Category: creativity

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More Stuff About Writing

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I wrote a very short piece about my first love, inspired by hearing Donovan’s ‘Catch the Wind’ on Amazon music the previous evening, and I posted it, with a link to the song, on the blog for my regular writers’ group, with an automatic link to their Facebook page, which I then shared on my timeline and another FB writers’ group. It seemed appropriate because it was sort of a short story, or at least fast fiction (though it wasn’t fiction – is there such a thing as ‘fast memoir’? There is now.)

I can’t seem to get my head round how to link the WordPress blogs together, though they’re both set up to share on FB and Twitter. I think it might be something to do with this blog, like my other two (yes, there are three altogether, though I don’t write to the other two any more) being self-hosted. I also have a WordPress.com blog, from about ten years ago, that has hardly anything on it, because I realised I could (in theory) get a better Google ranking by having it on my domain name. But my WordPress.com identity is still out there, though under my married name.

Three members of the writers’ group are registered on the group blog, but only two of us ever post to it, though when I set it up I sent an email invitation to all the members. I guess they don’t know what to do with it – probably not helped by the fact that I set it up immediately before the lockdown, so we didn’t have a meeting at which I could give a demo. We don’t use the Facebook page very much either, although we have two collections of stories and poems under our collective belt (‘Southsea Soup’ and ‘Of Life and Love’), and a third, ‘Flights and Fancies’, coming out imminently. (I’m currently proof reading, but have already managed to knock a cup of coffee over my copy).

Sometimes I think it might be fun to get a bit more pro-active with all of this, but then…

IF I do start writing properly (and I’m not saying I will, that depends on what sort of inspiration comes to me, if any), it will probably be more memoir to start with – specifically, ‘The Long Way Back’, the first half of which is largely done, and the first draft of the rest, except – guess what? – I don’t know how to end it.

A friend commented (on Facebook) about my previous post that she has two novels that will never be finished, but she doesn’t ‘beat herself up’ about it. So why do I? Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many idealised dreams about how my life ‘should be’ (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?

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Thinking, Writing, Writing, Thinking

What I write here is whatever pops into my head, and that’s all I can write.

How many times have I said that? Yeah, I know, a lot, I keep droning on about it. What am I doing wrong? I used to think that as long as I kept writing every day, something miraculous would happen , and I’d find a way of being able to write ‘properly’, to think up stories, to go back to my novel and finish it. But it doesn’t work, so why am I still doing this?

‘Oh, you have to write through all that shit’ people tell me. That’s easy for them – maybe they only have a small amount of shit to get through. For me, it seems there is no getting to the other side.

‘Write another story like that one’ someone said to me yesterday, referring to ‘Eagle Flight’, which has just gone into ‘Flights and Fancies’, the upcoming Southsea Storytellers anthology. And yes, it’s a good story, I agree, one that I wrote about twelve years ago. But how did I write it? Where did it come from?

The answer to that is that it was inspired by an object (a soapstone eagle) which was used for an exercise in a creative writing class, and worked up into a story for an end of term assessment. If I dig around I might be able to find the tutor’s comments, but obviously in those days they were all handwritten on the hard copy.

Just before the lockdown started, I went to another creative writing course, with similar exercises to stimulate writing. I went to the four sessions and brought the material home and haven’t looked at it since. A friend invited me to join a writing group on Facebook which has regular prompts, and I’ve done nothing for that either, bar sharing a couple of poems.

I don’t engage with any of this any more, and I haven’t for years. Why do I still hang on to this tiny, frayed thread of an idea that I might ever be ‘A Writer’? Why do I even want to? I am very late writing this morning, and I almost didn’t bother at all. It’s stressful. I’m stressed enough, worrying about parcel deliveries and my sick cat, how can I get medicine down her to help her appetite when she won’t eat anyway? Worrying about so many things, most of them not so important in the scheme of things but they still need to be dealt with, they require action, and action requires thought and decisions and plans and comparisons of the best way to do them and then energy to get on and do whatever it is.

And I want to run away, not necessarily to another geographical place, but into an emotional place where I can be and let other things be and not have to think about making up stories or whether I can write or not or if it’s worth trying.

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Advice From Very Successful People

Yesterday I started writing about creativity, but I got distracted and gave up. So I’ll try and pick up the threads of what I was saying.

