On Writing

For a long time I prescribed to the notion that you’re not a writer unless you write every day. You need to find the time and space to write, even if that means getting up an hour earlier than you would normally, just so you can sit at your desk and let the ethereal words ‘flow through you’. And I tried. I really did try. But after a while I realised that many of the words I’d forced myself to write were tosh. They were not up to the standard and calibre that I knew I was capable of achieving. I was writing for the sake of it, to keep the demons at bay, rather than to represent my particular way of seeing. It was arts for arts sake, and inevitably it was unsustainable.

When I look back to the things I have written recently, the pieces that have weight, meaning and worth, they have all been stories that have come naturally to me. Pieces which I have had the smallest inkling of an idea for, and have invariably ‘written themselves’. I used to hate it when a writer would talk about how pieces write themselves, as if the act of writing is effortless and we are just the conduit for a higher power. However, I can now see there is some element of truth in that mantra. The good stories I write have all developed from the tiniest seed of an idea, which has grown into something much larger as I write it. For me, writing is a very natural and intuitive process, and I find forced creativity doesn’t produce the work that I am proud of. Work that rings with an element of self and truth. Therefore I’m trying to learn to keep my demons at bay, and be comfortable with myself as a writer, by understanding which ideas are the sparks that will grow into something bigger. I don’t want to simply write for the sake of writing, I want to produce worthwhile work. However I also recognise that I need to be better at not feeling bad when I have no such project or story on the go, for one will inevitably present itself. Well, that’s the hope at least.

At the moment, as I have no driving project propelling me forward, I have taken to editing snippets of free writing pieces I have done in the past, in the hope of creating a collection of complete pieces. In this way I hope to clear my head of the old, half finished ideas and spiritually make way for the new. Some of them may not be great, but I’d rather get them up to a certain level and then leave them, than have a mind full of muddled, segmented stories. That’s the theory anyway.