I used to love picking scabs,

when I was a kid in short trousers –

permanently scraped knees, all that.

Or waggling a loose tooth,

it sort of hurts but fascinates.

You don’t know why

but you have to keep going

 till it’s out. Like sex without the climax.

If this was written in HTML

that last word would be in blue.

For those who don’t have them,

it could link to an explanation,

though not a description, obviously.

No two being the same.

Writers, that is.

I am no writer, really.

Done some, of course.

What wannabe poet/scriptwriter/memoirist hasn’t?

Written, that is: picked at the scab that is your own life until it bleeds literature all over your screen – or page, as we called them in the olden days.

 

And the best writers pick away at their own flesh, the bits that have been knocked about a bit over the years. The bits that stand out from the rest, the scabbier the better: bright-red beacons of promise for creative writing; our unique angsts with universality.

“Without scabs there is no story,” a famous writer once suggested. Hemingway, I’ll wager; or a younger me.

Anyhow, that’s the way to go: dig deep, bring out all that angst.

Truth, Jimmy McGovern called it when I interviewed him. You mine all that, put yourself into your story and tell the truth. Little boys wear truth on their knees, or used to in the olden days; big boys and girls wear their scabs on the inside.

And as you rummage within for scabby nuggets with which to decorate your self-indulgent narratives you are, bit-by-bit, killing yourself. Ripping yourself off, until there is nothing left, and your insides cave in. And it’s all encouraged in those creative writing books.

It’s a fad, a fashion, an obsession; clinical name, necrotizing fashionitis.

Writing as suicide

The great universal.

Well, it is for me.