The Writer’s Journey

I don’t know how many other writers have this problem (I suspect the majority) but I decided to go rummaging around in my old files this week, and what I discovered shocked me. Half finished projects piled in higgledy-piggledy, and somewhat reproachfully. So I made a vow to finish at least some of them, if not all, and junk those that were simply too terrible to bother with.
Unusually for me, I actually stuck to it and dragged out a chapbook I’d been writing about my own writer’s journey. I did finish it, and have stored it away again for further editing.
But just reading through it was a revelation to me. I saw, up to the point where I stopped writing, how my life as a writer came together in what Isabel Allende calls `the relationship between events’ (in The House of the Spirits, a most wonderful book). It seemed everything I had ever attempted, learned and actually achieved had a flow that I never noticed before.
I was inspired to finish it immediately – and amazingly, I can tick off one completed manuscript from my half finished files. But it was what I learned from reading it, and completing it, that has the most value for me right now.
I understand now that not a moment, not one experience, good or bad, has been wasted – and I understood, for the first time, where I was coming from as a writer, and what I really wanted to achieve all those years. This has liberated me and returned to me the sheer love of the written word that started me off all those decades ago, when I was still a child and in love with `word play.’
I feel I can write again with the fearlessness I knew then – that it really doesn’t matter to me whether it gets published or not, as long as I have the pleasure of creating something.
Maybe that will be hard to stick to – last night I found myself scouting for publishers for the novel I also dug out of the archives and tackled again. But I pulled myself up – for one thing, although I am fired with new energy for the project, it still isn’t finished yet – and I may relapse into my old ways and not look at it again for years.
But that won’t happen if I hang onto the revelation that it doesn’t matter anyway. I am writing this novel because it has meaning for me, because I like the characters I’ve created and want to go on their journey with them. It’s word play – I am playing in my own world, making up my stories like I used to.
Sometimes the desire to make money out of what you write just gets in the way. Oh, I’ve been there, I can see that from my little memoir. I worked as a newspaper journalist and I couldn’t play much because my pay check depended on my doing the job well. But there was still the pleasure of spinning words into a proper format for the newspaper, there was still the pleasure of finding stories I could tell.
But now, when it is not so urgent, I found it hard to shake the notion that every project must pay financially, or it was a waste of time. The joy of simple creativity was eluding me.
If you are similarly stuck (and what happens is we become so enmeshed in making sure we don’t `waste time’ by doing something that maybe won’t pay that we do get stuck) try the memoir exercise. Chronicle your journey as a writer, from the first fumbling attempts to where you are now. Rediscover the muse that set you off.
It’s a revelation to rediscover the writer you were meant to be.

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