somewhat personal
January 18, 2023
Writing is easy. Narratives are hard.
In 2002 I started writing a short story with a good starting point, but I could not develop a narrative. So it ended up in the pile of unfinished stories.
In 2002 I was sharing a flat in London, and we bought a tv. We didn’t have a car, so we went to the shop and asked for the tv to be delivered. My job was to stay home and wait for the Argos delivery. Now we are so used to online orders and constant shipping, but it was not so ordinary back then. We couldn’t track the shipping, following the driver in a little spot across London.
The story was about this dude, back then my characters tend to be men, who was a journalist covering a horrible death that happened while I was in London — a young woman was killed in Victoria park in plain sight while she was running. My character, David Sacker (don’t ask), went to Oxford Street and bought a 28 inches tv, waiting for a delivery and losing his mind as he waited. The first paragraph (this is a translation from Spanish):
Twenty-eight inches was the equivalent of seven hundred and eleven point two millimetres. That was the diagonal of David Sacker’s new television. But it was also much more than that. It was the distance between his fridge and the oven, the distance from his bedside table to the floor, and the very measure of his madness.
He was waiting in his apartment, but he wouldn’t be able to take a shower, go to the loo, or buy food. What was supposed to be a one-day wait became several days. Alone at home, this wait would be too much for him, turning his brain into madness. He started to measure part of his Hackney apartment into units of 28 inches. Unfortunately, again, I wasn’t able to solve the jigsaw, and I didn’t finish it.
In English personal