It was Friday, and I had arranged to meet CT for lunch. We met at one of those  fashionably upgraded pubs of West Dorset that receive write-ups in the Saturday papers. We both ate fish, spicy squid, because after all it was Lent.

…

CT was a writer, so we were having a kind of literary lunch. He told me that he had three books on the go. One of them was a novel. He had finished it, but was having trouble with the ending and was re-writing it. Over coffee CT told me the plot.

“If only we could find the right way to love”: Exemplum One

‘An older man recalls his youth, and a love for a young woman that never happened. Or rather it had happened but then the love had been lost, and the rest of his life, outwardly brilliant and materially successful, has been a waste.

‘One day the older man goes back to the place of his first love. His memory however is false, everything is changed and he finds nothing. Instead he meets a man, and during a long conversation everything is changed.

‘He returns home, and then the story ends – it is a conversion story.’

– What happens right at the end? I asked. I was wondering if the man died.

– He dies from lung cancer, CT replied, but he writes to the man he has met and tells him he is at peace.

– It is a good ending. It reminds me of the end of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, I added.

Secretly I was dissatisfied. This was only the beginning, I thought. What really matters was what happened afterwards. After conversion, when the glow has faded, how did he live his life? Live life, especially the way things were in the world these days, and with the way he had lived up until now. It might be very funny. It might be very sad. Probably both. I wanted another 20,000 words. But I restrained myself. CT was a new friend, and after all it was Lent.

…

Towards the end of lunch, I realised that I had told CT very little about my own writing. I always found it difficult to categorise.
“If only we could find the right way to love”: Exemplum Two

– I write about pilgrimage, I said.

It was clear CT did not know what to make of that. Fiction or fact? I didn’t know which it was either, and the conversation did not progress. Still CT gave me some very good advice about the daily practice of writing.

– And the practice of only writing one sentence at a time, I added.

– What do you mean? a puzzled CT asked.

It was a bad habit. I was always being distracted by words. I would start one sentence, and then halfway through begin another, and then a third and so on. Sometimes I would have five or six on the go at the same time. It was the same with baklava. I would be walking purposefully down the street of some great city, but then whenever I saw a shop selling sticky sweet-meats, I could not resist.

CT was too kind to tell me what he thought of all that. – I was a full-time journalist for thirty years, he said. You get into the way of writing less.

He was right. Restraint. After all it was Lent.

…

mmj