A Pillow Book for the 21st Century

Having been inspired by the wonderful Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, I have decided to start my own Pillow Book. It will not be a patch on the original, but I will observe the world in my own way and share my observations in homage to the great lady. Please check it out by following the link below. Look forward to seeing you there.

My Pillow Book

Do or do not, there is no try

Star Wars has its silly moments, in fact as an adult watching Star Wars it’s hard not to become absorbed by its plot holes and pseudo-science, but that little quote by Yoda I have taken as a little bit of useful wisdom that I try to incorporate into my daily life. There is much to be said for the idea of just getting on with it, forgetting about fears and the risk of failure. Even practicing is doing.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, as it’s something that applies to my approach to writing. In many tasks in my life, I just get on with it. Work I get on with. Cooking I get on with. Reading certainly so, I do it without hesitation. All of the things I manage to do successfully have been things I’ve just got on with. This has been proven quite recently, when we had a limited amount of time to prepare for Comic Con. We decided to cosplay this year, and as is often the case this involved a certain amount of hand-crafting. In the case of my daughter’s outfit, I had to make a complicated cloak/mask combo as well as a simple white tabard (she went as San, from Princess Mononoke). For my son I had to make a hood and, in the end, a happi coat as I could not find anything suitable to adapt for his top (he went as Ashitaka, from Princess Mononoke…there’s a theme here). With limited time and budget I surfed the web, found some instructions, dug out the sewing machine, shredded paper, blew up balloons and papier mache’d and sewed for two weeks solid and in the end they had passable outfits which were recognisable enough that they were photographed copiously at Comic Con and had a fabulous time. My husband blew us all away with his hand-crafted No Face outfit (from Spirited Away) which he couldn’t then wear because it was blazing hot and dehydration would have ensued. Still, it proved that facing a task with a lack of fear and an open mind (and a touch of desperation) go a long way towards resultant success.

When I read the Dorothea Brande book on ‘being a writer’ there was one piece of advice which stuck in my mind. Brande refers to the importance of learning to write to a schedule. There is a process she lays out which leads to this, but in the final part of the chapter (p. 79) she says this:

“Succeed, or stop writing

Right here I should like to sound the solemnest word of warning that you will find in this book: If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is actually greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for your energy early as late.”

I have been thinking about those words a lot recently, because when it comes to writing I do not considerable more than I do. I have been able to get into the habit of morning writing, that comes easily but it comes in the form of journaling rather than exploring creative writing. What I haven’t been able to do, and what I think I may never be able to do, is get into a regular schedule of writing. In fact whilst I think a lot about writing, I do very little beyond this blog. The truth is, I have failed Brande’s test. Now, whilst I understand that there are many routes to writing, that Brande’s advice must be taken only as that, I have to admit that there is much truth to it and if I do not write I cannot become a writer. In a way the what of what I write isn’t important, but being committed to writing and actually doing it is quite critical to success (by success I don’t mean multi-million copy selling or even published, just a ‘writer’: being someone who writes). I have always, in the past, been able to hide behind that villainly ‘procrastination’, as most writers would admit to falling under its terrible thrall. In fact, I remember being heartened by these words in Renata Adler’s strange book Speedboat (which I will, honestly, one day read in its entirety):

“That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”

Somehow I think I am more the kind of writer that Adler is referring to (ranting, drinking and sleeping. Not phoning, however) than the kind that industriously turns out books. Unfortunately, I think you really need to be the latter to call yourself a writer at all.

I am trying to be honest with myself, and the honest truth is that I am over-committed to everything and at some point I have to choose to do something. I have a new job, and to do it successfully I will have to devote myself to doing it. I know I can do this, I have done it before. I want to be successful in my job (and I will, I am committed to it). I have a family which is less needy but still needy, in the sense that I have to devote at least some time to them (and I want to, being the more important point). I want to learn Japanese and how to crochet, and both of these things seem possible not least of which because I have attempted both before. At a recent camping trip my daughter had a go at archery, and now she’d like to try it more seriously but she is too young to go alone. I understand her desire. At sixteen I too had a go at archery and I loved it and I was a bowman for two years until a car accident unexpectedly knocked me back and then life took over, and I have, for a long time, wanted to take it back up but haven’t had the opportunity. Archery takes time, and having a family with small children simply doesn’t allow for that. But now it does. I think I can easily commit to archery. I have done so before, and somehow I understand it all a lot better now. It is something we can do as a family (guess where I met my husband?).

