You might have read some of my stuff here at Void  but I don’t think you really know me.

It’s not your fault, it’s mine. Since I started this blog I’ve kept out of view a lot more than I used to at my old blog.

Creating this space has been partly a reaction to what I used to write before. I let it get too open, too personal, and I lost site of the original intention I had for that place.

That’s ok because it needed to happen.

In the end, the process of writing became the purpose, and things I had not foreseen when I began it came to the forefront. Like the joy of connecting with other lovely people, and becoming part of a community of creative, intelligent women. It was so much more than just spinning out words on a screen.

But. Still. Something needed to change. And though I can slip into living my life quite publicly for a while, then I will swing back and claw back my privacy and isolation with fury.

The challenge for me here has been to find a way to write with authenticity, without opening up the deepest parts of my life and my soul for all to see. I’m not sure I’ve found a way to do that yet.

Often I’ll sit down to write for this place, with a head full of clever ideas and words, with references to this and that, and a whole debate taking shape in my mind, but when I start to type it out, it sounds hollow. Showy but empty. And totally flat.

At best I’ll feel just a little disappointed with my work, like it’s missed the key note I was trying to strike. But at worst, I’ll feel completely disgusted by it. Ego! Ego! Ego! Why am I even bothering to write?

I think all writers and artists have times like that. You can’t live without doing your thing, but the doing of it can often make you miserable, if you feel out of alignment within yourself.

For me, it always requires the litmus test of authenticity. Why am I doing this? Is this the real me speaking now? Am I still aligned with my True North?

But when your life and the landscape around you is changing, it’s not always easy to get a true reading from yourself. Besides, I’m not a balanced person. I’m like water; pushed and pulled with the tides, the cycle of the moon, or some such ephemeral force. I expand, I contract.

I think I’ve found my level and then the ground shifts again. You can’t contain me.

Don’t ask me for a simple answer to a straight question. Most of the time you won’t get one. I don’t work that way. I live in another language of feelings and impressions that have to sift and filter through my senses and perceptions before I know anything for sure.

If you push me or rush me, I’ll snap. I need time to arrive at my own conclusions, unfiltered by others’ opinions.

So, I’ve needed my space and my privacy back in order to go deeper into the void. It’s like a retreat. You find yourself withdrawing from the old places and groups, in order to nurture the birth of something new within yourself. It’s a chrysalis phase.

And every time I’ve thought that the transformation is done, I’ve found that I’m not quite finished yet. Even still, I think I’m not quite finished yet, and I don’t know when it will be through.

Maybe the journey will never be done, because this is my journey into my Inner Artist’s world. And the Artist’s Way is an endless path of learning and transformation.

If I rush it, I feel I will come out half undone, with my stitches gaping and my wings hanging off. Not quite the butterfly I should have become. A little bit crippled, unable to fly.

I’ve told you before that I’m an impatient sort, but this time it’s different. I draw deeper into my cocoon, knowing I have to hold back on the urge to leap and surge forth.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been so very very tired? My body’s way of putting on the brakes? There really hasn’t been any other choice. And through it all, my interest in blogging, and following, and commenting, has waned. So much so that if I’m to continue I shall need to come back with a different outlook, I think.

And so I take a break.

I reflect on everything I’ve learned since I started to write publicly. Too much to sum up in short words now.

But this remains, one perfect quote, and the acknowledgement that being ordinary, or trying to be like everyone else, will never be enough for me, because it means settling for being mediocre, when we should always be striving to embrace our authentic, sparkling, crazy selves. Like Jack said,

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
(Jack Kerouac)

Since I started writing at Void I’ve discovered the value of doing nothing. There are days, even whole weeks, when I hit a brick wall and I just have to stop.

Once upon a time, the panic would set in… “I can’t just do nothing! I’m not writing, so I’m not doing what I should be doing… and I won’t get to where I want to be going… and the world might fall apart,” sort of thing.

This kind of inertia feels alien to me but now I’ve discovered that doing nothing is often the best step I can take to keep going in the right direction.

I get time to let all my thoughts and ideas flow around me, and I stop chasing productivity (which seems to lead to burnout pretty quickly for me anyway).

Saying, “I’m doing nothing for a while,” can sound quite negative. So I prefer to say, “I’m taking a meaningful break.”

Don’t let stuckness ride you into a sweat. See the signs telling you to slow right down, and listen to the quiet voice within that will tell you which way to go next.

