| Product: |
Creative Writing |
| Date: |
14/11/01 (105 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Expressive, Life-Affirming, Creative!
Disadvantages: All-consuming
Sometimes I sit, pen in hand and wait for words to fall from my mind onto a clean white page. Sometimes they fall rocked with passion and envy and hate, sometimes driven by laughter or tears. Sometimes I write because there is nothing else – the world has receded and there’s just me and a cold room and words zipping so fast around my mind that I cannot write them quickly enough. Sometimes there is a character who screams to be made manifest – others whisper quietly whilst I sleep and introduce themselves in my dreams.
I have always been told I’m a writer and always believed I’m a writer. It sounds so incredibly pretentious reading that and I am inclined to backspace and delete but I won’t. I won’t lie to myself again. I won’t pretend that I can fall into a “normal” 9 – 5 lifestyle anymore or sacrifice this passion for the sake of a few more pounds. It’s not that I ever stopped being a writer but I did stop writing for a time in my teens when I cowed down to what the world tried to say to me, that I was too young or too old or too full of dreams and no feet on the ground. Too full of imagination and no practicality and I ‘should’ get a proper job when I grew up. My confidence has always suffered but like my hair, my words are my strength.
When I don’t write I become sick – in my head and heart. I am a star imploding when writer’s block descends and I cannot control the words that burn my mind, too many to count or string together. I sense a weight on my heart and I am being crushed by something on the inside. My voice, my expression screaming so loud that I think the whole world can hear it but it can’t. The world just sees a girl in a cold room, pen in hand, eyes looking inwards waiting…waiting…
I write because I have to write. When I was little I created stories and poems and wrote songs. I taught myself the recorder at
five and soon began to construct songs around my little tunes. Shame I didn’t realise that I couldn’t sing and play at the same time – I do believe I tried to!
I loved school and more than anything else I loved English and Music. The two have always walked hand in hand for me. Sometimes I turn to music when the words won’t come and then the melody becomes words and I am whole again. My teachers always commented on my stories (which were nearly always about animals!) and back at home I wrote more. When I was around 10, I started to write a story about an astronaut who reached the edge of the universe. I wrote and wrote then got stuck because I couldn’t figure out what lay at the edge of the universe. I could only see a horizon in my mind and that line made my head hurt. The enormity of space – the insignificance of a small girl in a cold room. The narrator in my head withheld the end of that story indefinitely – one day she might give up her secrets.
Writing is something I do because I have to. If I don’t write, if I don’t create, I feel like I become invisible. When I had a breakdown I wrote solidly for 3 weeks. If I didn’t have a story I wrote how I felt. If I could not write a sentence I wrote words, in any order in any tense - it didn’t matter. Anything to stop me counting how many threads of thought where currently weaving their way through my mind.
I do not believe I am the greatest writer ever – just that I am a writer. There’s a difference but I strive to become better at it – to master the horse without breaking it.
Creative writing is just that – creation. To create we must give birth and sometimes the pain of writing is intense. Sometimes it is mystical and magical – at others times just damn hard work and you have to PUSH to get the story out. Sometimes the baby refuses to be born, turns in on itself and waits for another 9
months to re-emerge in a new guise. Sometimes the baby just slips out in a moment – perfect in every way with eyes shining. There are poems I have that were ‘given’ to me in entirety, no re-working needed. There are others that sit waiting for the last line – or indeed the first.
To write I believe you need to be inspired – by love, hate, hurt, passion, revenge, fear. You tell the story because only you can tell it. It’s not that you want to tell it – you need to.
To continue with the birth metaphor, don’t try and plan every aspect of your story before you begin to write. This would be rather like mapping out a child’s life before they are even born and well we all know that they never do what we expect! Your characters are like this – faces that suddenly appear in the dark, voices that you hear when it is silent elsewhere. As yet you do not know them and you may need some time to figure out just who they are and what they are trying to say.
But what if characters never seem to come easy? What if they sit skulking at the far reaches of your mind and refuse to come out? What if there’s a fantastic character and no story for him to fit into? What if – horror of horror’s – there’s just NOTHING?
