Category: blogging

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Fifteen percent

If you’re reading this and find it interesting, I have a request – please, if you can spare the time, go back and read at least from the start of this week, because I suspect my ramblings don’t make much sense if you don’t know the context, and, although I do admittedly repeat myself quite a lot, I am also trying to build on and make allusions to what I’ve said before.

Of course, this writing is mostly for myself, and I don’t anticipate anyone else reading it, or even understand why anyone would want to. It’s an exercise in trying to understand and hopefully learn to accept, maybe even love, myself, though god knows my efforts to do so over the last fifteen years don’t seem to have got me very far. In the past I’ve defined faith as: ‘continuing to believe in something against all evidence to the contrary’, and I’ve taken a leap of faith (it is leap year, after all) in throwing my thoughts out into the void, where theoretically they are accessible by all, although in practice only a handful of people ever bother to read them (which is just as well really, I’m not sure I want people I bump into every day – well, not at the moment, obviously, but any normal day – to be aware of all this stuff – which begs the question – why do it at all? And that’s a whole other can of worms for a whole other day).

What I’m saying is, if you do read this, I hope it’s not just because you like my quirky way with words, but that you understand that behind the words is a person who at times is genuinely struggling to get through life. I’m not saying this to ask for pity, or advice, just maybe a little respect (just a little bit!)

I’m limiting the length of my posts to 500 words a day, whereas I used to write 500 minimum. That’s an arbitrary limit I’ve set myself because I don’t want to end up going down rabbit holes and spending hours over the thing – and also because, I just thought it would be interesting to do it that way. It does mean that I won’t always reach a resolution – or even get to the point – on any one day, which is all the more reason to go back and see where these thoughts have come from and to follow where they’re going.

I’ll end the way I intended to start, with a comment from an email I received from an old friend last night: ‘…you don’t half think a lot. You think more than anyone I know. Please my dear Linda, give your mind a rest sometimes. Be calm, be still.’

I do try to be calm and still, but I’ve never understood how it’s possible to silence that constant inner narrative, until recently I assumed that everybody’s mind worked that way, but I’ve been told it’s approximately fifteen percent.

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500 Words

Sun shining today. Will I venture out for a walk? Or to do some gardening? Hmmm. The eternal conflict between what I ‘should’ be doing (what would ultimately be better and more positive for my wellbeing in a general sense) and what I ‘feel like’ doing (back to the su doku again). Living alone gives me enormous freedom to ignore many of the ‘shoulds’ without suffering under anybody’s judgement except my own – until such time comes as I’m forced to interact with the outside world, or even (god forbid) allow anybody from outside into my home.

What am I saying here? What am I trying to say? I decided that writing 500 words a day would be a Good Thing for me. So I am trying. Because I know I can do it. This is what I always say (I’ve said it many times, in many ways, to many people), I know I can do it, because I’ve done it in the past, but nothing good has ever come out of it – well, wait, is that strictly true? If I look back fifteen years, I could argue that it has changed my life fundamentally in startling ways – but never in the way I once hoped for, ie turning me into a professional novelist.

So much of the advice I’ve received down the years has stressed the need to write, write, write regularly, write often and write at great length. Write spontaneously, do a brain dump, draw up all the rubbish from your writing well and that’s how you make yourself ready to write the Good Stuff. But, congenitally lazy as I am, all I ever want to do is keep writing the easy stuff. I don’t have the self belief, tenacity, staying power – let’s face it, guts – to face the difficult stuff, the hard work. And however much of this easy, spontaneous stuff – this drivel – I write, it’s not going to miraculously open the way into the source of ideas that I need.

I don’t think like a novelist – or a short story writer, come to that. Sometimes I think like a poet. Mostly I think like a confused woman approaching the end of life with the sense that I’ve never worked out what I should be doing, never made use of whatever talents I might have had to make a difference to myself or others or the wider world, amid the consciousness that I am now running out of time and options, and without the energy, enthusiasm or motivation to follow any of those options even if they were pointed out to me.

