WHY I write. And HOW....
It's also made me look again at my own attempts at scribbling stuff - I wouldn't call myself an author by any stretch of the imagination, not yet! - and what it means to me. I thought I'd share it with you, my handful of loyal readers. Because - why not?
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First: let me explain the WHY? What makes me sit down at a desk or table with my laptop and attempt to write something?
I write. I always have done, since I was a kid. I've written stories, short ones and longer ones, almost novella length. Poetry. A novel. Currently, I'm battling through penning a memoir as well. For 10 years or more - actually, now I think of it, it's 12 years - I've been writing this Blog and its two predecessors.. For most of my working life, I've had to write a wide variety of documents, factual things like procedure manuals, training guides and system requirements, as well as slideshows and presentations of varying complexity and then deliver them to audiences from a couple of people to a dozen or more learners in a proper training room. So the written word, and creating it, has been a huge part of my life.
It's always been challenging, and sometimes an absolute pain, and now and again I've found myself completely stopped in my tracks - the fabled Writer's Block that everyone who does this for a living (or otherwise) has experienced. But still I carry on. It's like an itch, somewhere in the middle of my head, that compels me to do this, and there is little rhyme or reason to it. It's just there and I must scratch it.....
It's not as if I've made any money from it.....well, discounting the professional stuff, the procedures and training guides and presentations, but they were just a part (albeit an important part) of my day job, for which I received compensation of varying quantity. But the personal stuff, the stories and the book and so on - no.
Well, apart from one thing. When I was I think 12 (so nearly 60 ago now, for God's sake!) I entered a story into a competition run by the Surrey Mirror newspaper to write a Christmas story. I can't remember the terms and conditions of the competition, nor much in the way of detail about the little yarn I sent in - it was, I recall, about a bloke hitchhiking home for Christmas from Northern Alaska to I'm not sure where, so I guess it featured snowmobiles and big lumbering timber trucks, maybe a train and airplane or two: I really can't remember. But Our Hero made it, and walked through his front door at 5 to midnight on Christmas Eve, to the delight of his family. To my surprise, and that of mum and dad, the paper printed it in their Christmas edition, along with several others, and what's more paid me £5 for it. My dad bought several copies of the paper and my mum cut the story out and posted it off to friends and family scattered all over the country and indeed the world, and insisted that I would one day earn my living from my pen. Which, I suppose, I did, although not in the way she meant.
And that is the sole direct payment I've receivcd for all the hundreds of thousands of words I've written since, in my poetry and my stories and my books and my Blogs. Not a single word has been published (apart from the several hundred Blog posts I've written and published via this Blogger platform or LinkedIn, which I left when I retired four years ago).
Partly this has been because, for whatever reason (and I still can't quite get my head around why) my AdSense settings on Google have never generated any income (and now seem to have stopped working altogether), so the Blog is simply an exercise in creativity, a hobby, with an audience that has never really grown beyond a handful of views per post, and try as I might I haven't found a way of growing it via social media, word of mouth or whatever. I put it down to most people having way more important things to do than to read the demented witterings of an ageing retiree ex-pat. Or perhaps the writing simply isn't as good or interesting as I think it is.... It's a question I've posed a few times in previous posts, but never yet had any answer, which is, shall we say, frustrating!
So - the big question here I suppose is this: If I never make any money from all this, WHY do I still do it? Simply: because I need to. I have to scratch that itch. And I always try to finish what I started. And because, who knows, one day I might figure out how this Amazon Publishing thing works and actually do something with it all.
And there's a bit more to it even than that. Over the past couple of years, because of the well known pitfalls of finding a new direction and purpose after retiring, and of course that bloody Pandemic, and a couple of relatively minor accidents that led to hospitalisation, I plunged into some nasty mental issues. They're largely gone now, or at least under control, but still linger in the back of my mind and make the odd comeback when least expected. I've written in more detail about them recently, but the essential point is this. My writing has helped, and continues to help, with the healing process. It gives me something to get out of bed for in the morning (besides walking the dog and getting my Beloved off to work and the kids off to school) and something to focus on besides what a mess the world is in right now. If I can make my mind focus on the creative process, even if not every day, then it keeps it from wandering off into darker places I really don't want to visit.
It's been therapeutic too, in that a couple of the stories I've written have, quite by chance and totally unplanned, directly addressed some of the problems that caused the Depression, and trying to marshal all my distant memories into a cohesive and hopefully entertaining narrative in the memoir have helped me realise that, despite the problems I've faced over the years - and like everyone else continue to face - it's actually been a good life, one I can be proud of with more ups than downs, and not the disaster area that mental problems can often suggest.
But, mostly, I write because I love doing it.
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So that's the WHY. Now: what about the HOW? Where do the ideas come from and what do I do to convert them into something that makes sense and is even vaguely readable?
Without wishing to sound pretentious, this is where the magic happens, but since I'm not Gandalf I can't really answer very clearly how or why. For the Blog, most of the ideas that drive content are in turn driven by the daily news cycle - and, let's face it, there is an awful lot of stuff going on to write about now. What with the War in Ukraine; incompetent and possibly corrupt government in a number of countries including both my birth and adopted homelands; global warming; the food crisis; rampant inflation across much of Europe; extreme weather events causing chaos globally; no end to senseless gun violence in a divided USA; the football season including the first winter World Cup (happening in November); a Covid pandemic that is still roaring on.......the list is endless. I'm spoilt for choice - as is every other journalist, blogger or YouTube vlogger on the planet. So the difficulty is to somehow make my stuff different from everyone else's - and that is incredibly difficult, and possibly (even probably...) not something I've succeeded in doing well enough.
