Tag: creative life

Live. Love. Laugh. Create.

Live. Love. Laugh. Create.

As a professional writer with a significant number of years under my belt in the publishing and corporate world, the decision to branch into longer prose was an emotionally challenging one. After all, my childhood dream was to write a book. My teenage dream and my early 20s dream was, yes you’ve guessed it, to write a book. Somehow life got in the way and I found myself starting many novels only to get to around 30 pages and run out of time, momentum or worse still, the story would dry up. Each time I started a new project thinking this time would be different. I had countless stories waiting to be told but for whatever reason I just couldn’t get them beyond a certain point. So what was different this time?

A few years ago my mother died. My mother was too young to die – she was only 60. What hurt us all about her death apart from the obvious pain of separation from someone we loved, was the sheer loss of potential. She was a truly gifted artist. She could paint, draw and use inks and charcoals as if they were an extension to her small nibble fingers. 

My mother was one of those mothers who made the halloween costume from scratch and I would win first prize every year dressed in one of her creations. Unfortunately, much to my own daughter’s disappointment, it was not a gift I inherited. There was always a feeling our mother could have done so much more with her gifts and talents if she had wanted to.

As her retirement age approached she busied herself creating wonderful inks and drawings of Inchcolm, the island on which she lived with my father for a few months of the year as they carried out their roles for Historic Scotland.

Towards the end of her battle with cancer, the one thing she battled with, within herself, was the fact that she was less and less able to hold a pencil or paintbrush and it was inevitable that she lost more of herself when she could no longer ‘create’ than what she lost physically to this eroding disease.

As time passed, we her children were able to look through her many notepads and canvases. I realised that it did not matter that she hadn’t set up an exhibition of her work, or that she had never taken money for commissions. She did it for love and she did it in answer to her own callings inside. I realised the most important thing was just the ability and drive to create something beautiful from nothing.

Not long after my mother died, I met an amazing man who listened to my childhood dreams and pushed me gently in the direction that I had become fearful to travel. I didn’t realise how fearful I had become until I started making the standard excuses – too busy, too tired, not in the zone. I found myself constantly hiding behind my ‘real writing work’. The reality was I was successful in my career, but what if I was unsuccessful as a novelist. A lifelong cherished dream would be shattered. He put it quite simply to me. “What are your priorities? Do you want to do this or not?” The answer leapt into my mind as a fervent ‘YES’ and I knew that I had to do it this time.

So here I am, nearing 100,000 words on my first book. Will it be a success? Does it matter? Of course a small part of me is saying yes of course it matters, I have so much to share. However, the most important thing I have learned, apart from the fact dedication, discipline and commitment are what makes our dreams come true (and boy do you need lots of discipline), is that you just need to create, to write words every single day. It doesn’t matter if the words are not so great every day, you can always edit, pull it apart and put it together again. Just create. Put something into the world that wasn’t there yesterday. That’s the true secret to living a creative life.

Why writers write!

Why writers write!

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I am so looking forward to the release of Harper Lee’s ‘prequel’ of To Kill a Mockingbird. I know many of her fans over the years begged her to write another, yet she declined to put pen to paper once more.

Now, decades later, Harper has revealed that she did write another novel which featured Atticus Finch and his grown up daughter Scout – but this was written from a different perspective and before the story as we know it today.

It made me wonder what compels a writer to write – or not write – as was the case with Harper Lee. It seems such a loss that a writer should write something so successful and then never pick up the pen again.

If you’ve never really considered it, think about it now. Why do you like to write? Do you have a burning need to write or is it just something you quite enjoy doing as a hobby to fill in the time? If you have a burning need to write, is there something in particular that you are just bursting to tell?

I realised, like so many, that my initial love of writing came from reading wonderful books as a child. As I grew older the became a form of escapism from the outside world. Words were like spells that gave me hope, new families, new adventures that were so different from my own.

As I grew older, however, just the very action of writing down thoughts and feelings somehow released me from the emotions of the world I found myself in. It was as if my mind emptied onto the page and I felt better once more.

My life has been more turbulent than most. Certainly more turbulent than my friends around me. I often said, nobody would believe the things that have happened to me, or the situations I have found myself in, all those things cannot happen to one person in one life time. It was from this thought that my writing found it’s drive, it’s desire, which was to help others who had been through the rough end of life or found themselves in situations they were just not equipped to deal with.

So there it is – the purpose of my writing is to try to help others. Social injustice – indeed injustice of any kind jangles me to the core. It’s probably why a story such as To Kill a Mockingbird is etched indelibly on my sub conscious and the subconscious of so many.

In what I have read about Harper Lee to date, it seems that she was overwhelmed, perhaps even frightened, by the response to her book and subsequent success. She had obviously written something so meaningful at just the right time, that the book became bigger than her. Harper wanted to make a statement about racism and social injustice – and boy she made that statement eloquently. She touched people with her words and her observations. Ultimately she felt she had said all she needed to say in that one book. People got behind her book and embraced its values just as surely as they believed in Atticus Finch himself.

This led me to ponder another question. As a writer, if you had the choice, would you want to write just one book that touched millions with its message, or would you prefer to be a prolific writer churning out book after book?

Before you answer, consider Dame Barbara Cartland for a moment. Not quite on the same literary scale granted, but she wrote over 722 books over an 80 year period which averages out at around one book every 40 days. She was a self-proclaimed expert on romance right up to her death in 2000. She may not have had a deep and meaningful message to convey to the masses, as we recognise it, but she had plenty to say about morals and the subject of ‘virginity’.

Of course for many writers, finances come into the equation. That said, anyone involved in the arts will know, reaping the rewards financially is more of an exception rather than the rule. Some writers are lucky. They hit on a formula that works for them, and they can churn out book after book.

One of my ‘desert island’ books would have to be Paulo Cohelo’s ‘The Alchemist’. A simple parable about how to live life. I have read many of his books since then, but have started to become bored with what seems to be a well worn templated style. Still – at least he wrote The Alchemist – and he believed in it so much he self published. He had a message that he was bursting to share, even if his subsequent books may be more about making money, they still communicate something about how we should live our lives..

I admire the fact that Harper Lee was inspired by her father’s work as lawyer working on behalf of black people. I admire that she felt so strongly about this subject that she just had to write about the injustices faced by a marginalised society. She wrote a book that froze a moment in time for us to scrutinise at our leisure, a work that we could draw life lessons from. How wonderful, if not a little terrifying, that must feel!

Go Set a Watchman is due to be published on July 14, 2015, by Harper Collins.