Sometimes,
when you’re trying to express yourself the important thing is just to do it,
rather than to spend all your time wondering about the best way of doing it. I
suppose what I’m saying is that, right at this moment, I think that it is more
important for me to actually take part in some kind of creative act than to
worry too much about whether it’s any good, or valid, or what I ought to be
doing.
There
really are few things as scary as a blank page.
Well… maybe
a shark…
A shark
that eats you just as you’re finally about to write something on a blank page
which has been staring at you, all white and full of un-met potential, for
hours.
Now that’s
scary.
Sometimes I
feel as though there’s something bubbling up inside me, trying to find a way
out. Not in a gross Alien kind of a
way. It’s like there’s an idea, a story that I want to tell, except it’s
formless.
No, that’s
not quite right. It’s not that it’s formless, because it feels as though the
whole thing might leap out, fully formed if only I could catch it. The idea is
slippery, or moving so fast round and around in my skull that I can’t get hold
of it. I can’t slow it down enough to get it on paper.
Then again,
sometimes I have the opposite problem. I grasp the idea and I sit down to write
something, but I can’t get it down quickly enough. I have the whole idea, the
entire story, right there, all at once, and I can’t write it quickly enough. So
my fingers are typing the beginning of the story, while my brain is whizzing
along to the end. I lose focus, and then I lose interest because I already know
everything that happens and I’m too impatient to get it all down on paper.
That’s bad
writing. Or rather, that’s being a bad writer. That’s how you end up with a
million ideas and a million stories that you’ve started and barely any
completed tales.
It’s partly
how I came to love writing short stories, because I can focus on those. By the
time my mind has whizzed on to something else, I’ve already written it and then
it’s just a case of tweaking and caressing and making it beautiful. Except I
have bigger tales to tell, longer stories and I stop myself from writing the
short stories because I tell myself I ought to be focussing on bigger projects…
…at which
point I refer you to the earlier problem. It’s a vicious circle.
Enough
excuses.
If I want
to express myself creatively, I just have to do so. I just need to cast aside
my own judgement and my own fear and trust that I will find my voice. I just have
to start writing and trust that the slippery, whirling storm in my head will
allow itself to be eased out on to the scary blank page.
As for the
sharks, I think I’m pretty safe from them in Oxford.
Fingers
crossed.
