Frydmania

Ages since I last wrote a blog post…but hopefully that’s about to change.  I am now the proud owner of my very own laptop…Many thanks to Dan who took my list of what I wanted it to do, read up for me, made recommendations, and even collected it today.

The title is an attempted play on Virginia Wolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own“, esentially arguing for women to be given status as writers.  The notion is that a woman who wants to write needs somewhere to call her own.  In Wolf’s view, it was having a room, somewhere to go, and in her terms, to write fiction.

Now, with the internet, there’s plenty of places to go to write, and plenty of things to write, too.  But having the means to write…that’s the key.

Years ago when I wrote lots – a daily diary, regular poetry, as well as lots of school work – it was pretty much all long hand.  Paying attention to my English teacher, I learned to touch type as a skill he said was really useful – and this really before computers were making much of a presence in schools.

Turns out that now, as he described, it really is just as easy to compose when typing as when writing by hand.  Easier in some ways, faster, with a certain happy rhythm to it.  Not that I don’t like writing by hand, but I found that the words don’t flow in quite the same way now.

So, here’s to my own laptop.  In time, maybe I’ll lower my standards, even use it for work in the 9-5 sense.  But the big reason for getting it is finally to have a computer to play on, to do fun stuff.  The writing, the surfing etc, is meant to be for leisure, rather than justified by performance or to do lists.

Talking to a few other women, it does seem to continue to be the case that the men rather hog the computer in evenings and weekends.  Mine has the excuse of running his own business, and working from home is a perk in this case.

But I thought there could well be a reason why there’s more men writing their own blogs than women, and time on the computer is probably part of it…

So, some rom – even some ram - of my own.  Here’s to making the most of it.

I’d love to say that I’ve done lots of writing this summer, after all my ‘I must write’ blog posts, but I have made a little start.

I now have a notebook for writing. Some of it is just funny things that I see or come across, in the hope that they may form the basis for writing. I’m finding myself thinking a lot about the mechanics of writing, what beginnings look like, what endings look like, and examples of what seems to work, from film and TV as well as fiction, to work out how good stories are put together.

I’m also working out what I enjoy reading/viewing, in terms of stories, and hopefully that may give me an idea of what I want to write about.

I should probably take my notebook on the bus, as my best option for observing people, one-off stories in newspapers, signs misread that suggest a different meaning, that kind of thing. While my journeys to and from work have usually been about pacing myself into, and out of, work, perhaps now I can use that ‘not required to do anything’ time to take my imagination for a walk.

I also find I’m reading the literary sections of newspapers more, seeing what critics think of books, though not so that I can only write in a way that ‘sells’. There are times when critics express that happy amazement you get with books that do take you somewhere new, or when they write about what and why they write.

Jeanette Winterston has some amazing pieces fortnightly in the Times Book Review where you can feel yes, I really am doing society a favour if I write. All of this is good for enthusiasm that books and writing are about pleasure as well as about ideas, both of which I want to hang on to in the process of trying out some writing.

Just after coming back from holiday, Dan and I met with a Polish couple living in England but visiting Edinburgh for the festival. The lady was a former pupil of mine when I last taught in Poland, and has gone from strength to strength, say I with pride though not much responsibility. The man is a lecturer in marketing, but went on to tell us the kind of societal trends behind products that he actually researches.

Probably no big surprise that it’s more and more about story telling in marketing, so that a product is based in the context of a story that you can be in too. I’d read a few months back about society shifting away from acquiring things to acquiring experiences, and he agreed that the story telling comes into this too.

In some ways that’s good. It doesn’t take much looking around to see that with the web, everyone has the chance to tell their stories more. In other ways, it can be a pressure – there are yet more stories out there, what space is there for mine?

But I have to remind myself that my criteria for writing when starting in this direction were not of marketability, but of doing something that I love, for my own ends rather than anyone else’s.

It’s tricky to keep this focus as I start out, not to interrogate what I do too much. Thinking about writing while on holiday, I distinguished between writing as art and writing as craft. Sometimes with crafts, the fun is more in the process than in the end product. I’d like a nice end product too, some day, but for now, there’s no substitute for hard craft.