Thursday, 5 January 2012

If I Wrote More in the Conditional Tense.....

The New Year strikes me as being a conditional season.  It's full of aspirations (coupled with a dash of self-delusion): If I lost a stone, I would feel better about myself / If I gave up smoking, I would live until I'm ninety / If I tried harder at my writing, my book would be published - you know the kind of thing.

It got me thinking that the conditional is a particularly fragile tense; nothing is certain about it, there's an element of chance, combined with a little bit of endeavour, too.  It's freighted with longing: if only, if only.  It's a dreamy tense, an escapist tense.  It doesn't exist in the here and now, everything about it is hypothetical. It's a tense that subliminally demands -- well, why not,  what's stopping you?  and in the answer to that question lies a whole novel's worth of possibility.

Why not tap into your sense of yearning and try writing a story, or just a paragraph, in the conditional tense.  If I were prettier, he would still love me / If Nick Clegg hadn't handed David Cameron the keys to Number Ten / If...if...if...

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