Re-hashing someone else's ideas or points of view is a pointless exercise, so I have to spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about stuff and searching for a personal angle or viewpoint that I can build a piece around. Then more time, from a few hours to a couple of days, writing and reviewing the piece before hitting the Publish button - by which time, as often as not, it's no longer News. It's also, because of the news cycle driven nature of the content, in constant danger of becoming repetitive: it's one thing being paid, as a journalist, by a paper or news website, to specialise on a specific subject, follow it and immerse yourself deeply in it, and write pieces every day to keep people informed, and something altogether different to express a personal opinion in an entertaining way independently.
Do I try to write a short piece on something every day, specifically to cover a "story" (for want of a better word), or do I take more time, produce longer pieces but less frequently, that are not only driven by the news cycle, but also personal, things that I care about? Right now, I tend to fall between the two - there is newsy stuff here when something jumps out and bites me (the sudden death of a favourite sportsman, for instance, or a Prime Ministerial resignation, or another US mass shooting atrocity), but also plenty of personal stuff too: book reviews, pieces about trips made to Switzerland or the seaside, and some deeply personal things covering my own struggles with both Covid and Depression (they have even crept into this essay).
But when I sit down to write, I typically have little in mind but a very very general idea about what I want to say. I stare at a blank page, type a handful of words, and see what happens. Sometimes it flows, and the thoughts burst out of my fingers and fill the page, almost without a conscious effort. Those are good times.... Other times, those few words are all that comes and after a few hours of angst and increasing panic it's scrapped. Read, review, take a break, then read review again. Maybe again. However many times it takes to polish it to my satisfaction. Then Publish (or less often Delete). Tougher, for sure, but somehow even more rewarding.
With longer pieces, the book and the memoir and the stories, it's not so very different. I am not a planner: there are no wallposters with timelines, maps, cast lists, key events or anything like that. Very rarely are there even any notes to refer to - it's all in my head. The closest I've come to that was The Match, my sex booze and football novel, where I started the original draft with a couple of pages, mocked up like the Teams page in a football program, that listed all the characters, major and minor, that would appear. That exercise took perhaps an hour, then I made myself a coffee and started writing. Somehow - I have absolutely no clue how it happened! - in the time it took to brew the coffee the very nebulous idea I had had that started the creative process solidified in my mind, and when the pen tip hit the paper, the entire story poured out in a single collosal brain dump. Every setting, the timetable and events, individual incidents in the football match that is central to the yarn, even dialogue was there, complete. It took me perhaps three weeks to finish my dump and commit it all to paper, in a couple of Ryman Jumbo exercise books, and it was done. Extraordinary, mysterious and frankly unexplainable...... Since then the book's been reviewed and edited many times, but the finished story, the one sitting as a pdf waiting for me to do something on Amazon or whatever, is not significantly different to the version scribbled out by Ball Pentel all those years ago.
And that is how I write.. Ideas come to me, at odd hours, and I try to remember them (not always possible: the lingering effects of my two brushes with Covid include increased fatigue and a lack of focus and concentration - the so-called brainfog) but sometimes the ideas drift away as fast as they appear. But if the idea comes back, it seems to come back in a bit more detail and that gives me my start. And off I go to another blank page and start bashing keys again, to see where that leads. Now and then it's a dead end, but often, eventually, the result is a completed yarn.
And because I've not planned anything, it grows and changes and develops as I go along, and often in unexpected ways. I wrote something recently, a longish short story that came as an initial idea of a guy going for a solo swim in a warm sea somewhere, and is eaten by a shark - I dismissed that out of hand: way too depressing. But it kept nagging away, and eventually, after a couple of weeks, it grew into a story about a bereaved husband dealing with his loss and the guilt around it, coming to terms with it and moving on.....kind of. From the outset I could see a couple of possible conclusions, and more came to me as I wrote, but I had no idea which one to use - until I got to the last few paragraphs, when my subconscious mind settled on one and somehow, to my suprise, it works and makes sense......but in an odd, open ended way that actually allows the reader to perceive a couple of the choices and settle on whichever conclusion seems right - to that reader. Weird? Well, yes, I guess it is. And (spoiler alert) with no sign of a shark - unless summoned by the reader.
So: it's all for want of a better term, ad-hoc creation, words coming to me on the fly and hitting the page for a period of time that may be a few hours or a few minutes. While I'm typing, I'll often go back over a couple of paragraphs, correcting typos and punctuation, and most importantly reminding myself where I'm going and keeping things on some kind of track. Then at the end of that writing day or period or story section I'll go back through it again and correct it. When the whole thing - be it a blog post, a story or another section in the memoir - is I think complete I'll go through it all a couple more times and polish it. Only then will I move on and Publish (the blog) or take a break and seek a new idea for the other stuff. It's undoubtedly an unprofessional way of working, but it works for me, and in any case it's, to an extent, the only option I have because I don't have the luxury of a dedicated work environment, no place where I can shut myself away from distractions and get my head down to at least try and focus for an extended time. As things are now, and likely to remain for the foreseeable future, I have to continue with the Wing And A Prayer method of writing, whenever and wherever I can.
So I will.
Good and detailed article which gives the reader a good insight into your secret
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