Whenever we have doubts about our creativity, or perhaps our lives in general, we fall into the trap of ‘not having anything new to say’ or do, or create.
In her call to creativity in The Happy Writing Book EliseValmorbida makes the point that just about everything post-Shakespeare would not have been written if all the subsequent authors had taken that view. Arguably by the Tudor times any story that could be told in the English language already had been told – and yet writers kept on writing, kept on telling different stories, or the same stories in different ways, and they kept on finding readers who wanted those tellings and re-tellings.
When we think about it, even Shakespeare didn’t tell new stories. Pretty much everything he wrote was in some way ‘borrowed’ and reworked: histories, myths, legends, proverbs, morality tales.
I wonder who created this trap, and when, and why – this trap of wanting novelty, newness, difference. Was there not a time when folk gathered round the fire and wanted the old stories to be told? Are we sure that we don’t still want that? To sit by the fire and hear the old stories, re-told.
I know that it is something I miss. I miss hearing my parents tell the old family tales. No matter how many times I heard them, I can’t quite remember the truth of them, the details fail. I want to catch them and write them down but I’m a generation too far removed. I try to set some of them down but can’t get them exact, not the way they used to be told, on camp-sites, in the pub, at home by the lights of the Xmas tree. And I am sorry about that.
I am sorry that I cannot sing my family’s song entire. Even sorrier that it is true for all of the peoples of the earth. Somewhere along the line we stopped singing our history, because we were too focussed on creating an imagined future, and did not understand how necessary the former was unto to the latter. When we stop singing our past, we start cutting ourselves adrift on the oceans, and our future beomes even more unsure.
And so I continue to write even though I am reasonably convinced I have nothing to say. I continue to add my creative contribution to the world, such as it is. I write my own simple story, in my own simple voice. I write of my past, because however present it might be when I put the words down, it will be past before anyone reads it. I write of my further past, because everything I say is coloured by the me that no longer exists, by my childhood, and my past adulthood, I cannot be in the present moment without bringing all my past selves with me, however subliminally.
Do I have anything new to say? I doubt it.
Do I even have a new way of saying it? Probably not.
And yet it still feels worth doing. I suppose I work from the possibility that however old my thoughts, however unoriginal, maybe they are new to someone. Maybe my particular way of phrasing shines a light in a way that creates a window for someone.
Equally, maybe I’m doing all of this purely for myself.
And maybe all the writers that went before me were also simply doing it for their own pleasure, passing the time on wet afternoons when there was no prospect of a walk. Maybe everything that came after, came after.
Sadly, I think that is no longer true. I feel that in the generations below me, far too many of the people who want to write, don’t want it for its own sake…they want it to make them famous, they want it to make them money, they want it to make them something. And maybe it will and maybe it won’t, but it’s a shame either way. We have many reasons to write. It’s not for me to judge validity, but when did that ever stop me? For me the lowest reasons are those that involve writing in order to ‘become’ something we don’t already know ourselves to be: rich or famous or powerful or… whatever.
I don’t write to become something. I write from where and what I already am.
When I write from a place of pain, I am not saying look at me, pity me, I am saying See! You are not alone. There is nothing wrong with you – we all feel like this at times – and there are ways through to the other side of it.
When I write from a place of joy, I am saying How awesome is this?! Go on look closely at your roads and gardens and walls and buildings and street art and weeds, where you are, right now, and step back in wonder. There is more beauty at our feet than we realise, we only need to stop and look.
When I write from a place of love, I am saying I am grateful for what I have, and I am saying there is this much abundance for me and so much similar or different abundance available for you.
When I write from a place of love, I am saying I am grateful. That simple.
When I write from a place of anger, I am simply letting it go. I try to not share those writings; I put the anger on the page so that it doesn’t stay in my body. Ah, but yes, I will confess…sometimes the anger needs to find its own place in the world, to maybe cause a shift or two. Anger would not exist if it didn’t have a use in the world.
When I write from a place of fear, I am inviting my inner, deeper, self to find a reason not to be afraid…or maybe I’m asking someone out there, you, maybe, to show me the way I have not yet found.
Sometimes, I think my creative contribution to the world is to simply ask the questions again and again, so that between us we might find better answers to them.
Sometimes, I think my creative contribution to the world is to remind us all, that we are wonderful, human, flawed, miracles.
Sometimes, I think my creative contribution to the world is simply to say this: if I can do it, so can you. It doesn’t have to be new or different – and yet, by default, it will be. It will be yours. It will be a new story or a re-telling of an old one. The one thing it will definitely be is a telling in a new voice, because no-one else, anywhere on this planet, among the eight billion people, no-one sees the world exactly as we do, no-one among the eight billion wields words the way we do, the way I do, the way you do.
And if you’re a writer, isn’t that miracle enough to get you back to the page? I hope so.
