Faber Academy: first task - the metal detector

Start as I mean to go on right? The secret of forming any habit is to just fucking get on with it. I look at people like my husband who finds this sort of discipline so easy to embed into his life….he needs to get fit, so immediately a daily run happens before breakfast, no questions asked, no excuses made. For me, I too need to get fit and running makes perfect sense - but it might be raining, or I possibly sense the start of a headache, or sadly my running kit is in the wash, in fact anything that will give me a perfectly plausible reason not to go for a run. Ditto flossing my teeth, or writing thank you letters, or - when my step-grandmother was alive, ringing to chat about the price of rice or something else that meant nothing to me, yet everything to her.

Creative writing has been a similar ongoing struggle, even though I have spent years writing and editing as a PR. 500 words on a new sanitary pad emailed to a client for sign-off by lunchtime, easy…who, what, where, when, how, why in which ever order I should really still be able to remember. I could do this on repeat every day. I remember getting happily pissed with a bottle of wine late into the the night having been given the ridiculous, laughable challenge of “romancing a coffee vending machine brand”. I churned out reams of brilliant, marketing guff that the delighted the client. Not surprisingly, this project did not make it into my peacocking portfolio of polished prose. My paid for words were perfect, crafted, on brand, informative, excited but not breathless, driving sales and winning hearts & minds - and I was bloody good at it.

However, writing for me, from the heart, telling truths, tracing lives, writing the perfect (or even imperfect) novel - well, that seems to be impossible. The white page represents the perfect metaphor of my complete lack of self-belief, and fundamental issue that nothing I might possibly write would be vaguely interesting to any other humanoid. With so many extraordinary books on the planet, I am stuck with rabbit in headlines why….why have I got any right to add my inner drivelling monologue to the mountain of brilliant words stacked up in the world’s libraries, book shops and shelves?

So in an attempt to rewrite Abigail’s Ten Commandments of Self, today marks the start of trying to seriously address my almost certifiable problem: Writing Procrastination Syndrome, and is the start of the Faber Academy’s ‘Getting Started: Beginner’s Fiction’ programme. My response to the first challenge is posted below….the writing prompt was an article, published in 2019, about a metal detectorist who found a signet ring lost by a local man many years earlier. The task was to imagine the morning of the detectorist…. I’ve called him Roy:

Roy dug around for his packet of fags, quickly tapping the bottom to access the last stick. A calming inhale of tar was just the start of regaining some sense of who he was, having spent another filthy black-hawk night unsuccessfully sweeping another huge field.  Head torch on, down, up, down, hedge to hedge, carefully measuring out his reach, meticulously covering every inch of furrowed land….jumping at the occasional beep as the search coil teased him with hope, or at a unnervingly human scream of a fox-mating triumph. 

Last night’s patch had been hopeless. Clagging mud, plus too much black sand to make sense of the real treasure he knew was tantalisingly near.  The biggest challenge of any outing was to ignore the shoulder pain where the detector swung from its cross strap, pulling down onto the ground. Practicing mind of matter, Roy could now ignore its weight and lopsided pull for about 40 minutes before a creeping ache would inevitably move across his back, shoulders, arms – and by the end of session, his body would be bent into an inhuman twist.  

Four Strongbows, seven Players and two painkillers were usually the bare minimum to help the gaspingly sore straightening process no matter what time he ended – 6 am or 6pm. But it wasn’t just the physical pain that was problematic…. Roy couldn’t stop hearing the ghost buzzes, shrilling between his ears that had irregularly jogged his line swings.  These erratic beeps annihilated any potential romantic qualities that some of the detectorist blogs bragged about – the lies of being at one with history, the thrill of chasing of treasure - all were simply bollocks. 

For Roy, detectoring was life and death – he needed a find and it had to be soon.  Yesterday afternoon the final demand for three months’ outstanding rent had arrived by registered mail, bailiffs were now a reality rather than threat.  And all he had found in the last illegal eight hours of was some poxy modern finger ring….hardly a Roman soldier’s bounty or a lost royal jewel. 

Roy poured a whiskey chaser and scrolled through Spotify…. “Fields of Gold”, his lucky song – a hoard was surely waiting for him somewhere, he just had to find it.