Stacking everything up I realise I cannot do all of this. I can learn Japanese and crochet, these are things I can fit around my busy life by doing just a little every day. What I can’t commit to is writing. I want to do it, I’m scared of doing it, it makes me frustrated and angry and absorbs hours of my time sometimes just in thinking. I’m not ready for it. I’m nearly 40, and am beginning to wonder when, if ever, I will be ready for it. Maybe never. That’s a chilling thought.

So I’m giving it up, for the time being. I feel quite strangely about it, though perhaps I shouldn't. A friend recently, quite astutely, commented that I'm something of a 'serial starter' which suggests, also astutely, that I don't finish things, which is true but also not true as I do finish a lot of things. I finish meals, for example, and drinks. I finish washing and then I start it again because washing is one of those tasks that never ends. I finish movies and books, quite regularly. I finish small projects like making Comic Con outfits and cross-stitched bookmarks. I finish a considerable amount at work, in fact I am a project completer. Perhaps that is why, in my personal life, I'm not so hugely keen on finishing. Perhaps because, in the final analysis, actual finishing is death and I'm not hugely keen on getting there fast. I do feel strange not finishing this. Being a writer has been a lifelong dream, but perhaps what I am finally learning is that dreams are not real. To make it real, I have to do it and that seems to be the one thing I simply cannot do. I don’t have the talent or the skill, or the commitment to develop either. Of course I will still write my blog, I don’t think that counts as the kind of ‘writing’ I mean (though I know it is writing). I am an excellent reader, and perhaps I have to learn to be contented with that. For the time being, anyway. I can still be one of those lady-writers who writes her first book at 50. I’m not giving my dream away quite that easily.  

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf famously wrote a speech, which she later turned into a short book, about the importance for a writer of having a ‘room of one’s own’. In this particular case, Woolf’s focus was on female writers at a time where women in Britain were just struggling towards greater levels of emancipation and Woolf herself was seen as a kind of vanguard, being a women of independence and great vision, as her works of fiction continue to lay testament to. In the book ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Woolf addresses the question of how women can venture into a writing career, and her view is that without economic and physical freedom such a hope is illusory at best. It is an insightful point. Economic and physical freedom remain a significant issue for women around the world even today, and in many cases for women economic freedom beyond the level of dire poverty remains an illusory hope. Freedom from oppression, freedom from physical or sexual violence, for the majority of women remains an aspiration though in some areas we have, perhaps, made a little progress. It is only, sometimes, by reading a treatise so old (it was written in 1928) that we come to realise how little has really changed. A Room of One’s Own is a great, short, feminist work that elucidates many of the problems for women in achieving their aspirations in life. Like all of Woolf’s work, it is not an easy read, her writing is simultaneously dense and nebulous, but it is definitely a worthwhile one.  

But this blog is not about feminism, but rather why that work has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks. I have been in the process of creating a room of my own, a writing and reading room. I have not done this without help, I should point out, in fact my husband has been a driving force in this transformation and I’ve been very grateful for the considerable effort he’s put into achieving this goal. How it happened is this: until recently I’d been writing in the dining room. In the dining room we had a lovely oak table, eight seater, which took up the bulk of the room. The chairs are extremely uncomfortable. There was also a matching sideboard, a tall bookcase and loads and loads of junk. You see, we didn’t use the dining room very often. Mostly we eat at the kitchen table, which seats six (but extends to eight) or in the living room, and occasionally, when we have visitors, we will tidy the dining room and use the table. This happens, at best, 2 or 3 times a year. Most of the rest of the time the dining room is shut away or I am shut away in it, feeling like an interloper.

