Last week I wrote 543 words of creative writing. It doesn’t feel like enough for someone who’s supposed to be a writer. So what’s stopped me from writing more?
First, all the things I needed to do – teaching and preparing lessons and workshops, for example; going to meetings and making social media posts to advertise the workshops and taking posters advertising the workshops to likely places and asking for them to be displayed, for another; contacting people who might give me workshop or teaching work and asking them to think about it, for another.
Second, all the things I needed to do but didn’t – most especially working on an edit of a novel, which I’ve been supposed to be doing for the last two weeks but it still hasn’t begun yet because of … well, because of all the stuff above.
Finally, staring out of the window not having good ideas, doing the wordwheel or the sudoku because I haven’t got any good ideas, doing the laundry because I haven’t got any good ideas and all the other things you do when you haven’t got any good ideas. And feeling guilty about doing all those things, thinking that if I was really committed to this stuff, or really disciplined, I wouldn’t get distracted in this way; or if I was really any good at it I would have good ideas more easily.
When you write it down like that and read it back you realise you need to give yourself a bit of a talking-to. Yes, OK, you do need to make some time and space for creative work, but beating yourself up for not being able to is a fool’s game. Sometimes life does that and all these things you’ve been doing – yes, even the staring out of the window and the doing the wordwheel, are part of the process. Even not having good ideas. It’s not helpful to expect all your ideas to be good or expecting every day to be a day when good ideas are possible. The opposite is actually true: it’s brilliant and magical that you ever have any good ideas at all!
The 543 words I wrote last week are different. I think I really like them but I’m not sure anyone else will. They’re not exactly a story and not exactly a poem but I’m glad I’ve written them and I will send them out into the world because they’re on a theme a journal has asked for and you never know, they might be just what that publisher is looking for, and if they do get published I’ll be glad not just because of the success, but also because I care about those words. They’ve been brewing for a very long time, since I was about six, in fact, and I think they matter. Maybe 543 words is OK after all – it’s certainly better than 0 words, and even if they’re not the right words, they are part of the story that leads to the right words. I hope. I’ll keep you posted!