You might be surprised by the outcome.

It can be a lonely road, pursuing your art. Most artists and writers that I know work alone. For my best work, I need the peace and quiet of no distractions to help me drop into that inner space where the ideas start to flow.

That’s why I chose this little house in Throop, down near the river. No one’s ever passing through or stopping by on their way to somewhere else. It’s a secluded spot, away from the bustle of town.

My desk faces the window, and I look out across my small back garden to the little village green, with a line of stately oaks across the road, behind the old white house where they have the noisy parties on saturday nights in summer. It’s a pretty good spot for a writer, if you don’t mind being kept awake a little now and then, and I don’t.

At times, I have to fiercely defend my need for this creative solitude. At times, I feel a little ludicrous to expect to enjoy the luxury of it. If I was a published writer, if I was earning a respectable income already from these hours of writing that I do, the time spent painting and drawing too, then perhaps I would feel justified to stand my ground and demand my space. But I don’t. I feel like a whiny, selfish brat: “I neeed my space, man, I neeed my space.”

However, years of ignoring my artist soul have taught me that I just don’t have a choice. If I don’t have this time, this space, then everything else in my life starts to suffer. I’m somehow less of a functioning human being. I start to feel cornered, or caged; at any moment I might lash out or break down. “I did warn you,” I will say. But it will do no good. You didn’t see it coming and now you’re rather shocked. Reeling at the sight of me unleashed, teeth bared and growling.

When I get time and space alone to write, or paint, or just read and think, I’m a better woman, a better mum. And generally a nicer person all round. I have more enthusiasm for life–so it seems like an easy no-brainer to me. Carve out the time and do the work, then spread more joy and live in peace.

Yet there are people in my life who continue to misunderstand my artist’s need for space to create. They find my need for withdrawal disconcerting, even hurtful. They take it personally, when it is not a slight towards them at all. They may even go so far as to suggest that my art is ‘trivial’ because I don’t earn real money from it. “Yet,” I always add. I’m still putting in the time. The 10,000 hours I need to pursue towards mastery of my craft.

This kind of experience can be incredibly discouraging to the artist soul. Our inner artist is like a child: impatient and irrational in it’s demands, and in real need of attention and nurturing, if it is ever to do great things with it’s dreams.

If you have grown up in an environment that placed great demands on you to be sensible or responsible, then you have probably been ignoring your inner artist’s voice for years. Your artist soul could be so repressed and ignored that you do not even think yourself to be ‘creative’.

Of course, this is rubbish. We are all creative. It is the natural expression of our force for life, and when it is dammed up or diverted, we start to lose our joie de vivre and our childlike enthusiasm for all things new, for wild adventures and simple unimpeded fun.

Worse than that, it’s my belief that without an outlet, the force it takes to hold this natural energy in can cause depression and serious ill health within the body. But I’m not a doctor or psychotherapist, so don’t listen to me–you only need listen to yourself, and the little voice within you, calling you out to play. Is it there? What does it say to you now?

Defending our right to our artist’s time and space takes courage and conviction, especially if we are serious about pursuing our craft and making our dreams a reality. On the road to mastery, we must be able to stand up and say that we are committed to the journey that we have embarked upon, and allow no diversions or material distractions to get in our way.

In the face of lukewarm approval from those around us, this can take the kind of strength and resilience that our inner artist, in it’s childlike condition, probably lacks.

That’s why the metaphor of the Hero’s Journey is so compelling to many of us. It touches the artistic and creative souls most deeply, as they recognize an aspect of themselves in the protagonist: they know they are on a journey that may seem impossibly difficult at times, and they know they may be faced with great adversity along the way.

Now, I’m not talking about encounters with dragons and goblins and such, for juggling the combined demands of housework, paying the bills and raising small children is far more challenging than those kinds of battles with mythical beasts, as any modern parent will grimly contest.

In the face of discouragement from others about our art, we must find a source of inner strength and find a way to ‘take heart’ (literally, ‘encouragement’) about our creative work. We must become our own best champions:

If no one else is cheering us on, we must cheer ourselves on with tokens of esteem for work well done.

(Julia Cameron, Walking In This World)

And most importantly, we must carry on doing the work. We must keep turning up at the page. Keep filling the well. Keep defending our right to the creative solitude that we need. With time and discipline and practice, it gets easier to do. Take courage, and the investment will become the reward once the work is done. It’s a lonely road at times, but one that’s well worth travelling.

