Choosing what to write right now is like choosing which one of my fingernails I’d like to have removed with a pair of pliers. I have numerous files of half-begotten stories, all of which have faded into irrelevance after a few weeks, when something else felt more important and pressing, only to suffer the same fate. Ironically, once upon a time I was paid to write. In fact, I was paid to write as much a possible every single day. I would sit at my desk and not move for three hours straight, hands flying over the keyboard, barely pausing to draw breath. My heartrate and cortisol levels skyrocketed, but my synapses were firing at a rate I had not realised was possible. I had never felt so keenly aware of my own ability to think at speed. It was exhilarating – I felt invincible.
But things didn’t continue in that vein, and six years on, writing and I are awkward bedfellows. Occasionally it feels urgent and necessary, and words pour forth with little encouragement. Most of the time, however, it feels like yanking a stubborn 6-year-old out of bed, wrestling them onto a piano stool and demanding they play like a prodigy: exhausting, and usually fruitless. Such high expectations are the artist’s stumbling block, the demand for perfection so all-encompassing that it feels best not to start in the first place. Of course we all know that writing something is better than writing nothing, but the ugly feelings that arise as soon as I put pen to paper can be so overwhelming that it’s easier to do just about everything else.
My most common excuse is to spend my energy working on what I feel “should” be done: a workout, admin, cleaning the bathroom, folding up the washing and any number of other household tasks. Not that those activities send the ugly feelings away, instead, while angrily trying to remove limescale from the shower, my mind is drawn to Rose Miligan’s poem, “Dust If You Must”, in which she warns “Dust if you must, but bear in mind/Old age will come and it's not kind.” Suddenly my life flashes before my eyes, and I see myself, a crumpled 85-year old, weeping pointlessly over the words I had held within me as a young woman, but had been too afraid to put on paper.
You’d think that would be enough to convince me, but no, the procrastination continues. The more I realise I have to lose, the more difficult it becomes to get the words out in the first place. I look back on how easy and instinctive it used to be, how I used to fizz with ideas and feel driven to express them. Now, with naivete gone, I see the pitfalls to every one of them at the very moment of conception, convincing myself they’re no good before I’ve even begun. This leads to a general state of frustration and fury, with the universe and with myself. I have an entire galaxy of words and stories at my fingertips, yet I find myself shying away. What makes me think I would ever stand out? What gave me the idea that I was any good at it in the first place? And how, in a narcissistic and image-driven world, would anyone see me as anything other than another faceless content creator, writing click-bait headlines and SEO-focused social posts? Better to hold the talent close and share nothing, if only to protect my integrity.
This is of course, nonsense. If all artists felt like this we wouldn’t have art. We’d live in a much greyer and contained world without creative work to add colour and expand horizons. Most of us would be pretty stupid and emotionally stunted, too. George Bernard Shaw famously said “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable,” but I don’t know whether he ever spoke out about how unbearable creating the damn stuff can be in the first place.
Marginally more comfort is to be found in the words of poet Sean Thomas Dougherty in his piece entitled “Why Bother?”
Dougherty’s answer:
“Because right now there is someone
Out there with
a wound in the exact shape
of your words.”
Although I doubt that some of my past pieces have matched up to readers' wounds – like that memorable listicle of interesting facts about the Chicken Kyiv – this poem does always make me wonder about writing’s ability to help. To read about something that you had previously thought unique and specific to you, set upon the page by a stranger, is an extraordinary feeling. As though, as Alan Bennett describes it, a hand has reached through the page to take yours. By knowing that others have experienced the same troubles, and survived them, we may yet feel a little braver, and stand a little taller.
I find Dougherty’s words to be a useful reminder about the value of honesty as well as imagination when it comes to committing pen to paper. Art helps us see beyond the limits of our daily lives, offering a glimpse into worlds we couldn’t possibly imagine, but it’s at its most powerful when it throws light on the world we’re already in. Bringing honesty to the words on the page means more easily reaching out that hand to the reader. It transforms the solitary act of writing into something shared, empathetic and reassuring. If we write what we think we should, or worse, what we think “they” want, we run the risk of alienating people, of appearing aloof or out of touch. On the other hand, filling your work with raw life experience launches art from the pedestal on which it is so often foolishly placed and brings it smack down to earth, with its inescapable dirt, unfortunate smell and inexorable pain.
I often worry that writing is secretly a selfish pursuit, just an empty academic exercise to prove my cleverness and superior wit. While others hold life and death in their hands on a daily basis, I just sit here at my laptop getting cross when a sentence doesn’t sound right. To even presume that it could be generous or altruistic in some way seems more narcissistic still. But if I could reimagine it as something that could potentially help someone, maybe not in a life-altering way, but perhaps in a moment-lifting way, then it might feel a bit different. Deciding whether to bother might not be such a difficult choice, after all.
