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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