S.G. Talmor

It sometimes happens that one begins to write with nothing at all.
No project, no image to reach for, not even a sense of what might come next. There is no scene yet, no situation, no direction. And still, one has sat down to write.

At that point, there is usually only one thing: a desire to write. A desire that is often vague, poorly defined, without a clear object. It does not yet know what it wants, or even whether it wants anything in particular. It is there, unmistakably, but it rests on nothing.

This desire quickly meets what seems stronger than it: silence, emptiness, the sense that there is nothing to say, nothing worth writing. Everything suggests that it will not be enough, that one will have to give up—or push through by force.

Only in appearance.

Because when nothing exists except that unsupported desire, writing can begin differently. Not because the desire finds what it was looking for, but because it stops trying to lead. It remains. It waits. Something else can move.

Many people know this moment. They may not name it, but they recognize it. At a certain point, the text begins ahead of them—not because they have found an idea, but because they have stayed long enough in that empty place for something to take over.

From there, the text starts to shift. Not because inspiration appears, but because language, left alone, begins to do more than comment on itself.

In the first text I refer to, the writing settles into an almost empty situation: an office, boredom, a voice forming as it speaks. Nothing yet separates what might become a world from what is merely verbal scaffolding. The text talks. That is all. It aims at nothing.

We’re working, I’m bored—it’s my favorite moment. We’re in an open-plan office, which doesn’t really mean anything, since the “landscape” consists of glass partitions separating us. The walls are white. The desks, the chairs, our computers are metal. You hear the clicking of keyboards, fluorescent lights overhead. I chose this place to be left alone. We work. We’re fine like this.

I say “we,” but I’m really alone. The others work in IT.
They operate in straight lines. Procedures, systems, logic stacked on logic.
I’m not mocking them—I’m wired the same way when I have to be—but still, they’re IT people.
They don’t see me. Not out of hostility. I’m simply not on their radar.

So I sit there, unnoticed, perfectly placed.
My own deserted island, right in the middle of the office. Then something enters the text.

— Come and look, there’s a rainbow up there!

The sentence is not prepared. It explains nothing. It does not answer a question. It arrives. With it come a voice, a presence, a change of position. From that moment on, the text is no longer standing outside what it describes. It begins to look from within.

No one decided that a rainbow should appear. It was not summoned. A sentence surfaced, and the text moved with it. That is all.

Later in the same text, without any progression leading toward it, another element appears.

When we returned to our desks, there was something odd. Someone had placed a green plant near the window.
— There’s even a flower!
You could even say it looked red.

This does not repeat the first shift. It deepens it. Color enters without reason. It does not stand for anything. From that point on, the text cannot remain abstract. A world has taken hold.

The same movement appears in another text, by a more stripped-down route. Here, the entry point is almost administrative language. Flat. Unmarked.

My boss called me in.

Nothing more. There is still no scene. Language moves forward without texture. The boss speaks awkwardly. The text remains level. And inside that levelness, something asserts itself.

He was wiping his glasses with the tail of his shirt. I had always noticed that shirt, striped, hanging out of his pants. I caught sight of a patch of his large belly, covered with hair. It held my attention for a moment. He could see me clearly now, but he looked even more uncomfortable.

The narrator believes he understands what is about to happen. A phrase rises in his mind.

— No, no. That’s the good news. You’re not fired. You’re being transferred.

I was already picturing myself laid off with severance pay. I could almost smell it. I wondered what I would do with it. I would invite Jessica to travel with me. The Seychelles. White sand, palm trees. Then another image: the Bahamas. We’re in a speedboat. Jessica’s hair is blowing in the wind. She turns her Ray-Bans toward me and says something stupid. We hit a wave head-on. It keeps happening. The boat won’t stop bouncing. Jessica laughs.

So do I.

In both cases, the movement is the same. The text begins without image, without plan, without any idea of what will follow. This is not a weakness. It is the condition. As long as the writer does not know where they are going, nothing is closed. The text remains open to what may enter.

Entering a novel is not a decision. It is the moment when one notices that the text has moved ahead.

That shift is not only literary. It changes the way one stands in relation to writing. Something loosens. The desire to write stops behaving like an order or a project to be managed. It becomes availability.

I do not need to want to write in order to write.
I can make myself available. And that is enough.

Writing is not always a project.
It can be an experience.

What changes, then, is not the text, but the one who writes—
even if nothing is published,
even if nothing is shown.