write for myself

... if I want to be a writer anymore. I’ve lost the pleasure of it. Perhaps it’s moving house and feeling unsettled and having so many practical things flooding my brain – or am I making excuses?

I’ve lost my geeky pleasure in words, sentences and paragraphs. What now?

Harder to get out of bed this morning, but I did, and I wrote another 500 words. A totally different scene with totally different characters. Perhaps this is how longer pieces of work get written – lots of mini-scenes that eventually can be shaped into a longer story, and then the whole thing re-written coherently from scratch? I don’t know. First rule of this new process: don’t over analyse it. Second rule of this process: don’t over analyse it :-)

I cleaned myself up, boiled the kettle in the living room not to wake the others, and sat down to write. I wrote 500 words about a father and a son and a beached whale. I didn’t want to stop, but I had to do my morning jobs and get my train. Today I am very happy I started writing again, and very sad for reasons I have not yet worked out.

It’s really hard to not have an audience in mind, an imagined critic or reader. Of course I want to be published, of course I want to be universally admired and loved, but I will only get the best work out of myself if I ignore all that crap and write for myself.

The painful work is the important work. If I am afraid of it, I gotta do it!

I think sometimes people aren’t gonna try and understand what’s going through your head. They may have your best interests at heart but you’re too tired and hurt to cope with the protests against your feelings. Especially when you’re ill and your resistance is low.

So I wrote something for myself today. Because I needed to.

Because I don’t, atm. Haven’t really for a long time. When I say “write for myself” I mean give myself space to write private journal entries where I can talk about the things that really bother me about myself, my life and other people. Writing is such a fundamental part of my life, in a sense it is a vocation, it is like breathing to me. But for too long I’ve sat on my feelings and not expressed them as fully as I could and now it’s time for me to change the rules.