Inspiration

Inspire:  a breathing-in.


I went to a writing workshop on Saturday. It's the longest time I've ever devoted to thinking about where I want to head with my writing. Lots of excellent food for thought, but a couple of points that really struck home.

The first was in a session about writers and how they live their lives, do their work.  Several people have been advising me to give up my job, or reduce it back. And I've felt myself that somehow a Proper Writer would be wandering lonely as a cloud, or languishing in a garret, or sitting in a Greek fisherman's cottage and in any and each of these settings concentrating deeply and purposefully on writing. Dedicated, focussed, single-minded, no interruptions.

This scenario has always filled me with panic.

I don't do anything else in this way. I've always had multiple things going on, priorities to juggle, projects to manage, people to see, deadlines to meet. I just can't imagine sitting in front of the screen or page for hours at a stretch, struggling for inspiration. I generally find it's the other way around. That writing is bubbling up inside of me and I'm waiting, waiting for a moment when I can get it down.

Listening to a poet explain how she had perhaps one day a week to devote to writing itself, in between all the other stuff she did to earn enough to be able to write, was a great place to start. Day a week: that seems possible.  Even better, she was followed by a science professor running a university department who managed to write novels (ten so far) whilst holding down a senior job and raising a family (not sure how much raising he does, but we'll take it on trust for now, heh?)  Best of all, he said that when he got funding to stop university work for a year and write, he dossed about, lost his focus in all areas of his life, hardly achieved anything at all, got depressed and panicky. I just know I'd be like that too.

I reckon for me it's a question of finding a balance.  A re-jigging of time and priorities, a gradual transition rather than a sudden sea change. This feels more manageable, more realistic, more achievable.  The danger of waiting for a pure solution, clean time, is that it never happens and I never write.

Which leads me on to the second insight.  It was a session about writing in digital environments, including some discussion on blogging. I explained that I wrote, and I also blogged (sometimes about my writing, more often than not a drivelling-on about nothing in particular). I find it easy to write my blog, and often hard to progress with my novel.  And frequently the quality of writing dashed down in fifteen minutes in one of my Postcards strikes me as better than a carefully crafted, agonised-over paragraph of lonely-as-a-cloud wandering.  What advice could the panel offer?

Wisdom and insight.  "You need to make your writing feel like blogging. You need to look at tools that help you to write small scenes or episodes as the mood takes you, and juggle these around. You need Scrivener software". I looked this up and she was dead right.  However now I also need either a Mac to run it on (oooh tempting....) or the patience to wait until March 2011 when it comes out of beta and is properly launched on the Windows platform. Aaargh.  Not sure I can manage either of these things.

It was also suggested that I print out the blog as individual pages and lay them all out on the floor (a big floor) so I can arrange them by themes, try them out in different groupings, see if there is a way to create links and connections between them so they hang together in a more structured way.  I'd already been thinking about this. 

What I need next is some help with this, another pair of eyes, a critical friend, some constructive feedback.

I feel excited, energised and enthused. I'm in the zone.