write and be damned - or at the very least - a bit fed up - Oh and Shopping!

Creativity. It can be such a slippery rascal. We speak in metaphors about muses. About ideas 'coming to us from elsewhere' like butterflies to be captured in our nets of ink, lest they should escape and become the muse of someone else. That's a nice thought. That ideas float by us all the time, and all we have to do is reach out and grab one, and pin it down beneath the glass for all the world to marvel at.

But.

It takes me hours of sitting to get anywhere at all, and even then it is more like mining. I have to descend into the pits of despair and grapple in the darkness for as long as it takes to feel the sharp sting of something. I have to crawl along the narrow passage-ways of my own making, skinning my knees and ripping the flesh from my aching fingers as they tear at the rock face in search of a single gemstone.

And.

Even when I find one (which I occasionally do), then it is so raw, so filthy that I have to then try to clean it up. Polish it. Cut it so that it catches the light just right. And taking great care not to smash it to smithereens by accident.

Writing is a bit hard methinks. I think Joseph Conrad puts it beautifully in one of his letters, reproduced here from Tillie Olsen's Silences.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours, and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I will erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all of my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts...

Conrad goes on about how the story haunts his every waking moment. That he can hear it narrated to him but he cannot get it down on paper. I get that a lot. It's like some cruel bloody creative joke - the kind of - here it is but bet you can't get it down in time! Conrad writes;

They [the ideas and words] creep about in my head and have got to be caught and tortured into some kind of shape.

So today I sat in front of the pc for a few hours watching the thoughts go by with respect to my novel. Eventually I was able to begin writing and got a few hundred words down. And then the teenager walked in and stood behind me. (Oh God I Hate That!). And read over my shoulder at which the ideas and the words fled like terrified mice. And then she said, "Please can I have a lift to X's house?" and that was that. Pinning down of words over for the day, because after the lift it was time to get the little one from Nan's house, so I gave up.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

So I went shopping with Chilli instead, and we bought lots of pants. Because pants are good.

We also got changed in the corridor outside of the changing rooms so that we could compare notes, and bottoms, as you do. We remember the days of the Communal Changing Room you see, when there was space to move about no matter how big your bum got!

Chilli also made cinnamon and apple muffins which were absolutely gorgeous - so scrumptious I ate three and am now much heavier. But happily so. Cinnamon is my favouritist flavour in the whole world!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I just shared Conrad's thoughts on writing with my husband who now thinks I am mad. "It's not a very good advert for the job, is it?" he said. What could I say? I didn't choose writing, I said. Writing chose me.

If I cease blogging it's because he's called the men/women/people in white coats for me.

P.S.

Still Smoke free :) *Smug - Very Smug!*

Friday YAY!

Tis Friday! In the world of normal this is a good thing, but in the world of the hourly paid/student/mother/housewife/wouldbenovelist it is not all it's cracked up to be because...

Friday is the day before Saturday



and Saturday

is

the day when I have to

wash the school uniforms do the shopping and the rest of the washing clean the house sort out the kids' homework sort out my own homework mark the assignments I collected today plan next week's teaching do the evaluations on this week's teaching and...

breathe

write a conference paper and read the books I need to read to write the conference paper and have the thoughts I need to have to write the conference paper and

breathe

and make hubby happy and children happy and

breathe

and there's only 2 More Fridays before Conference Oh NO!

Ahhhh!

Had an idea. I'm going to be talking about writer's block so...

I think I will give everyone a handout with NOTHING on it and say



this is what writer's block looks like

and look back at them for 20 minutes and show them this and say

this is how writer's block feels...

Silences and Writers Block

"Literary History and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some ceasing to publish after one work appears; some never coming to book form at all.
"These are not natural silences, that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature." Tillie Olsen in Silences

And so I sit here, contemplating my own silences. Not the silences that mean I can't write anything, but the silences that prevent me from writing my novel, or that try to, at least; the nagging doubts that pick at my work with what can only be described as a very poor attitude; the lack of time and other commitments such as teaching, that sap my energy and leave me struggling to work late into the night; the self imposed distractions such as this blog, or the checking of endless email accounts; the words that flow so freely through my mind once my head has hit the pillow and yet flutter away just out of reach the moment I try to pin them down on the page. As though they are frightened of the light. And I have to ask myself, what am I frightened of? Of telling the truth? Of lying? Of getting it wrong? Or of getting it right?

The questions I return to readily is this; Why do I write at all if it is such a burden, a difficulty, a torture? Non-writing friends ask me why I even bother? But I think it is time to forget about answering that question because I write because I was born to write. Simple as that. If I write total crap, if the prose is stilted and lousy, then that is awful, dreadful, but I am condemned to spend my life producing it and then trying to make it better. I have no more a choice in whether to write or not, than I had of being born a female. And I wrote in the closet for years, until very recently in fact. Some people hide the fact that they drink, or raid the fridge at midnight. I hid the fact that I wrote everything down. Compulsively.

So - back to silences, and the reasons for these silences. Time is one of them. Virginia Woolf wrote about this. This need for space and time. This Room of One's Own. And I am blessed because I do have a room of my own to write in. But time is precious and difficult to come by.

Time. Time spent (willingly) with my children and my husband, and to feel guilty if I am writing. Time spent working; marking, planning, preparing, teaching. Tillie Olsen writes that she did not publish a book until she was 50, that "The years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks into which most of my life went." (p.38) She talks about discontinuity as a "pattern still imposed upon women", and this makes me feel better because it is damned difficult to chase away the demons, to stare at the screen or page until something begins to emerge... tentatively, hesitantly... only to be called away to find a pair of socks, or cook the evening meal, or collect children from school, or to spy from the corner of my eye a batch of essays that needed marking yesterday.

But I am in good company. Katherine Mansfield wrote of her frustrations in the early days of her relationship with John Middleton Murray: they both wanted to be writers and yet she is running around keeping house while he works on his prose.(p.16) Franz Kafka speaks of writing late into the night because he is working in an insurance company. He speaks of long silences and breaks, saying "When I begin to write after such a long interval, I draw the words as if out of the empty air. If I capture one, then I have just this one alone, and all the toil must begin anew." (1912 Journal entry). Kafka also suffers from a lack of confidence also, writing in 1914; "Yesterday for the first time in months, an indisputable ability to do good work. And yet wrote only the first page. Again I realise that everything written down bit by bit rather than all at once in the course of the larger part is inferior, and that the circumstances of my life condemn me to this inferiority." (p.15) You see - the discontinuity principle is at work here. I feel this strongly every day. No chance to immerse fully, at length, to write until the writing is spent.

And so begin my thoughts on writers block for the conference paper. I wish the novel were as easy to write, that the muse would be so giving of itself for fiction, for the writing that truly matters and yet struggles so much to become.

I hope the rest of the novel racers are having an easier time of it because I would not wish the insecurities I feel in my own work on anyone!

UPDATE

As if to prove the point for interruptions, and discontinuities, my eldest has just come home and trotted into my office to tell me all about her evening with her friends... so much for the wonderful train of thought I'd been having!