Trying to make things is risky. Friends sometimes describe me as ‘creative’, but I don’t really think of myself that way – I may be a ‘tryer’, but I give up too easily – or, if I persist to the end, I’m inevitably disappointed. And no, that doesn’t make me a ‘perfectionist’, I have an extremely high tolerance for things that are a long way from perfection.

To be honest, I never really know how to judge the things I make, whether that’s a poem, my PhD thesis or a crochet shawl. I don’t trust my judgement on external things, other people, what clothes suit me… (actually, that’s not quite true, because I do have very strong opinions on some things, but I hate arguing so I only express them to people and in contexts where I feel safe that they’ll agree with me). But when it comes to aesthetic judgements… well, the same applies, because I don’t want to admit to liking something if other people around me aren’t going to agree, but it also goes deeper because sometimes I just don’t know (or care) what I think.   

I don’t really feel like writing this morning. I’m a bit late because I’ve already been to Sainsbury’s, but I haven’t had breakfast yet. I want to sit in the garden but I’m not going to because DHL are supposed to be delivering a parcel, and I don’t want to miss it and have to go to Costcutter to pick it up like I did a couple of weeks ago. But here in the study I am right at the front of the house so will be able to hear if anyone knocks. So I might as well persevere. I haven’t had a text with an estimated delivery time, just that it will be today.

I just tried to check the ‘tracker’ from my phone. And – as you do – got sucked into reading an article with the headline: ‘Steve Jobs Said One Thing Separates Successful People From Everyone Else (and Will Make All the Difference In Your Life)’. The answer, of course, was predictably summed up as: ‘Trust yourself.’

Oh yes, that good old self-belief.

‘Trust that you’ll figure out how to react and how to respond to roadblocks and challenges. Trust that you will become a little wiser for the experience. Trust that you’ll grow more skilled, more experienced, and more connected.

Try enough things, learn from every success and every setback, and in time you’ll have all the skills, knowledge and experience you need.’

There’s a reason why you only hear this advice from mega-billionaires – because the people who try all those things, trust themselves, try to learn the lessons of their failures, keep going and still get nowhere, those people don’t want to talk about it. Or if they do, why would anyone listen?

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Still #notwriting

I’m going to change tack today. Sort of. Thinking about making things – including stories – and the relationship between the process of making, the end result, and assessment of that result. I’ve been quite careful with the words in that sentence. I deliberately used ‘making’ instead of ‘creating’, and deleted ‘judgement’ to replace it with ‘assessment’. Even ‘end result’, which feels much more neutral than ‘product’ or ‘artwork’. Because there is a minefield here, in the language.

Yesterday I spent some time listening to (I don’t bother trying to watch things on my phone when it’s the words that are significant) assorted TED talks sent to me by a friend who tries to encourage me. The first one was by Alain de Bouton, about redefining ‘success’, which personally I didn’t think said anything new, though he is quite entertaining (I could see why my friend sent it, but to me it says she’s just missed the point of who I am). Then there were talks about ‘creativity’, including one by a writer of an extremely successful book about the capriciousness of inspiration, how can you ever know how anything you make will turn out, and, if you’ve hit the spot once, how can you ever be sure you can do it again?

This friend is always sending me stuff like this. She thinks I’m ‘creative’, but I’m never comfortable with that word. It sounds much too pretentious – like calling yourself an ‘artist’ or a ‘writer’. Every time I tell someone I’m a ‘writer’ I cringe inside, wondering where the conversation is going to go next – the same way I do when I tell people I have a PhD. ‘Poet’ is easier, because then they tend to be less impressed; they jump straight to the idea that I’m either a crackpot or a charlatan, and they either laugh it off or give me a wide berth (or both).

And now… I have ground to a halt. I am in front of the computer with tears rolling down my face. I have, unexpectedly, cracked through the armour and reached the soft place of grief, where I might say to the therapist ‘I suppose it’s a bit sad really’ and she says ‘It’s tragic’, and I take on board the pretentious, egotistical, over the top melodrama of the word and nod my head, speechless because I can’t talk through the pain. THAT is what I mean by ‘failure’. My inability to love, defend, stand up for the things I make.

I can’t write any more today. I give up.