For a long time now, I have dreamed of a quiet room filled with books. My books, until recently, were stored in communal areas: the hallway, the landing. They were double stacked, so only half of them were on view at any time and often the books in the back row were forgotten. I dreamed of a room with rows and rows of shelves stuffed with books, and comfy chairs for sitting in and reading at, and blankets for warmth, and soft lighting and no TV and no technology, except for my laptop of course which I could use for writing. There is something extremely attractive about silence, to me. The idea of a quiet room, forgetting the books and the comfy chairs and all those trappings, somewhere I can go and think and be at peace, makes me feel comforted. I am quite adept at drowning out noise: my workplace is noisy, my train journeys equally so, and I have learned that in order to think I have to be able to fade that noise into the background. I am not always successful. Yet, still, a quiet room to call my own is like my safe harbour in a storm. It is something I need, but have never really had.

Recently we’ve started talking about this more seriously, perhaps because I am making a much more concerted effort to bring writing into my daily routine. The dining room was okay, but not a particularly effective space for writing. I know environment shouldn’t be hugely important, yet I think it is. Creative a space which is conducive to your writing, I think, is an essential part of the journey. Or if not creating, discovering. For some writers maybe a crowded cafe will be the right space, or a library with the right kind of ambiance (I am thinking, here, of the lovely gothic reading room in the John Rylands library), or maybe somewhere green with a river flowing and a slowly decaying wooden bench.

For me, converting one room in the house into a space in which I can write and read and think quietly is a boon. We finally committed to this a couple of weeks ago when, quite by accident, we discovered a typewriter in an antiques shop and, at £9.50, we just had to get it. I love typewriters, I’ve wanted one for a long time. My typewriter is an Olivetti Dora portable typewriter and it’s great. What’s more, kids love it. Both my kids and kids that have visited have spent an age tapping away at its keys. Then I found a wonderful writing bureau for sale, secondhand, on Gumtree. I used to have a writing bureau when I was a child, and I’d loved it. I’d spent hours at that desk doing my homework or writing or reading the old set of Australian encyclopaedias my Mum and Dad had brought back with them which were stashed in the glass fronted shelves at the bottom of the bureau. I knew that my writing desk had to be a bureau. We were lucky to pick up the one we did; it isn’t in perfect condition, there is damage to the edges and the leather rest needs replacing and there is some bleaching to the wood, but to me it is perfect. It has been loved, used, abused a little perhaps. It has character, it has stories. The lady who was selling the bureau was doing so reluctantly and I wish I could show her, already, how much I love it, how much it means to me. It made me realise that mostly when we have bought furniture I haven’t cared too much about it, but this piece of furniture is already special to me.

  

Then one evening I came home and my husband had removed the dining table from the room and the next thing I know he is demanding to know what kinds of shelves I want putting up and suddenly we’re off to Ikea and a couple of days later I have a wall full of shelves just waiting to be filled with books. That’s when the hard work really began. Moving and organising books is always a trial as this blog expresses so neatly, especially when you have a very large book collection, as I do. Book moving day looked like this:

(and that’s not all my books. Agh!). And after a day’s worth of trial and effort, of sorting and re-sorting and bending and lifting and carrying we discovered there weren’t enough shelves, so my husband went and got some more and we ended up with this:

   

A lot better, isn’t it? Everyone loves the new room. We still need to get some comfy chairs and a rug would be nice and some little side tables that we can use to perch a glass of wine on and a Scrabble board. But we can take our time over that. For now it is just wonderful to have a nice, quiet, peaceful room. Right now I am sitting at my writing bureau typing away and all I can hear is the whirring of the hard drive and the sweet chirping of the birds outside and my husband vaguely prowling around the house looking for things to do, and it is blissful.

This got me thinking about the writing rooms of other writers. Here are some interesting examples:

Proust’s ‘soundproofed’ room

Proust famously lined his writing room with cork to limit the noise, shuttered the windows and drew the blinds. A sickly man who rarely left his room, instead he focused his attention on his epic exploration of memory and time (which I will never, ever finish).  This picture is a replica of Proust’s writing room from the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

Roald Dahl’s shed

Roald Dahl’s famed shed in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire is now part of a museum dedicated to the art of storytelling. Dahl wrote his wonderful children’s novels here. In some parts of London, this would be a ‘house’ retailing for something in the region of £250,000. It’s also gorgeous. Rumour has it that no one was allowed in the hut, and no one was allowed to clean, but if that was true how is it that we have pictures of Dahl in his hut? Curious.