“I have an irrational fear of commas,” he said, and I smiled.

It doesn’t seem so strange to me, the poor old little comma. I have used it and abused it much over the years. And as a former English teacher, I have a better idea than most ordinary folk about when to stick it in or leave it out.

Besides, fear of making a few mistakes here and there is not going to get in the way of pursuing my goal of mastery as a writer. There really is no choice but to embrace fear of failure, and plod on. Or plot on (joke)… (groan, I know).

Yet I’m one of those peculiar people that takes great delight in playing with the rules of grammar and punctuation a little bit. That’s because I knew them once, the rules.

A great education instilled me with the confidence to write at length, in complex clauses and elaborate prose; to throw colons and semi-colons around at will, with shameless disregard for the reader’s concern.

It seems I’m not the only one with a deeper interest in the subject of grammar and punctuation. In 2004, a little book on the rules of punctuation in English became a surprise New York Times bestseller. I read it and enjoyed it too. Though it hardly ranks as a classic on my shelf.

By the end of the year, I’d seen a thousand unloved copies in secondhand stores. Lynne Truss’s sudden rise to popularity shrank without trace–a cautionary tale for aspiring authors in their choice of topic, perhaps.

Before you get me wrong, I have to say that one thing troubles me about the premise of Truss’s book: linguistic purism.

There are people who seem to think that our language should be defended and protected from all change. It seems strange to me because our language has been changing and evolving for thousands of years. There are no rules, only a bunch of mutually-upheld conventions.

Great writers have been challenging these conventions for years. Making language fresh; making us, as users, think about our words, our sentences. A subtle revolution–but what can be more dangerous and subversive than our words?

When Cummings abandoned capital letters in his work, did the world fall apart? I think not. And yet we’re still asking these questions of ourselves today. I agree that total abandon would not be desired but it’s good to challenge our assumptions and the received wisdom at times.

Though I’m with GrammarBlog on the assertion that people who don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” should be strung up by the gonads.

So whilst I’m playing around with my developing thoughts on the merits of capital letters over sentence case in my post titles, and considering whether to use full-stops too, please bear with me and accept that I’m a little apples-and-pears in my approach.

I call artistic license in this case. What’s your excuse?

“You need an adventure,” he said to me, and I knew he was write.

(OK, he was ‘right’. But I meant the word in both senses of how it sounds when spoken.)

Does an apparent mistake like that make you uncomfortable when you read it?

Poets use these kind of auditory puns all the time because they help create rhyme and scan. But  I love it when a writer helps me challenge my expectations a little by throwing in an outrageously cheap pun like that.

It works because I choose my adventure to be this one–to write. And I’m answering the opening statement, in an unconventional way. What do you think? Have I gone too far? I’ve got some high quality support lined up in my defence:

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
(Helen Keller)

so,

Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind.
(Jack Kerouac)

If words existed first in speech, long before they were ever written down, isn’t it more important to consider the way we hear them when they’re spoken than how we spell them when we write?

Maybe it’s the poet in my soul, but I can only write when I can hear the words as they would be spoken. I write lines of prose that have internal rhythm and often incorporate rhyme. But sometimes I wonder if readers will even pick up on this. Because we all read differently.

Our first topic on my undergrad degree at the University of Birmingham was “What is Reading?”, and after 12 weeks of lectures and seminars I’m sure I was little the wiser. But I do know how I read, and what I like.

And for all that I’ve read about ‘audiences’ (or ‘markets’ in business… because it means exactly the same thing) I can only make judgements based on my preferences and how I read.

Someone somewhere on the web once published something that said blog readers don’t like long posts. What did I do with that information? For a long time, I kept it in mind, and attempted to keep my posts short/er.

Maybe I managed to shave two hundred words off the odd nine-hundred word post once or twice. Hey, I even managed to produce a four-hundred word post one day! Hurrah.

But it seems it is my natural proclivity to be garrulous, verbose. Short posts will come, from time to time, but the long ones form the backbone of my style and how I write. As I’m staking out my claim upon authenticity as a writer, I need to be true to my form as much as I can.

Publish and be damned (I say, again). Resist the urge to edit and delete too much. Is this a popularity test or a naked and shameless pursuit of my art?

