Sophie Jenkins - The Forgotten Guide to Happiness - The unmissable debut, perfect for anyone who loved THE KEEPER OF LOST THINGS

Writer’s Block

Despite the trauma and conflict of my private life – like failure, disappointment and penury, which are all the traditional ingredients of a decent book – I still hadn’t managed to come up with an idea for a heart-warming story. And I knew why. The one essential ingredient for writing was missing: boredom.

Boredom stimulates the imagination in a way that nothing else can. The mind hates a void with its intimations of mortality. On the minus side, if unchecked, it can fill itself with any old junk, as I found out the day I booked a session in a flotation tank at a central London spa for creative purposes.

I’d gone there to find my muse.

Trisha Ashley, a writer I admire, has a vain, bad-tempered, leather-clad muse named Lucifer and I thought it was time I got one for myself.

At the spa, surrounded by rolled-up towels, dizzied by rose petals and incense sticks, I listened as Michaela-in-the-white-uniform explained the process to me. The flotation tank was like a large water-filled cupboard. The lights would dim to black, the music would gradually fade to silence, and sensory deprivation would promote vivid colours, auditory hallucinations and creative ideas, the effects of which would last up to two weeks, until it was time for a top-up.

Michaela held the door while I climbed in and she promised to be back at five forty-five.

It was the longest forty minutes of my life.

Alone in the dark, once the music stopped and the white right angle of light around the door disappeared, I lost sense of the walls around me and suddenly felt as if I was drifting alone in a black sea. With sharks. No colour or auditory hallucinations, just the prickling awareness of large creatures biding their time beneath me. Nudging me. Getting a sense of what they were dealing with. To reassure myself, I groped for the walls to get my bearings and got saltwater in my eyes. It stung. I forced myself to relax but as I breathed out deeply I lost buoyancy and sank lower into the water and it flooded into my ear. How much water can an ear hold before it starts to weigh down your head, pulling you under?

Eyes throbbing, mind wandering, I realised I’d been in there longer than forty minutes. The water was getting cold. It had been quiet for a long time. I imagined Michaela forgetting all about me and taking off her white jacket, locking up and going home while I lay uncomfortably suspended in the thick and silent dark. She might only remember me when she was fighting to get on the tube. And what if she had a date? Yes, I was suddenly certain she did. That’s why she forgot about me. If the date went well she might not remember me until morning, when she came in and found me hypothermic in the ice-cold water, half eaten by sharks.

On the scale of panic, from nought to ten, I was at this point about a five. I got to my knees and felt for the door handle, for reassurance. It wasn’t where I expected it to be so I methodically smoothed my hands over the general area, panic rising swiftly to a seven when I couldn’t find it. But why would there be a handle on the inside anyway? Michaela was supposed to be there. She’d promised to let me out.

My perception swiftly altered. I was no longer a tiny soul in limitless space. I was fully grown and locked in a watery cupboard getting claustrophobic.

‘Help!’ I shouted, deafening myself. ‘Help!’

A bright light shone over me.

‘You okay?’ Michaela asked quizzically from behind me.

‘You came back!’ I said, crawling out.

‘You’ve got another thirty minutes,’ she said.

I looked at the clock and she was right, but nothing in the world would have induced me to go back in there. I haven’t bothered looking for a muse since.

I threw my energy into cleaning the flat mostly for mercenary reasons – I needed the deposit money back. When Mark and I moved in, we’d photographed every flaw, every scuff on the skirting board, every chipped tile in the bathroom, because if there’s one thing landlords hate, it’s returning the deposit.

The creative power of boredom is something that the non-writer doesn’t appreciate. They see you sitting there with your feet on the desk, staring out of the window, and assume that you have knocked off for the day, and ask what’s for lunch. Obviously you’re not ready to make lunch because you’re writing. Then the person will point out that you’re not writing, you’re sitting there doing nothing. So you explain that the creative force is all going on up here, and you point to your head, and then they will tell you to take your creative force with them to the nearest McDonald’s because they’re starving.

After the argument, you find you’ve lost your train of thought completely.

Anyway, as well as cleaning I cancelled my phone contract and walked to Camden and bought a cheap pay-as-you-go phone. Over a McCoffee I texted my new number to Kitty, my parents and Carol Burrows and once I’d done that I walked back home and sat at my desk and tried to think of good characters for my book. Characters are more important than plot. When you finish a book that you’ve really enjoyed, you never miss the plot. Nobody ever says that they enjoy the plot trajectory and wish they could have more of it; no, it’s the characters that you long for. That feeling of closing the jacket knowing they’ve gone off without you and you’re left alone as they disappear into the distance; that’s the feeling that feeds a reader and forces her to find another book to get involved in.

I couldn’t think of any character to write about. I wondered if I had writer’s block. Herman Melville got it after writing Moby-Dick . Hemingway was terrified by it. F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered enormously with it. What if I was a one-book wonder like Margaret Mitchell, who, after writing Gone with the Wind , got run over in the street without having ever written a sequel?

The problem with writing is, the only way to be a writer is to write. This might seem obvious, but there are a lot of people who want to be writers without writing. They go on motivational courses and spend whole fortnights at writers’ retreats in Crete or in timber lodges in Dorset, having food delivered while they wait for inspiration to strike. They join the BBC Book Club and ask authors interesting questions and take notes and listen to the broadcast a few weeks later. They go on holiday for research purposes and generally have a really good time without writing enough words to make a short story. I should know; I was currently one of these people.

Slightly depressed, I spent that evening googling house shares. I could afford to live in Barcelona and Malaga (but imagine the commute). I could share a bathroom with two vegetarians and a salamander in Ealing. I could hot-bed with students in Bethnal Green if I didn’t mind going nocturnal and sleeping through the day.

And then I came across a website called the Caring Share.

The deal was, I could live with an old person for practically nothing and in return I would spend eight hours a week keeping them company and generally being helpful by doing ‘light household duties’, something I did anyway, for free. The website looked inviting – patterned china and cupcakes and old people with grateful white smiles. It was like moving in with Granny. I could offer advice on crossword clues.

I typed in my details. For references, I cited Kitty and Anthea, who could at least vouch for the fact I was honest and literate.

In anticipation, I advertised my possessions on Gumtree with the proviso ‘Must Collect’, and over the next two weeks I sold the lemon sofa and armchair, my IKEA desk and the small beech foldaway table with the four chairs that slotted into it.

It was like dismantling a dream, emptying that flat. Each night the place was hollower and less mine. The landlord brought people round to see it and the couples would stand by the window, arms around each other, taking in the view, and I wanted to kill them. And one day, scaffolding went up, and the safety netting bathed the flat in an alien green hue, like living in a pond.