 

Virginia Woolf’s room of her own

If you read Virginia Woolf’s excellent diaries, she talks a lot about her house at Rodmell, Sussex, from which she can walk out into the country, along the River Ouse, and at which she had the ‘room of her own’, a little writing lodge in the garden, where she produced most of her most famous works.

 

Tove Jansson’s Island

Perhaps a bit extreme, but I can see the appeal of an ‘island of one’s own’. The island is as much a character in Jansson’s books as anyone else, if not the most enduring one.

What is interesting about all of these writing places, and when you start reading more about writing rooms, is how many writers had sheds or huts completely separate to their home to do their writing in. I suppose this makes a lot of sense: going to the shed at the bottom of the garden creates a break between home responsibility and the job of writing and in that distance between back door and shed door the writer can emerge. Creating a space in which you write, and only write, is something that perhaps helps to ease the journey between the ordinary version of you and the you that creates. It’s an interesting idea. My writing room isn’t just a writing room, it’s a shared space in which I can write and my family can read and play games and share quiet time with each other. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot better than where I was before. But writing this blog has got me wondering: perhaps there is room in my garden for a shed...?

Reflections on writing: the value of keeping a journal

I’ve kept journals on and off during most of my life. Usually journals have appeared at times when I’m stressed or unhappy, and I’ve used them to help me make sense of what I’m feeling and put things into context. I’ve kept a writer’s journal before too, using it to jot down my thoughts about stories or poems I wanted to write, or writing snippets of prose or observations. I’ve never been particularly obsessive about it, but there’s usually a notebook to hand and now and then I’ll write something in it and that’s been about it.

When I read Dorothea Brande’s book ‘Becoming a Writer’ one of the exercises she poses is this, designed to help you access your ‘unconscious’:

“The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can – and without talking, without reading the morning’s papers, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before – begin to write.”

Sounds easy right? I thought I’d give it a go and over the course of several days began to realise how impractical this was for me. Firstly, I don’t ‘rise’ alone. My husband ‘rises’ with me, so getting up 30 minutes or an hour earlier than usual completely wrecks the morning routine. Secondly, I don’t ‘rise’ alone so the whole ‘without talking’ business is virtually impossible without seeming sulky or ignorant. Plus I like talking to my husband in the morning. Then there’s the terrible habit I’ve developed of checking my e-mail before I get out of bed in the morning. Yes, I know, it’s a terrible, rotten habit, but I’ve found it helps me wake up more quickly. So the whole not talking, not reading business just doesn’t work for me.

So I adapted the exercise (okay, yes, I cheated) and instead I decided to write in my journal during my train journey to work in the week, and first thing after getting up on a weekend. I’ve found this habit much easier to develop and, surprisingly, I’ve found it highly beneficial. It has taught me a lot about me. For example, one of the first things I noticed was how hard it was to actually write anything in the morning, when little had happened. I realised that often I write in response to something. That writing is often a reaction. Consequently for the first few mornings I had very little to say. The more frequently I wrote, however, the easier it became and now I find my pen flowing freely as my thoughts unwind and my ideas slip from my mind onto the page. Now I am generating thoughts rather than reacting to external stimulus. I have become sentient (at last).

Another discovery was that writing helps me to sort and organise my thoughts. I already kind of knew this, but writing regularly has cemented that understanding. If something is troubling me, or if I can’t work out how I think or feel about something, writing it down brings sense to it. Perhaps it is the effort of attempting to cage my thoughts in the structure of language that helps me draw them into a more ordered form.

Writing regularly also aids the flow of ideas. I have found myself uncovering a number of ideas through the random, unformed ramblings of my morning thoughts. As a result I have more ideas than time to write them (or skill, for that matter). In the course of my reading of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I have noticed a similar trend coming through her own thoughts. It is almost as though allowing the mind to wander, to follow its own path, helps you to uncover the bright spots swamped beneath the daily mundanities.