That isn’t quite 500 words. Do I keep going for the last fifty or so? It’s just an arbitrary challenge I’ve set myself. I can say I’ve done it, but like the 50k words I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2018, it’s worthless because there is nothing there – well, nothing I haven’t said or thought or written a million times before. That’s the story of my life.

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Blobby Canvases

I went to a writers’ group yesterday, one I used to attend every week but have more or less given up on over the last couple of years. I picked up a card and letter to myself which I wrote last year at this time defining my goals for the year. I haven’t opened it yet because I  know I won’t have done any of the things I said then – to be honest, I probably realised when I said them that they weren’t going to happen. Next week it will be time to do it all over again, and what will I say?

Why write every day when nothing ever leads anywhere? That is the dilemma I keep wrestling with. Maybe I should define where I want it to ‘lead’, because often that’s taken to mean fame, fortune, book sales, when really I just want it to lead to something I can be proud of producing, to fill the crack in my soul and help me feel good about myself. I used to think that writing every day would lead me to better things, but instead it all feels futile – though, if I’m honest, no more futile than the other things I spend my time on. I guess it hurts more because writing has always felt important to me, a precious thing – I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, but I guess I’ve always hoped to do something real and worthwhile with it, but instead it seems that however hard I try and however much I do it, I end up just throwing it out there without ever constructing something whole and finished. It’s like an artist who puts a few blobs of paint on the canvas, then the next day starts another canvas with different blobs of paint, and so on ad infinitum without ever creating a complete image.

You can call me ‘talented’, but it’s just a micro-talent, for stringing words together in a pleasing way. The macro-talent of constructing plots and creating characters always eludes me, I’m forever trying to grasp it but can never quite get there – or maybe it’s just that I give up too soon, that is likely knowing how readily I give up on other aspects of life – still, the fact remains that without the ideas, plots and characters, there’s nowhere I can take those words, and so the stack of blobby canvases grows.

Perhaps that’s why I’m more drawn to poetry than fiction – a poem can be just a few stanzas – even a few lines, or a few words. It doesn’t require the same degree of structure and commitment as even a short story. That said, I rarely set out to write a poem – they just come to me, and if they don’t, I can’t force them – but once I start it usually doesn’t take too long to draw them to a satisfactory conclusion – or at least some sort of provisional ending (though even that doesn’t always work).

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Does it matter?

Lately I’ve been having conversations – constantly ongoing inside my head, but occasionally with other people too – about whether to carry on trying to write when I can’t see any prospect of completing anything worth publishing; whether I should write ‘for myself’; and crucially, whether writing ‘makes me happy’ (whatever that means).

All I can say is that when it goes right it’s the greatest joy imaginable, but those times are so rare, is it really worth churning out sentence after sentence knowing that most of them are of no interest to anyone, not even me?  I know the argument that if you don’t go through all the grunt work, you’ll never have a chance of finding the treasure, but on any given Monday morning, the pleasures of walking by the sea, listening to the radio, reading, crocheting, killer su doku-ing in a friendly café and untangling yarn (which I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks) are so much more immediate, accessible and reliable, why bother spending time and nervous energy on anything so risky and massively unproductive as writing?

I’ve been vaguely wondering about how many words I’ve written in my lifetime – starting with the years 2008 and 2009 where I wrote (and blogged) a minimum of 500 words every day – so for those two years I churned out over 365,000 words – I’m not sure how long I continued with that discipline of blogging, but I think it was consistent for at least another couple of years, and then there were the years 2000-2007 where I wrote a journal every day even if I wasn’t blogging, so when you add in the 200,000 words of the first draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’, that will easily get us past the million word mark from 2000 to 2012 (ignoring anything I’ve written before or since then, including the 50,000 words of last year’s NaNoWriMo marathon).

