Sometimes people are kind enough to ask, "how it’s going, the writing?". "Up and down," I say, because what else can I say? Truth is I don’t know. I have no idea whether it is going well, or I’m just wasting time and computer memory, ink and paper. I will never have any idea. I will never know if people are simply being kind (or horrid) or if the work is good (or rubbish). I will never know if any of it was ever worth it.
Except sometimes, maybe, someone will show me in ways that I cannot deny, that the words did precisely what they were intended to do. Sometimes, maybe, they will weep, or laugh, or just take in a deep breath that says they don’t know what to make of it. Sometimes they will come back and tell me in very precise, simple, personal language where it took them, how it helped – or indeed how it didn’t, which is also a valid and powerful response.
One of my favourite quotes, discovered on line, was Rosanne Cash talking about her songwriting. She said something like “I’m a writer. It’s what I do. How would I process my life if I didn’twrite.”
Oh yes, and yes, and yes. I write to process my life. In that sense, there is also no answer to the question “how’s it going?” other than “up and down” – unless we’re brave enough to say: “it’s going really well, I’m learning so much, and sometimes what I’m learning really hurts”
Another quote I scribbled down recently was from Camus – and I loved that David Whyte described him as a philosopher rather than an author – he said “Live to the point of tears.” This isn’t meant to mean be angry or melancholy or depressive, it means live deeply. It means live until you feel the nature of being alive, until almost anything can move you to tears, because of the pain of it, or because of the tender beauty of it, because fragility, because eternity, because finitude, because it and you are all part of the same thing, because recognition, connection.
I do both of those things. I write to process my life, to understand who I am, where I’m wanting to go, and whether I’m heading in the right direction. To be fair I also write to purge myself of the daily crap of living – my bad moods, other people’s anger, fear, anxiety, the whole I’m-not-good-enough gremlin attacks – you know the stuff. I write to celebrate the small wins that I would otherwise forget and, who knows, maybe they will be important to me some day.
And I write to find my way to the point of tears. Someone once said that if you can’t make yourself cry when you write, you won’t touch anyone else that deeply either. I know that to be true. Not everything that makes me cry will make you do so, because my pain is my own, my tenderness will be different to yours, but writing is my way of living to the point of tears, of finding what it is that takes me to that point. It is about finding what I’m here to do, and also about finding what the world is here to do to me. Or for me.
One of my spirit cards tells me that it is not happening to you; it is happening for you. I need reminding of that at regular intervals. Writing makes me look at how I see the world and so it is a doorway into changing how I see the world.
Whatever random thought enters my mind can change my day. Often does. I can wake up feeling ok, but one negative thought can send me into a tailspin – not the kind that results in a crash-landing but the kind that keeps spinning when it hits the ground and burrows in good and deep. My morning practice of journalling does not stop these thoughts from grabbing my attention…but putting them on the page forces me to reality-check the truth of them and/or to decide that (accurate or not) I won’t give them the validation of being ‘true’ – I will actively choose something else. It may just be me, but I can only do that on the page. It does not have the same power if I simply try to do it in my head.
I have often said that I think in print… it is more true to say that I think more clearly in print. Or maybe just underline the word think. The slowness of writing, even of typing, and I type a lot faster than I write, makes me ponder what I’m saying to myself. It takes what I am saying outside of myself and makes me look at it in a way that I cannot do when it is still just inside my head.
That is obviously the point of journalling, but for me it is also the point of everything else I write. Even when I was putting together technical books on a fixed-fee commission, I couldn’t keep myself out of them. There were things that crept in that were just my own personal take on how things should be done, with no grounding in my own formal training. I basically made stuff up, on the premise that if it got through peer review then maybe it actually made sense.
My rare forays into story-telling, my poetry, my every-word-on the page comes out of the depth of who I am and what I believe: either to express the truth of it or to question the current version of
it. I don’t always know which, and sometimes what lands on the screen in front of me is a surprise, and very often I forget what I have put down and reading it again is an even bigger intake of
breath. Seeing myself from the outside as it were…it’s as close as I am ever likely to get to seeing myself as a stranger might.
Let’s go back to the original question: how’s it going, the writing? It’s possible that everyone who asks, means something different by the question. They may be wondering if I’m having any commercial or literary success with it. They may wonder if I’m still hitting the page every day. They may want to know if it is still such a joy to do or, if not, how I am feeling about it.
If I analyse the question like that, I come up with a different answer. A simpler one. I am writing. Pretty much every day. Some days more, some days less. Some weeks I put stuff out there, some weeks I only put stuff out here. Some weeks I don’t even manage that, but there will still have been words on pages.
Someone else asked me this week if I find it easy. And the answer is: Yes, I do. Because the bar is so low. Words on page? Tick. Job done. I’ve adopted the Fitzgerald technique of writing for the bin. When something lands the way I hoped it would, the thrill is enormous…when it doesn’t work even for me, well, yeah, that was just practice – I have a delete function. No worries.
The writing is going brilliantly because I still want to show up every day and do it. Thank you for asking.
Whether it's any good or not is not for me to judge.