More importantly, writing in my journal has enabled me to write, generally, more freely. Making an effort to write every day makes it easier to write every day, weird as that sounds. Practice makes perfect. And it’s had other beneficial effects too: I find it easier to concentrate in the morning, easier to focus on my work. I have got into the habit of making myself little ‘pledges’ each day, simple things like: I will write today, I will go for a walk, I will meditate. Nothing too ambitious. Writing it in my book, pledging it to myself, makes it much more likely that I will deliver on my pledge.

When I’ve been sad before, or stressed, when I’ve been using a journal to help me find my way through a thorny patch of life, I’ve always found it useful. When I’ve felt miserable, I’ve found that writing the good things that have happened in my day a great way of turning my thoughts around to a more positive view. That writing in a journal every day helps to train the mind towards writing shouldn’t be that surprising, yet it is. And the only way to understand how much it could help is to do it. Go on, try it. It might surprise you too. Just remember to do it every day. 

Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

I came across this book in an article in which writers gave recommendations about how to develop writing skills. This particular book was recommended by Hillary Mantel, and her advice was: read the book and follow it to the letter. Quite an intriguing recommendation.

This book was published in 1934, and you’d think that after this length of time the advice might seem a little antiquated or stale in parts. Surprisingly, this is not the case though the references to typewriters might be replaced with laptops in the current age and of course there is nothing in there about avoiding the distractions of the internet. However, these are minor points and the advice given by Brande remains remarkably fresh.

If you’re looking for a book which gives advice about styles or writing exercises, then this book isn’t for you. However, what Brande focuses on is the psychology of being a writer and how to train your mind to adopt writerly instincts. In this respect, this book is quite different to all the others which I’ve read which focus on inspiration and beating writers block or various different writing techniques. Brande, however, posits the idea that you can write about pretty much anything but what you need to do is to grow a modicum of confidence in your unique vision of the world and train yourself to write regularly and to unleash that part of your brain in which your creative vision is seated. She poses the idea that we are all dual-minded, and that the key to writing successfully is to allow your unconscious mind to flow with its ideas and vision and then use your conscious mind to edit this into a cohesive piece.

Peppered along the way are lots of very practical pieces of advice. Write every day, train yourself to avoid procrastination and self-editing (until you’re in the editing stage), keep a journal, go for walks and undertake activities which occupy the body but allow your mind to wander, read wisely and attentively.

It’s an interesting approach to developing writing skills, which I found quite refreshing. Brande’s focus is on nurturing your innate abilities, which is not to say that everyone can be a writer and certainly not a genius writer, but as she points out at the beginning: 

“Open book after book devoted to the writer’s problems: in nine out of ten cases you will find, well towards the front of the volume, some very gloomy paragraphs warning you that you may be no writer at all, that you probably lack taste, judgement, imagination, and every trace of the special abilities necessary to turn yourself from an aspirant into an artist, or even into a passable craftsman. You are likely to hear that your desire to write is perhaps only an infantile exhibitionism, or to be concerned that because your friends think you a great writer (as if they ever did!) the world cannot be expected to share that fond opinion. And so on, most tiresomely. The reasons for this pessimism about your writers are dark to me. Books written for painters do not imply that the chances are that the reader can never be anything but a conceited dauber, nor do the textbooks on engineering start out by warning the student that because he has been able to make a grasshopper out of two rubber bands and a matchstick, he is not to think that he is likely ever to be an honour to his chosen profession.”

I have encountered, regularly, this idea that becoming a writer is so difficult that most people will not master it, and perhaps that advice is true. But what Brande seeks to achieve is the making of that judgement after you have apprenticed yourself to the vocation of writing for a period of time, not before you’ve started on the journey. I found her advice very practical and helpful and I’m slowly putting it into practice. It is a book that would benefit from slow or multiple readings, something which might help to build confidence in the difficult periods or provide a guidebook to getting back on track.

As a book about how to be a writer, this is one of the best I’ve encountered. A worthy read for anyone about to embark on their writing journey. 