No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge.
(Jack Kerouac)

My partner and I often have this debate about what audiences want,

“They want short and pithy–something they can make sense of at a quick glance, and pull the main points from readily.”

“No they don’t. Morons want ‘short’ because they have the attention span of a gnat. Sensible, intelligent readers will spend longer reading high quality content.”

And in truth, we’ve each argued on both sides of this fence (though he will deny it, I’m sure), which seems to prove us both inherently flawed in our nonsensical minds. He tells me to write shorter posts, and I point to his 4-page volumes of unrestrained rambling with steam shooting out of my ears.

Perhaps the answer should be, just write what you want, like Kerouac said. You know you can’t please all the people all of the time, so why try? It may be enough to please two happy readers today, and then put my feet up for a rest (and this is assuming I’ll even get two!).

But this brings me to more uncomfortable questions for a writer, in fact, the biggest one I know:

How badly do you want to be popular?

Would you carry on writing for years on end, if you thought that no-one was reading your stuff? Would Rowling have pursued Years 5, 6 & 7 at Hogwarts, if Years 1-4 hadn’t been such a success? (If you’re wondering about that, take a look at Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Address on the Fringe Benefits of Failure.)

And wouldn’t people have thought her a little  insane to do so at the expense of living a ‘normal’ life? Because spending day after day writing something that perhaps will not change the world is surely an abnormal way to live.

This is the artist’s eternal dilemma. You may feel that your art is trivial, that it will not change the world. You may fear that no-one will buy it and you’ll never make any money from this path. And you may fear that you are wasting your time when you should be doing something far more sensible. You say these things to try to keep your ego in check.

But you also have to believe in the terrible necessity of doing your art. It is vital to you to write, to paint, to stitch or shoot pictures, or do whatever you will do that allows the creative impulse within you to find it’s own true and most beautiful form of expression.

It is vital to you, because if you don’t do it, everything else begins to fall down around your ears, to collapse. And so your art becomes something you must defend fiercely with your ego, and it becomes something of great ego importance nonetheless.

A more uncomfortable question for a writer might be, how far will you go to defend the pursuit of your art? To mark out the time that you need in order to write, when others around you are pressing upon you the need to be sensible or do something else.

Recently I took a very bold step. Something that most bloggers would consider just crazy. I turned off my comments, for good. Too late now. No going back–I’ve said it and it’s here in black and white as testimony to the fact.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the whole practice of commenting on blogs. Mostly, it comes down to the fact that I’m a bit snooty about my art and I want this space to be pure, distinctive, untouched by idle chit-chat or vain applause.

But there’s a bigger and better reason why, as a writer with a serious dream of being published, I would counsel you to turn off your comments too. Simply this–it’s too easy to allow your comment activity to become your validation for why you write (and if you mostly write through a blog, read this as ‘why you blog’ too).

And it’s too easy to fall into the trap of believing that you are writing to please your Followers. If you get sucked into thinking like this, it will get in the way of finding your authentic writer’s voice. In the end, you will only be writing for the applause. Like those tired old bands that reform years later to go on tour (I never could understand why anybody went to see them).

Those Problogger and Copyblogger types will tell you that you need comments to increase your Google ranking. Blah blah blah. I say, if you’re writing with only Search Engine Optimization in mind, then go ahead, but your writing won’t be authentic and distinctive and the brilliant expression of your true creative self. I know which I’d rather be.

It’s true we often feel that we need validation, and as a solitary artist or writer, it can be very difficult to fulfil that need from within. If you hope to flourish, it seems to me that you just can’t work in total isolation. The essential kit-list for all would-be artists begins with two things: a Muse and a Believing Mirror.

Of course, it doesn’t just end there. One needs material and observations of the world to write about. If you’ve read The Artist’s Way, you’ll know that Cameron talks about this as the importance of “filling the well”.

On a coffee date with an old friend last week, I told her I was feeling in need of an adventure–something to offer my inner artist to feed upon and make exciting new art with. I’ve been living a dull life of duty and obligation for a long time now, with little spice or spontaneity.

I was rather surprised by her response, that the Brontes lived all their lives in the same house and still found a deep creative well to draw from in the production of their art. She’s right, of course. But I don’t care for her point much.

Far more importantly, I feel that it’s necessary to ask yourself what sort of adventure you seek in life.  I do believe that writing is an adventure, and the Writer’s Road, when pursued with a picaresque flair, can take you in all sorts of exciting and new directions.

