Ignoring Shiny Things by Wyl Menmuir
Like many people since lockdown began, I’ve been watching the world from my window a lot more recently. It shouldn’t be that surprising to find how much more I notice when I’m not running from place to place, but I’m constantly surprised by what I see. I’ve discovered there’s a stoat who calls into the garden occasionally, a fox too, often carrying a rabbit in her mouth. There are tiny lizards that live in one of the walls, who emerge to bask in the sun when no one is around. I’ve discovered that my cat has a highly complicated social life of which I was entirely unaware. And there’s a magpie who turns up at almost exactly the same time each day when, miraculously, the cats are elsewhere. He does a professional recce of the garden and after he has done his rounds, he selects a small scrap of something shiny and leaves.
Of that animals that visit my garden I relate most closely to the magpie. I’m a chaser of shiny things. I always have been. Alongside reams of notes, fragments and character sketches, my notebooks are full of ideas for novels I’ve not written. When I’m feeling generous, I tell myself that these undeveloped ideas formed part of my writing apprenticeship and maybe some of them did. But really, I know that many of them remain unwritten as a result of the magpie on my shoulder, which points out ever shinier ideas.
Wyl and his children built a refuge during the lockdown.
For me, the first moments of any project are the most exciting. They are the moment at which everything is possible. The point at which nothing is fixed down. The moment of maximum potential. In short, the time at which everything is at its shiniest.
Beyond this point is where the work starts. Beyond this point, I have to use language, which is always approximation, to explore an idea that is, in that initial moment, perfect. From this point on, other things begin to look shinier. The next time I will feel the same sense of excitement will be when I finish, or when I hold the completed book in my hands for the first time. That’s maybe two or three years after I had that initial rush. In that time, I know I’m going to have to ignore maybe a thousand shiny ideas that present themselves.
Resting from writing and editing by doing something completely different, Wyl has become quite adept at making spoons.
By the time I sat down to write my first novel, I had worked out I had a magpie on my shoulder. The fear of not completing a novel overtook the fear of finishing one. I knew it well enough that when a friend offered me the simple advice they had read from Neil Gaiman, to ‘finish what you start’ I wrote it on a post-it and stuck it above on my wall. I incentivised myself to finish the novel and broke the whole thing down into 10,000 word chunks and rewarded myself each time I passed on of these small milestone. A little hit to keep me on track and to ignore the shiny things that were, all of a sudden, everywhere other than the manuscript I was writing.
After I finished my first novel, in the time before that bigger surge of excitement of seeing the book in print and the undreamed of excitement of being nominated for a major literary prize, I made myself a new desk (I wrote about the process of making it here) and I carved into it the words ‘finish what you start’. This advice has seen me through writing a further two novels and a decent handful of short stories, articles and essays. It’s a near constant reminder that I need to ignore the shiny things and push on until I see whatever I’m working on through to completion.
One of the three maxims of the Oracle at Delphi was ‘know thyself’. I feel I know my magpie pretty well now. He still sits on my shoulder and points out the shiny things only most of the time now I look up, acknowledge the shiny thing and carry on.
At the moment of writing this, I’m in between edits for books two and three and I’ve allowed myself to look at shiny things again. I have a box of them on my desk. It is full of documents, diaries, photographs, a small horde that was collected a while back by one of Cornwall’s great magpie creators, the director Bill Mitchell, and which I’ve been allowed to spend some time with while I’m thinking about my next novel or novella. It’s still the most exciting part of the process. Everything is open. Everything is potential. Nothing is pinned down. My mind is full of beautiful shiny things. Only now I know that once I’ve worked out if there’s a story in there that needs to be told, I’ll see it through to its conclusion.
One day, when I’m walking in the woods opposite my house, I hope I’ll come across a huge shiny fortress and on the foil-clad battlements, I’ll see my magpie looking down. I imagine, he’ll give me a knowing look that says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with shiny things; it’s what you do with them that matters.’
by Wyl Menmuir