On Hanging Around in Book Shops

I work in a city, and I’ve worked in that same city for 20 years. It’s a small city which has changed little despite the time that has elapsed and the impact of the bombing seventeen years ago which shattered glass and buildings but left the essence of the city intact. In that time I have come to know the city well and consequently there is little left to surprise me. This is proving a problem for me. As part of my desire to adopt a more ‘writerly’ life, one of my goals is to walk more frequently. There is much to be said for leaving the office for a little while during the day, even twenty minutes away from the desk can be restorative. Walking comes highly recommended as a writerly kind of activity, as the body is occupied and the blood is pumping but the mind is free to wander. So I made myself a deal, and that deal was that I would go for a long walk at least three times a week. This is easy at home where open green fields, country paths and shadowed tree-lined walks are within easy reach, but the city, sadly, I find quite boring. There are shops and there are streets. The architecture is very familiar to me. There is a sad absence of green space and what green space remains is shrinking. I have walked this way and that and, though I try, I find it very difficult to see the beauty in so much steel and concrete. I can walk, of course, simply for the sake of walking. I can set myself a time limit and tromp around and pay little attention to where I am and the quality of my surroundings. There is something quite soulless in this kind of walking, the kind that is just about the exercise. For my walks to work, for me to gain true benefit from them, they have to offer something more than just the distance from A to B.

In the past I used to spend a lot of my lunch breaks in the library. There were lots of books and lots of nooks and crannies I could hide in and read a chapter here or a poem there. Then the library closed and three and a bit long years later it re-opened. I waited until the second day to visit, and since that day I have been trying to get my head around what exactly is wrong with it. There is a deplorable absence of books, but that alone isn’t it. Ostensibly it is the same building, but it is like they have taken the shell of it and scooped out all the warmth and humanity and left a lifeless husk behind. I imagine it like being confronted with a loved one suffering from amnesia or dementia: you look into those familiar eyes only to see a stranger staring back. Perhaps that sounds a little dramatic, but it is a fair representation of how this new version of the building makes me feel.

So walks to the library are to be done sparingly, which leaves me with a glaring lack of motivation to get away from my desk. The promise of books, their fine-leaved loveliness, is enough to get my feet moving. This is why I hang around in bookshops. I am lucky to work in a town which has a huge book shop, three floors with shelves and shelves of books and lots of chairs and sofas where you can haul up and read the first few pages of something. I have discovered that I can take a long walk, the leisurely way around, and end up at the bookshop somewhere towards the end of my walk. It is a nice place to take a rest, to have a browse and indulge in one of my other favoured activities: future book collecting. I love making lists of books I’d like to read.

I recently discovered an interest in nature writing, and books about travel and journeys. This discovery surprised me; I have always been a staunch fiction reader but my encounter with Sara Maitland’s Book of Silence changed everything. These days I hang around, often, in the nature or travel section, both of which are upstairs which adds neatly to my exercise quota. Consequently my ‘to read’ list is growing, with lists of titles like ‘Otter Country’, and ‘Gossip from the Forest’ and ‘Eight Feet in the Andes’ slipping their way into my wish list. I find these books surprisingly meditative, peaceful. the literary equivalent of lying in the warm sun by the banks of a meandering stream, listening to the bees buzzing, caressed by the long grass with the smell of wild honeysuckle in the air. You know what I mean. I remain focused on reading books by women writers, though sometimes I find my mind playing tricks on me. I see a book by ‘Sarah Gartfield’ only to take it from the shelf and find it is, in fact, Simon, but despite these little deceptions I have found a wealth of new books to read. Names like Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy, Olivia Laing and Jean Sprackland will soon be as familiar to me as Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Helen DeWitt and Tove Jansson. Old friends, side by side on the shelf. Last weekend I was lucky enough to find a copy of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen for £1 in a secondhand bookshop, and despite the fact that I’m not buying books it found its way into a little slot in my library.

I can’t afford to buy any more books. I can’t afford it in many ways. It is not just the money, though that is a consideration of course. I don’t have the space. Neither do I have the time to read them all. I have managed to accumulate a lifetime’s worth of reading material already. Sometimes I wish on myself some kind of debilitating illness which keeps me in bed all day for a year so that all I would have to do is lie there and read. Of course I know that is silly. I would be bored within a week. But there is something infinitely pleasurable in the idea of having nothing else to do in the world but read and read and read.

So I will continue with my walking, I’ll carry on hanging around in bookshops. I will continue to graze the shelves and make my lists and finger books and read first pages and not, not buy anything. Well, mostly.   