Speaking of which, the one thing that demonstrated is that it’s perfectly possible to keep on churning out those words without ever generating a spark of anything which can be turned into the germ of a novel or short story or anything of interest. Does that matter? This is the question I started with, after all. Writing like this is the easiest thing in the world, but does it bring me joy or contentment for its own sake? When it comes to crochet or knitting or lino-printing or weaving or any other craft, I guess I’m happy to just keep doing it and shoving the results into cupboards and drawers and forgetting about them. I guess that my writing is the same. At some point I’ll be gone and all these files on my computer will be deleted too and no one will know or care what I wrote or thought or felt. And if I don’t write the words out, what then? They get reabsorbed into my head and maybe the underlying thoughts will come out another time in another form or maybe not. And really, what does it matter? Why should anyone care?

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Chasing Happiness

Saturday, 05 January 2019   2:30 AM

Already this year I am feeling besieged by the happiness gurus. For example, yesterday I read this:

‘If it doesn’t make you happy, something needs to change.’

Why? What? What needs to change? How can you predict what is going to ‘make you happy’?  And how are you supposed to change it? What to? How can you ever predict the consequences of what you do (long term, in their entirety)?

Why does everything have to ‘make you happy’ anyway? How does that work? Never do anything that stretches you, or scares you, or that might take you somewhere you weren’t expecting? What sort of life is that? Life is full of risk – you either jump into it or you don’t. And if you don’t want to right now – well, that can be okay too, but not necessarily forever.

Happiness is a chimera – in both senses. It is both an impossible quarry and a composite, an impossible composite of disparate elements that really shouldn’t (oh dear, we don’t say ‘should’ and ‘shoudn’t’ do we?) be together – that don’t make sense together. And what about the word ‘disparate’? I’ve been picked on in the past for using it, but fuck that, I’m writing this and it’s absolutely the word I want to use right there – if you don’t like it, go and get a fucking dictionary. Pretentious, moi??? I’m not using it to impress or intimidate you but because it says what I want to say better than any other word I can think of.

And in the end, that’s the point, isn’t it? Who’s writing this anyway? Maybe what makes me ‘happy’ is using the exact words I want to use, and I know what I’m saying and how I want to say it, so why the fuck not?

Probably I should take some of the ‘fucks’ out of this – probably I will, whether I ‘should’ or not. Everyone plays around with words in their own way. Why shouldn’t I?

That word ‘quarry’, for example – it also has two meanings – both the thing being pursued (the chimera of happiness, in this case) and a source, a place from which things are extracted. What am I extracting here? (Apart from the Michael – or the urine). Meaning, of course. I’m digging in the quarry of the English language to pull out meaning, and that is my raison d’être’ (maybe bits of other languages too). It’s what I do, and though I say it as shouldn’t (oh, there go the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ again!), may I say I do it brilliantly. I do it in the only way I can, and as only I can, and it would be very gratifying if someone (anyone) would read this and say: ‘that’s amazing, that’s fabulous, I just love the way you play with words’. But even though I know that’s a pretty hopeless quest (and a hopeless quarry) I will continue to do it even if I’m the only one who reads it, because it is the process of doing so that MAKES ME HAPPY! and…

What was the question again?


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Sunday, 03 June 2018

I don’t know how to start, what to think, what to say, what to do.

Sometimes I face the world and it all seems like such a mess. If I list all the things: my cat is sick; I don’t know if I can go away and leave her; my camper van needs a lot of work; I have to prepare a talk for the book fair; I said I would edit this book but I’ve done nothing and I don’t feel like doing anything; I’ve lost my memory stick; I have tendonitis in my wrist; I am sad, I am afraid, I am lonely, I get angry a lot of the time, mainly at myself; I don’t cook properly for myself; I am bad at doing housework; I am not writing; there are so many things I need to sort out.

I make a list like that and then what? Oh and my typing has got really bad. I keep looking at the keyboard and don’t notice all the stupid mistakes I’m making.

