Writing is strange. The word ‘meta’ sends me into a panic.
I also know I can disappear in unproductive mists of rumination if I start to try to write about writing.
Over the last fortnight, I’ve been writing a lot but have done nothing on the project I’m trying to finish. What I have written includes:
- a blog post for a charity CEO
- news about the brilliant, wonderful and important East London Suffragette Festival (do come. It will be brilliant)
- loads of varied content about the Writeidea Festival, including a submission that now means I’m curating this year’s Fringe
- precis help for my daughter’s vet clinic work experience
- two poems: both execrable
- a short story about feet on the Underground
- critiques of fellow SCBWI writers’ fiction
- exercises on a Writing for Teenagers’ course
Not to mention tweets via various accounts, letters of complaint to council planning officers, a job application for unfamiliar work, daily scraps about stuff that may end up in fiction,a major edit of the opening of my middle grade novel and a whole lot more …Oh, okay, critical self: some of it is editing. How far is editing writing? There’s another rabbit hole down which to vanish and look, there goes another hour.
It’s all writing, in different ways: but none of it relates to the project I think is most important.
What with family and festival commitments, hospital appointments and pesky friends who insist on having birthdays EVERY year, I’ve been away from here for those two weeks. I value the Weekly Blog Club space; partly it’s the closest I come to keeping any form of diary or journal.
There’s nothing like trying to recreate your 17-year-old thoughts – for a novel – to make me wish I had done this. Maybe I’ll feel the same in 20 years’ time but it seems unlikely I’ll go through similar changes and such intense feelings.
I’ve mentioned the 750 Words process before. I’ve been neglecting that recently too. And it’s probably no coincidence that the piece I am having problems with is non fiction but personal.
I’ll try again later. Or tomorrow. Except I’m busy tomorrow.