Then write about nothingness; write about this person who seems blank and impenetrable. Maybe he is a ghost or a shadow or a figure so scary you cannot name him. Maybe he’s shy and likes to sit at the back of the room until someone else has spoken. Maybe he doesn’t want to be the centre of attention.
Stories are everywhere – you are the living proof of an ongoing story with an infinite number of possibilities and ‘what could have been’ and ‘what should have been’. It is true that it is much easier initially to write about your own experience but I have to say I don’t feel particularly inspired to wr
ite about living in my council flat in the middle of a city! However, what I do write still is my story because I write of my dreams and my wishes and desires. I write about what fuels me and destroys me. I take people I know and remould them. I look at people I don’t know and go with that wonderful human ability to categorise and stereotype and invite or discard the stranger in the blink of an eye.
Something I have practised for several years is automatic or unconscious writing. Sometimes the conscious logical mind wants too much credit for the creative process and simply gets in the way so I try to just let my unconscious mind speak to me in all its symbolic unusual glory. I used to practice this with a friend of mine and we discovered that there seems to be a moment when we just know that the ‘communication’ from the subconscious has ended – very strange.
The process is quite simple and meditative. It’s really good to practice this just before sleeping – or just after waking up when you’re still in that sleepy mode.
Make the room as dim as possible and have a pen and paper infront of you. Make sure you’re not going to be disturbed. The best kind of pen to use it is a free flowing ink kind – rollarball or similar because you are going to be writing quickly. A pencil could also work here too.
Now – sit comfortably and few a few moments just concentrate on your breathing. Don’t think about writing or what you are going to write, just be a still and quiet as you can. Allow yourself this time to be with yourself.
Now take up the pen and half open your eyes, just so you know where the beginning of the page is. Now write ANYTHING. It doesn’t matter what it is you write down. It doesn’t have to be sentences – it can just be words and don’t censor it! It doesn’t have to ‘make sense’. This is your conscious mind trying to
take over again. Subconscious writing is often dreamy in content and makes little immediate sense if you start thinking about it.
A starting line of one piece I wrote like this is
“Magpies are the stars and blue flies dig for water…”
Another is
“Easter Island. Monoliths and dark fields. Shadows are the same wherever you go. I break eggs into a bowl and stir and stir. Something stirs…”
The idea is to write anything that comes to mind and keep writing until something inside says, “stop”.
I had no idea at all why I was writing about magpies or blue spiders or Easter Island but it let the words do what they wanted. This isn’t meant to be a finished piece of work, it is an exercise in creativity. You cannot pass or fail only create – whether now, later or next year. There are words and stories that have been told and retold over and over in your dreams and images that you could only imagine. The beauty of this kind of exercise is that it gives you material to work on, immediately and completely. It might be weird and it might not make sense but it will get the creative juices flowing once you let daylight flood the room and you kick your conscious mind back into gear by reading it.
Play the “what if?” game that writers use to move their stories along. What if a girl laid on the ground and felt something move beneath her? What if it was an earthquake or a sleeping giant or the rumble of trucks coming across the mountain pass? What if she was mesmerised or terrified or fascinated or suddenly pulled down into the earth? Play the game and be playful – let your imagination run wild because it’s sure as hell unlikely we can be as wild as this is “real” life.
If words and ideas don’t come easy then try listening to your favourite piece of music and writing down the images and feelings and thoughts that flow t
hrough your mind as you listen. Does it stir up memories, does it remind you of your youth, your age or the possibilities of the future? What if this song, this piece of music were a person – what would they be saying? What if this piece of music where a landscape? What would it look like?
Whether religious or atheist we are all living proof or creation – from biological to spiritual. The ability to create is coursing through my veins as I write. Writing is my lifeblood – it feeds me, strengthens me and sometimes I am wounded and I bleed but I keep writing because I must. It is my passion and my star and sometimes my star shines bright and other times it burns. Mine is an unquiet mind.
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