Perhaps, that’s a metaphor, I am looking at the keyboard and don’t look at the results of what I’m doing. Trying to observe. I’m not using the little fingers very often, I don’t know if that’s an issue. Little finger (right side) should be apostrophe and @ sign and question mark I guess from looking at the keyboard, and ‘enter’ too, I don’t know which digit I naturally use for enter. And shift for any keys which are to the left of the keyboard. That should be ‘on’ the left, because ‘to’ the left implies they are not actually on the keyboard. And I keep pressing additional keys without realising it, particularly number keys.

I just did ‘enter’ and my natural response was to use the right index finger, which is odd because that is the furthest left of that hand.

So that time I made a point of using the little finger.

(But I still got it wrong and hit ‘#’ at the first attempt.)

This is crazy, I got up at 6.00 to write and this is what I’m writing. I am not writing anything worthwhile, just drivel, but what does it matter if all I write is drivel? It could be the greatest prose in the world and still no one would read it.

I have a pain in my side. I think it’s because I’m trying to sit up straight and look at the screen instead of the keyboard while I’m typing. I’m used to slouching. And what does any of it matter? It doesn’t, of course. But this is how I write. I write in well-formed, well-structured sentences, and I spell correctly, because that is how I think, that is how it comes into my head. If I wanted to write ‘badly’ it would be an effort, I would have to work at it and it would be false. That’s not what I do. I write what comes into my head.

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Killing time

Good title. Could even be a title for this blog.

I seem to have spent most of today faffing about setting up this blog. I’m sure it was never that difficult in the old days. Either I’m getting more stupid (quite likely) or creating blogs has got a lot more complicated (ditto).

Not sure what (if anything) I want to say here, now. But I’ve already broken my first rule of blogging by typing this straight onto the page and not into a Word document which can be kept, checked, edited etc etc.

Whenever I restart blogging it’s customary for me to say, well, I used to blog every day, but got out of the habit, so this is me starting again, blah, blah, blah, let’s see how long it lasts.

I wonder?

I used to write 500 words a day, you know. Just thought I’d point that out.

My therapist (yes, I’ve got one of those, of the psycho and not physio or any other-o variety), whom I saw yesterday, thinks it will be good for me to write again. Or keep writing. Or whatever. Despite the fact that I’ve given up because, well… I always give up. That’s just something about me. As that American humourist who’s really really famous but my mind has just gone blank – aha, yes, Mark Twain, that’s the fella – as he allegedly said about smoking, giving up is easy, I’ve done it dozens of times. Starting again seems to be getting progressively harder, however.

It’s been a funny old day. I skipped writers group this morning with the excuse that, well, they were doing a competition today and I haven’t written anything for it and I thought I could find better uses of my time than trekking over there and listening to everyone else reading out their contributions, but really it’s just because I’m lazy and couldn’t be arsed, and indeed I didn’t find a better use of my time. But the blog is here now and I’m two-thirds of the way towards that 500 words.

In fact I wrote 500 words this morning before I even started on this crazy let’s-start-another-blog thing, and I haven’t used any of them, or rather, I’ve almost certainly used at least some of them, but not in the same order, if you see what I mean.

Some days just get you like that. I haven’t even been for my customary go-and-sit-in-a-cafe-somewhere-and-drink-tea excursion to bump up the total on my step-counter (which is a whole other can of womrs which I’ll probably get back to some time).

Choir this evening. I haven’t been for a month. I ducked out of the last concert and the last two preparatory rehearsals. I really ought to go. I’ll enjoy it when I get there.

Somehow I’ve managed to miss lunch altogether. Cafe time? It’ll be dinner time in a couple of hours and I really should have some dinner, cook something, I mean. Yesterday I went out and had fish and chips at the beach cafe. Yum

I’m sure I’ll have something more exciting to write about tomorrow.