  

Reflections on writing: the start of a long journey

I think it’s highly likely that most people who are prolific readers probably also desire to be writers of some description. For some people that desire will be satisfied by the daily quota: the posts to Twitter or Facebook, an e-mail to a friend. For others a blog might do the trick, or keeping a diary. There are those that dabble in journalism, the many that desire to be poets and write little rhymes or tankas or limericks, or if they’re lucky have the odd piece published in a literary journal or perhaps win a small, local competition. Then there are those who want to write creatively, who create little stories or perhaps have an idea or two for a novel and tinker away at it and dream.

I am one of those people.

For me, the bug hit early. I remember the moment, though I cannot place it precisely in time, when I discovered I wanted to be a writer. I must have been around six or seven years old, and I’d written something at school about a tiger and I brought it home to show to my parents. My Mum paid little attention to it, I suppose even by that age she was used to the swath of work I’d bring home from school and she gave it the usual acknowledgement then got on with whatever it was she was doing, making dinner probably. My Dad, however, took the time to read it and at the end he said that it was ‘really, really good’ and he said it with that tone of voice that meant that he really meant it was really, really good, that he wasn’t just humouring me. Right then and there I decided that I would be a writer. It was the first inkling I’d had that there could be something I might be really good at, and it was extra special coming from my Dad. My Dad wasn’t around a lot when I was a child. He worked away most weeks and we’d see him only at weekend and even then he didn’t spend a lot of his time with us kids. So his acknowledgement, his interest, had a special meaning for me.

I went on to tinker with writing. In my secondary school I wrote plays. Two of them were successful, both parodies of popular TV series. My third play was a flop. At the time I was hanging around with a group of girls who were quite popular and wanted to be ‘stars’ in my play. I, foolishly, allowed them to interfere with the creative process and the result was a dreadfully showy rip-off of St Trinians in which all the girls wore short skirts and were sexy and did dances and which hung together as well as a row of marbles. And that was the end of my playwriting career.

In college I wrote stories and articles for the college newspaper. I wrote terrible fairy tales along the lines of those by Angela Carter without an ounce of the talent or skill. But it was nice to see my name in print and to see people reading my stories, whether they liked them or not. And yet I found myself floundering in English Literature class. It was my worst subject (not that I did that badly, mind) falling behind my drier, more factual legal and history studies. I started to question my capability. My childhood dream, my grown up dream of perhaps becoming a journalist turned into lawyer which turned into historian / archaeologist.

Then I dropped out of university and got a job in insurance.

That was the end of everything. Since then I have been an inveterate tinkerer. After my son was born I started writing stories, I even wrote about three-quarters of a novel, which I eventually threw in the bin. After my daughter was born I started writing poetry, and I managed this much more successfully. I had a few poems published and I even won second prize in a competition. But this success killed my poetic interest. Suddenly I was in sight of actually achieving my dream, and the fear killed me. What if I made it? What if I was only moderately good? Rather than continue, I lost my appetite for writing. I gave up. I changed my job and absorbed myself in technical writing which, perhaps not surprisingly, I proved to be quite good at.

And yet I was not satisfied. Somehow the idea of writing, creative writing, not being a part of my life depressed me beyond measure. I started to unpick what I had been doing. I realised that I had been doing everything I could to put barriers between me and achieving my childhood dream. Perhaps because it is easier not to try than to try and fail. Perhaps because I was afraid. Perhaps because if I achieved my dreams, what else would I have to look forward to? Whatever the reason, I realised that if I didn’t want to end my years sunk in the mire of regret, it was time to bite the bullet and really try to be a writer.

So here I am, trying to become a writer. I know this will be a long journey. I know I need to do many things: I need to build my confidence; I need to get into the habit of writing; I need to practice, practice, practice; I need to learn to understand what it is that makes writing good as opposed to mediocre and I need to put that learning into practice; I need to read and research; I need to lead a life which is more conducive to writing, and not one in which it is easy to put it off until tomorrow. I intend to share this journey on my blog, but I will tell you now that it is not for you but for me. It is part of my strategy. I have discovered that making a commitment openly can be the distinction between success and failure, and this time I intend to succeed.