This may be an uncomfortable truth to face. But I’m not prepared to settle for anything less, at least not on a monday like this.

{no comments and no subheadings today, just stream-of-consciousness ideas, and love and respect to Sterne and Kerouac, for all that I’ve learned from them along the Writer’s Road}

The other day, I said something about the tonne of dull and tedious tripe that gets published everyday on hundreds of blogs all over the web.

It’s not that I feel I need to read it all. It’s just that I get so despondent, flicking through my daily feed for something that might fire me up, excite me, make me think.

Let’s get physical – I’m not pulling any punches

I’ve come to the conclusion, as an artist, that taking in the bulk of what is written on the web is about as useful to my craft as junk food is to David Beckham. This week I’m on a strict health regime, to raise my game–back to DH Lawrence for my leisure reads. And hang the rest.

It seems I’m not the only one who’s feeling a bit jaded about the state of the modern blog:

The blog format has devolved. Once a simple gateway to self-publishing, today the blog format is responsible for a thousand tawdry blogs: hideous half-breeds of tabloid and blog built around odeous content, cluttered site designs, and optimised for pageviews alone.

Rock on, Nick. Now there’s a fellow Brit I can get in line with.

It’s not a ‘Tribe’ mentality, it’s a herd

The problem for most bloggers is simple. They’ve become confused about their purpose. They don’t know what they’re trying to do, and so they’re copying everybody else.

They’re getting blinded by the shimmer and glitz of clever widgets and fancy templates, with clouds of comments and social media links, filling up the weighty spaces of their empty, expectant sidebars. A strange and overpowering urge to add meaning or distraction. As if their own words aren’t enough to hold a reader’s generous attention.

If you don’t have a love for the medium, then what the hell are you doing here?

Let’s be clear about this: the medium is writing. It’s not blogging. The act of keeping a weblog is just the mode of delivery for the stuff, the words, the art. Blogging itself is not an art. And when a thousand blogs became tutorials for the purpose of blogging-as-a-business, that was the moment that blogging got dull and boring and tired and tedious.

Perhaps it’s too much to ask for all bloggers to adopt a purity of purpose about their work. Some people just want to keep an online chit-chat going, a public ‘Dear Diary’ experience mixed with confessionals and personal heart-to-hearts.

That’s ok, if you’ve got the time to spare to read and share, but I don’t. And even if that is your sole purpose for turning up at the page, you’d do all your readers a favour by getting more conscious and committed to the art of writing itself.

I’ll finish off with some sensible advice

Someone helped me out along my writer’s journey by asking me a very valuable question once, which was this: Why do you write?

This little question has become the True North on my writer’s compass now. If I can’t answer it clearly to myself, I know something’s wrong.

If I’m writing for popularity, it just ain’t going to work. If I’m writing from obligation because someone said I should post every day (or three times a week, or whatever), that ain’t going to work either. And If I’m writing to try to prove something to the world, my parents, myself — that definitely isn’t going to work.

Why do I write?

I write to be a better writer. I write to feed my artist soul because it needs the energy, the flow, of doing work it lives and breathes to do. I write to better hone my craft, to get my subject across.

Those answers are enough for now and will keep me heading in the right direction, even if I don’t always know where I’m going. Because this life is all about the journey, not the destination.

And you?

You can’t answer this question in the comments because I’ve turned them off. I’m really not interested in the clap-on-the-back experience or the mutual admiration brigade that many bloggers seem to cultivate and perpetuate.

If you want to respond to what I’ve said, do the sensible thing and either send me an email through the contact form, or write your own post with a trackback or link to this one. I always welcome feedback and new ideas.

I fell into running a business when I became a holistic therapist. I really wasn’t interested in business itself. I just wanted to do my therapies and help people feel better.

I was naive. An idealist, for sure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I loved what I did and I thought that was enough. But it’s not and it rarely ever is.

If you’re thinking of starting a business, think twice

Over the years I’ve met lots of other lovely therapists, artists and small business owners. All pursuing the dream of running their own lives by doing what they do best. But sadly, too many of them are struggling to make a profit from their passion. And, critically, some of them will risk and lose a lot more than their pride.

Luckily, I got wise quick. I stopped thinking about doing the therapies and started thinking about what it would take to make a therapy business work. I realized I couldn’t work much harder, so I had to work smarter. And part of that meant getting over my aversion to the b-word; finding a way to do business that rocked with my values and felt true to myself.

