The stories that write themselves

Here was the thing: he wrote a slew of very short stories but, sooner or later, he discovered that they conformed to a structure that he found easy to repeat. There would be two people: a man and a woman. They would be in love, but then fall out of love somewhere between the third and fourth paragraphs of his very short story. It would be moving, he thought at first, but the more he thought about it the less moving he felt it to be.

The overwhelming feeling he got, looking back at his collected works from the last few months, was of a writer wrestling with demons of his own creation; his stories had become a place to act out scenes which had never occurred in his actual life. Some of the characters slightly resembled people he had once known: they had the same shoes, or the same haircuts, or similar eyes. He imagined people resembling people in situations that had never happened. He wasn’t crazy, just creative. It’s all material, after all.

This was the cloth he cut his stories from, but, no matter how different the cloth was in terms of texture and colour, it always looked the same in the engulfing gloom of the cut of his story.

He wrote a story about a narrator and his girlfriend fighting. He focused on the items she had just bought, and rammed these items home as some sort of vague metaphor for loss. There was a touch of irony too, a wry humour to it. It pleased him.

He started to live again and write less. Instead of writing about sadness he started to feel it. It was different from how he had imagined it on paper. He vowed to go back and write stories that more accurately reflected these feelings felt in real lived life.

What happened, though, was this: his life started to be lived as if he was a character in one of his stories. There were fights with girlfriends; there were disagreements about actors from television; he quite accurately played the solitary writer sitting writing observations in cafés.

Sadness became part of his life to such a degree that he could no longer scalpel it out and leave it sitting, carefully carved into a pleasing shape, on the previously blank page. It had not only become part of his life, it had become part of him, and no matter how hard he tried he could not get rid of it. At first sadness clung to him like a leech, then it grew inside him like a cancer; there was nothing he could do.

The sadder he got, the happier his stories got. He sold millions of books, and became famous as a feel-good author. His views were sought on vital issues of the day by daytime television programmes, where he sat in a neat suit and nodded when required to do so. A smile was uniformly plastered on his face; his skin was tanned orange and powdered to stop the glare; his teeth had been expertly engineered into the perfect smile. Now he was successful, he looked incredibly – irredeemably – happy.