On Writing

I started this blog a year ago and in all that time I haven’t written about writing, which I think shows remarkable restraint. (What utter cheek to call this post On Writing, the same title as Stephen King’s very excellent book. The nerve!)

The trouble with writing about writing of course is that it very quickly becomes a display of self-flagellation (at best), which might be relevant to writers who are generally a self-flagellating lot with weird interests in other people’s suffering, but please God may we have enough awareness to realise this spectacle is not always actually worth reading about.

This is also I think the trouble with being someone who writes - there's a temptation to think that everything you think is worth writing about - that every thought is worth documenting, that every emotion is worth capturing in words, that every thing needs to be commented on all the bloody time.

Things don’t, though. Probably. Probably there are ways of experiencing things without commenting on them, without writing about them, without pinning them down with language; ways of getting to the end of a day and saying 'well that was alright' and then going straight to sleep.

Listen this is my anniversary post so I’m going to write about writing, it’s inevitable, sue me.

The first job I wanted that wasn’t teacher or doctor or banker (that is, the jobs I saw other people having) was 'writer'; whether that meant actually to write, or to live in an apartment in London filled with books and a cat, I wasn’t fussed. But it became a thing I was sometimes good at and, more to the point, enjoyed, so long after I've let go of the idea of being a professional writer (a what now?), I still write everyday.

Occasionally I think I would like to stop writing, to stop turning everything into words in my head, but I’m pretty sure it’s too late. What started as a few lines to take the edge off has become the monkey at my typewriter, and I’ve grown fond of the little fellow.

There’s a rush you get when you nail a sentence, that you can’t get from anything else; a lovely dream you never quite give up on where maybe if you write enough, all your thoughts will join up and everything will be connected to everything else, and you will one day be a complete sort of person, a perfectly organised human being.

Imagine.

There’s also a stubborn shard of hope (all hopes are shards, and stubborn af) that says maybe one day you will write something that causes someone else when they read it to say "Oh!", and they will understand themselves in a new way, a better way, a more dangerous way, and your work on earth will be done - or at least you won't be alone in your understanding of yourself.

Writers are wannabe surgeons - good writing will cut you open where it hurts the most and leave you with just enough words to mop up the mess, and writers don’t even use anaesthetic or take the Hippocratic oath or anything, it should be illegal. I don’t know why we aspire to do this. Maybe because we’ve done it to ourselves so many times, we forget that others Might Not Like It. And all it costs us is obsession.

(This, by the way, applies as equally to academic writing as it does to poetry - truth is truth, and nothing cuts you open like truth.)

The joy of writing this blog - because it is a joy or I wouldn’t do it - is that it has become a space I have created for myself where the condition of entry is not to say something perfectly, but to say it at all. Over the year I’ve sorted through some of my thoughts and sewn them together in not too Frankenstein a fashion, I hope; and behind the scenes I’ve had some really interesting responses which (as my sister pointed out), are more than an academic might ever get from a peer-reviewed journal, so I’m practising gratitude for that: thank you. May you all keep doing whatever it is you do to make sense of who you are and your place in this world, and may you all share as much of that with other people as will make you slightly uncomfortable.