Someone wrote a book about me

Ah, that’s not quite true. But someone wrote a book about people like me, and they called us Innerpreneurs. Unlike entrepreneurs, who typically have a vision of creating something outside themselves (like a new product or a new way of offering a service to consumers), Innerpreneurs are motivated by their inner feelings, by their own personal quest for self-expression and satisfaction.

Simple, right? Maybe it’s just that entrepreneurs got a bad image  in the ’80s. They were all about the money, money, money. At whatever cost. And that just doesn’t sit right with most Innerpreneurs. We’re driven by warmer, fuzzier motives, like changing the world for the better and being 100% authentic in how we live our lives.

But that doesn’t mean we’re soft in the middle. Innerpreneurs are willing to take risks and challenge norms. We’re open to new ideas. We challenge assumptions and seek new pathways, seeing life’s unpredictable journey as a colourful adventure. And that can take real courage.

Innerpreneurs recognize themselves as the CEOs of their own lives and the chief managers of their own “brand”. And, as such, they want to make sure that they are realizing their full potential, achieving measurable successes, and constantly evolving and improving with the times.
(Karma Queens, Geek Gods & Innerpreneurs by Ron Rentel, 2007)

Now I’m proud to be an Innerpreneur because it helps me understand how I can make my own business work. Now I know that I don’t have to compromise my ideals to get ahead in business. It’s no longer an either/or choice. And I’ve realized that business can be really cool when it’s done with ethics, integrity and values that really rock.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourites to think about:

There’s no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love. There’s only a scarcity of resolve to make it happen.
(Wayne Dyer)

Everyone’s a writer these days. Everyone’s got a blog, and day in, day out, millions of words are being published in the webosphere and the twittosphere, on tumblr and Facebook and everywhere else. It’s easy, right?

You only need to sign up for an account with Blogger or WordPress and ten minutes later, you’re away. Pouring out your soul or pimping your business ideas to the world. To whoever wants to listen.

But, really, I wish a few more bloggers would ask themselves this question first before they hit the keys: why should anyone read my blog?

Writing is an art. And though it’s easy now for everyone to be a writer, not everyone is an artist. If you’re not pursuing your art with passion and commitment, you’re not an artist. If you’re not constantly challenging yourself to grow, to develop, to be more than you are now, you’re not an artist. If you don’t feel the magic and adventure of the journey that you are on in your artistic life, you’re not an artist.

As an artist, you should know that you need to keep chipping away at your craft. It’s about pushing yourself to new limits. It’s about embracing dissatisfaction and disappointment with your work, then setting yourself new goals and getting back on it again. Because you are either in the pursuit of mastery right now or you’re settling for being an amateur. So what’s it going to be?

If you spend a lot of time reading what gets published in hundreds of blogs online everyday, you’ll soon realize that not everyone’s an artist. Being an artist means doing work that you put your heart and soul into. And in the race to become the experts, the leaders, the gurus and the linchpins of the web, too many bloggers are overlooking the basic requirements of this art. A tonne of bloggers are out there hitting ‘publish’ everyday and just clogging up the airwaves with dull and tedious tripe.

Hugh reminded me today that life is too short not to do something that matters. And with that, I’d add, life is too short not to do what you’re doing really damn well. Writing matters, and if you’re peddling your words on the internet then good writing really matters. Be passionate about your chosen subject, learn to develop your writer’s voice, and actively pursue mastery every day. Then, and only then, will you be able to say that you are an artist.

This last week or so there’s been plenty of ‘crazy’ going on with me, and I just haven’t been able to write. Not find the time, nor find the words. But when ten days have passed and I haven’t produced anything to publish, a new kind of crazy takes over in me.

My inner artist starts screaming at me for some deeply-needed attention.  Like an athlete that trains every day, and then isn’t able to run. I get antsy and irritable, rolled into one.

“Turn up at the page,” is my overplayed mantra. But it’s not just putting pen to paper that’s required in order for the words to flow well. There’s a particular state of relaxed concentration that is required to usher my thoughts and ideas carefully into the fold.

And like wild outback brumbies, if you flinch for a minute and lose control, they’ll buck and rear and be off and away, racing through the far, parched-desert-acres of my brain. No writing possible then. I can only sit and await their return.

