Writing is always beginning again

I read somewhere that you shouldn’t write too much about writing. The advice was that readers would be bored by the existential (and practical) challenges that exist between the writer and the page. I don’t agree. I love to read about writing. I find that writing about writing is often writing about life. 

I’ve been thinking about this space and how I use it. Mostly I’ve been berating myself for not writing more, for failing to meet the targets I’ve arbitrarily set for myself. Beating myself up for not writing enough is a well-worn mental pathway for me. I have been doing it pretty consistently for close to 20 years. If I were to make a list of my most common thoughts, it would be in the top five. Often the criticism happens on the page. Countless times I’ve written about not writing, the irony apparently not clear to my brain which flatly insists that I am worthless as a writer and a human. 

I recently went back through a previous iteration of this website/newsletter. I’d published a few pieces under a different name, from another chapter of my life. I wanted to copy over the writing I’d done because some of it, I thought, was good. I didn’t want the work my past-self had done to go unnoticed, unread. I wanted to incorporate my past self’s work into this space my current self built. This space I built in the spirit of trying again.

I have been writing for decades, but I have not been very successful. I have not managed to make writing my career, despite many years of trying. I don’t say that as self-criticism as much as a simple statement of fact. These days, berating myself for not writing gets folded in with the shame, regret and disappointment of failing to make my dreams a reality. I know there are good reasons why writing hasn’t worked out for me as a full-time job. A debilitating mental health diagnosis, concerns for my safety and wellbeing and the need to make enough money to take care of myself all meant that my writing career couldn’t be my first priority. I am proud of making those choices - they were the right ones - but they are still difficult to live with. I grieve the life and career I could have had. 

I spent some time moving articles from my old spaces to my current one. Doing that, I saw how much writing I had done in the time I’d been beating myself up for not doing more. When I saw gaps in my output, I could easily identify what was happening in my life that kept me away from the page.  As I type, I can see the bookshelf where I store the journals I've been keeping for decades. There are hundreds of them. Journals I kept when I was traveling, which smell like Indian food and are gritty with grains of sand from California. Journals that are tear-stained, tea-stained, food-stained. Journals that I made as a child. I kept the A4 pad I had as a teenager which I added to occasionally with magazine clippings and story ideas and random thoughts. I remember that A4 pad as a moment when something clicked and I began to rely on the page for comfort and company. 

It’s not true to say that I haven’t been writing. That sentiment reverberates around my mind, but that doesn’t make it true. Self-loathing is rarely logical. 

During covid, I wrote a book. I had been made redundant from my job and lived alone. Every inch of my life belonged to me and I lavished myself with words. I got up very early and wrote in my journal. When I was done with that, I switched to my novel which I hand wrote on loose leaf A4 sheets. I wrote two drafts in quick succession, thrilled everyday at what a gift it was to have this time. There was a purity to my writing life that I will likely never experience again. And that’s OK. That life was a barren one. I was desperately lonely. Isolation, though familiar, is uniquely devastating. 

Being on my own in a room with my ideas may always be my favourite part of the writing process. Sharing work is where it gets more complicated. This piece, about not sharing work because of a persistent nasty troll, felt both sad and true to me. I tie myself in knots about things readers probably don’t even notice. I weigh the merits of publishing this day or that. I think about strategy, about ‘making the most of’ my work. I fear the internet’s long memory, the atmosphere of shallow criticism and public shaming that exists on social media. I think of my creative output as something you can optimise and scale as if I were making widgets. 

But that’s not how creativity works. With creativity (like love), the more you use, the more you have. 

Writing is always beginning again. You are always starting over with a blank page, always reaching toward something else, something new, something fresh. I know that I will look back on this time in my life and see how much progress I made. I know that even when I’m away from the page, I’m writing. I know that living a good and happy life is essential for ‘productivity’, though I hate that word and the fact that I still crave it. I know that, with hindsight, I’ll look back and see that I was doing just fine. 

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No links today because I’m working on revising the aforementioned book. 

Thanks for being here,