Guilty as charged

Sometime during the Year of Getting Organised, I came across some old material.  You know, stuff I’d written, typed with an actual typewriter onto actual paper, a long time ago.  Some of it was while I was at school, along with some truly cringe-worthy short stories from my early adulthood. 

And it was bad.  Baaaaaaaaad.

Once you get past the psychic slap of how truly awful some of it was – if you can get past it – you can read it again, for insight. 

What I found in this early writing was a sense of my own stuck-ness, and in the very middle of it, a desperate need for beauty, for inspiration, for connection, as lifelines out of the mire. There’s even a (hideously plodding) story based on this very theme – a theme that even I didn’t recognise at the time.

But I also saw fragments of my craft emerging: the oblique slant of words used in fresh way, some nascent plot ideas, and a blunt personal honesty that was possibly the reason that continuing to write was so daunting.

I also recognised was what was missing: artistic self-belief.  The brazen self-worth needed to foist my imagination into the bright rule-bound world.  The mindfulness to persist with writing from that space, to plough through my inexperience until I achieved something that even my cracked self-censor could grudgingly acknowledge might be ok. 

So, what can I take from this insight?

In the time since I wrote that material, I have come to understand a number of things.  Like, that writing improves your writing. And living, without writing, also improves your writing.  I understand now how fickle a commodity confidence is – that its weight and value is mediated in direct relationship to how badly you need it.  That it makes bad writers lazy and tortures good writers and constricts their efforts to a trickle.

And that none of that matters while you’re writing.  The most important thing is to just keep going.

I have learnt that uncertainty is bearable. Not knowing all the answers is a good thing. The bits that are missing tell just as much as the bits that are in the story.

But mostly the thing that I have learnt is that the writing is only 50% of being a writer.  You can be technically precise and grammatically correct, and still fail at the wholeness of the craft.

The other 50% of being a writer is the story that you bring to the endeavour – and that’s where the magic takes place. It’s where the jagged edges of your lived experience abrade a raw opening in the words, creating a space for the numinous to enter. It’s what gives life to your work.

So, these are my crimes, if any: believing too much that I had to be “good at” writing before I’d even begun, and believing too little in the stories that needed to be told. In this, I include my own powerful history, left unspoken for too long. In this respect only, I am guilty as charged. 

For these errors of omission, I hereby make restitution: not in silence, but in well-timed speech. Not in secluded reflection, but in decisive word-driven action.  I will hone my craft until it has the gleam and heft of the finest Damascene steel, and holding it as a sabre before me, I will carve a path to my own bold future.  

Key words

After filling myself with that unique blend of inspiration and wonder that comes from attending a fabulous writers’ group, I had a tiny, effortless moment of insight. 

I was thinking about writing.  About my own writing, and what exactly I aspire to.  I imagined for a moment that someone else was describing my writing, and the words that I would like to hear them using to describe the essential qualities common across my body of work. 

As soon as I’d framed the question, the answers came – each one arising with clarity and colour in my mind: 

Strange
Beautiful 
Truth

Strange – because strangeness stretches us, grows us and gives us new understanding.   In essence, strangeness is at the very heart of originality. It’s the new, slightly askew view, the novel approach, the uniqueness of a thing. 

Beautiful – I aspire for my work to be lyrical, to capture the fragile moments of ordinary and awful beauty that wash over us and around us, often unnoticed.   

Truth – I aspire for my work to contain at least a fragment of truth – the truth of our shared humanity.  While truth is a many-splendoured thing, and its name has been put to the service of terrible crimes, there is another type of truth:  the unadorned place of connection, the sacred space from which the power of sharing our stories arises.   We do something profound when we acknowledge the reality of another person’s lived journey.  We can do this when we gift our readers with a piece of ourselves, so that they can enjoy the jolt of recognition in an otherwise imagined/imaginal/fictional reality.    

That’s a big ask, right? 

Yes, and no.  I’m going to write what I’m going to write.  It will be what it is.  Along the path to publication the writing will be held up to objective standards, those elements of the craft that are determined by either consensus or debate to be what is required for “good” writing, for publication, or even for commercial success.  None of that, however, creates any personal impetus or satisfaction:  that, my friends, must come from within.  

Once you have overcome the peculiar notion that even a single person on the planet might want to read what you have written, everything else about the quest for recognition and readership becomes even more absurd.  No two people will ever share the same opinion of your work, because each reader brings a part of themselves to the story that they are reading.  Essentially, you are pitching your work to an endlessly shifting finish line.  

So what, then, can a writer aspire to?  Fortune?  Not often.  Fame?  Not likely.  Popularity? Oddly mediated, and even more fickle than ever in the age of the one minute meme. 

The only thing left to aim for is to write something good.  And the only definition of “good” that will be even remotely useful to the writer is the one they have crafted for themselves. 

Strange beautiful truth, it is, then. 

The secret ingredient in blogging

There is something that has been playing on my mind lately. Surprisingly(!), it's about blogging.

There are a lot of 'how-to' blog pointers out there. The vast majority of these are based on marketing fundamentals.  They are the same rules that govern the production of commercial copy: advertising.

Think of your market. Select a handful of key words with maximum appeal to this market. Keep it simple, short, sweet. Write always with your target in mind. Tweet. Throw in some controversy. Not enough to get yourself sued, but enough to create a storm of response through the blogosphere.  

This is not a bad thing, and no doubt it has raised the calibre of many commercially-driven blog enterprises. But I would like to speak also in defence of self-expression.

For every successful blog who has followed these - yes, copy-writing - rules, there are plenty of others who have just gone right ahead and done their own thaing and succeeded. 

Irish gumbo has been steadily serving up bowlfuls of his own special wistful and wry observations, unabated since 2008. (I love that blog. And I want the recipe). 

Last year, Lori at RRSAHM broke all the rules when she blogged her way blindly through the unthinkable implosion of her life. She is still pulling shards out of her wounds, and her blog allows her to slowly examine and arrange them into small patterns of meaning and moments of grace.  Something powerful is unfolding there that defies the laws of blogging. 

And in the same year the all-time most hilarious (and full of whimsy) story was told in all its passive aggressive glory by The Bloggess, who was just as surprised as Victor when success rang the doorbell. 

So what's the secret ingredient?

Each of these blogs demonstrates that there is something other than a set of formulaic rules behind good writing.  They are each imbued (or in the case of The Bloggess, saturated) with the personality of the writers themselves.

How do I get it?

Learn from the successful.  But also know that success is not the product of a formula. It requires something unique and intangible that only you can provide. Write what you mean to. Be genuine. Keep it real. Put a piece of yourself into it. You - and only you - are your writing's secret ingredient. Learn to savour your own unique style by having fun with it, and then arrange everything else to bring that special intensity to the fore. 

That is the place where your writing will succeed.