I sat in a room with quite a few people tonight. Most didn’t know me, I didn’t know them. And I told them that I was feeling nudged to do creative writing again.
Luckily, that was all that I had space to say (when we all had to say what we did in our free time) or needed to say. But I knew I was saying so in front of a few people who do know me well. Who thankfully also have my interests at heart. But it was still a ‘gulp and keep going’ moment.
I seem to be finding it easier to tell people that I do writing for a living. It’s true, I enjoy it, and my ‘other’ writing can hide behind it, which is fine for the time being.
I am happy with the awareness that Dorothy L. Sayers, crime writer and creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, was a copywriter for an advertising firm before becoming a novelist – and I’m pretty sure there were/are some other great writers who’ve been down the same route.
To say I do creative writing…well. I still don’t know if I’m sure what that is. I feel like I should be doing a course to say that. Have assignments which I read in front of the class. (In fact, I do ‘read out loud’, it’s just called putting it on the internet. And I set the assignments myself that way.)
What interested me was the finding myself talking about doing it. Something has shifted, it seems. Perhaps I have reached a stage of life where I am choosing not to hide – myself, my stories, my writing – and so the words seep out when I have a space in which they can do so.
I am still keeping a distance from too much control over it, though. That would spoil the fun – and the purpose of the 31 days, and my intentions around it, is to keep that fun.
To slightly adjust a quotation, ‘if you love something – set it free’. I have no intention to batten down the hatches again. Because I am rediscovering just how much I love writing.
As ever, there are more than enough words. It will take time to whittle them into a form that suits them, that makes a tune of its own, like a reed being cut and adjusted into an instrument.
For now, I am gathering them, spreading them out, looking for patterns. I am letting them fall through my fingers, and gathering them up to begin again.
Sometimes they may fall a different way, cast a different shadow – and I am trusting myself to relax, to enjoy the moment, and also to take notice of the patterns when they happen.
Out in the open, others can see me hunting for sticks. Some may call and wave, perhaps. Increasingly, I am a writer because that is what I find myself doing.
And in doing so, I find myself again, in the reeds, and the patterns, and the whisper of the air around them all.