…”

But I’d already agreed. The bet was on.

And today is the dead­line. Pas­cal will call any minute now to ask how his four hun­dred short sto­ries are com­ing along. “I enter the cor­ri­dor” — back then the sen­tence was unfa­mil­iar to me. And today? What can I say? I’ve man­aged close to two hun­dred and eighty. At first I thought I would­n’t even come up with twenty. But then I had a few unusual ideas and learned to view the sen­tence and my task from many dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives.

So, I stand by it. If you can’t get that one thing done: Take on so many work­ing ver­sions of it that the task seems sim­ply impos­si­ble to you. And then get started.

By now, I want to know myself: Can I reach four hun­dred? The num­ber still seems tremen­dous and unat­tain­able. But that’s how I would have felt about two hun­dred. Or even just one hun­dred.

I’ve lost the bet, and of course, Pas­cal will get his bot­tle of sin­gle cask bour­bon. How­ever, I’ll keep writ­ing, even if it now com­pletely con­sumes my free time—which Pas­cal might not like, since I still won’t have time for our spir­ited get-togeth­ers.