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.