This is the problem with having a wilful and spirited mojo. It’s not always reliable. If the worst comes to the worst, and you find yourself enduring a spell in the doldrums, pack a bag, take a hike and seek an adventure.

And to that end, I’m in London this weekend, hoping to pick up a light northerly breeze that will cast me back in the right direction soon.

We’ve come so far, and we’ve reached so high…

This week I was shocked to realize that I had forgotten my blogging anniversary. On January 28th there should have been a cake, with one candle, and a party hat for me… just me, as the subject and guest of my own celebration.

One year since my superbad writing-self pulled out her finger (well, all ten, really) and got down to making the dream a reality. Afraid I couldn’t do it, but no longer willing to let the excuses win. And here I am. Surviving and thriving. Yay me! Hooray.

Recently I said something about how writing can change you, especially if you do it a lot. I wrote this in my journal:

Writing is a process of excavation and discovery – deconstruction of the self… whilst at the same time it is a process of conscious construction and creation. You are uncovering your own depths and perhaps long-hidden talents. And you are everyday strengthening the new and budding archetype within you: The Artist.

In the past year, I’ve experienced more change and positive transformation than in the previous five years all rolled into one. I hit ‘publish’ on that very first post, and some sort of magic took hold of my life. And every time I repeat that act, it’s reinforced.

Not everything I write is something I feel wholly pleased with and proud of, but I know that I just have to keep on chipping away at my craft. And resist the urge to edit or delete my posts too often.

I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way…

That’s what’s so beautiful about doing your life’s work (and believe me, this is my life’s work): you know that you’re on a journey, an adventure, one that speaks to your soul and makes your heart soar, but you don’t always know where it’s going to take you.

There’s no map to this place because you are forging the path as you do the work, and no-one, no-one, has been quite where you’re going before. It’s your own unique and personal journey, along the Writer’s Road.

And finally, consider this…

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking.
It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
(Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

Inspiration.  It’s mysterious, it’s evanescent, blissful and transcendent. When we’ve got it, we feel great. Life is good and the days are short. But when your inspiration disappears the creative process can seem to come to a sickening halt…

Work begins to stall and with it comes the uncertain questioning of my choice of path as an artist.

Desperation starts to sink in, and I begin to frantically search for my inspiration again. It can’t have gone far. I know I left it around here somewhere. But where?

Roadblocks and doldrums

As an artist, I’ve hit roadblocks before that have interrupted my creative flow for weeks or even months.  For me, it’s a visit from Churchill’s ‘Black Dog’ that usually does it.  Though art can be the thing that gets me out of it again (and please know that I mean writing, as much as painting or crafting, when I use this term).

But this time around it wasn’t depression or stress that was interrupting my work, because this time around I was happy.  I’d just met someone great and was cruising through the contentment of being admired and feeling attracted to someone.  It was a beautiful meeting of minds.  Only my intelligent writer’s mind seemed to have vanished, leaving me adrift without a care.

I did the only sensible thing I could do at the time: I surrendered to the thing and let it flow.  But little nigglings started to creep in after a few weeks.  I’m a subscriber to the view that as a writer you turn up at the page, regardless of the whimsy or the mood you’re floating through.

There will always be a million other things going on in my life that attempt to distract me from my art (my work – I see the two terms as interchangeable … one and the same thing).  But the urge to write is always there and can always be relied on.  Or so I thought.  Yet here I was, staring at the keyboard, with nothing coming out.

Look on the bright side!

I started to face the possibility that contentment could be antagonistic to my creative process.  Years of writing forged from struggle and discontentment might have just conditioned me to working from that place.  Is my writing often grumpy?  I don’t know.  Perhaps there is a certain amount of what I hope is humorous self-deprecation involved (it’s a Brit thing – think Hugh Laurie or Rowan Atkinson).  Darker subjects often seem to hold more depth and mileage for me but I don’t think I’m the only one affected by this bug.

Recently I came across an interesting review in the Telegraph, about Lady Antonia Fraser’s newly published memoirs of her marriage to the great British playwright and poet, Harold Pinter.  They were together for over 30 years, until his death in 2008, but many of the critics believe that his truly great works were those written before his relationship with Fraser began in 1975.  Fraser herself attributes the changes in his writing and political views to a change from an unhappy, complicated personal life, to a happy, uncomplicated personal life.

Endorsing grumpiness, ‘down under’

There, I thought.  This could be the proof that I need to show that there is a definite link between misery and the creative muse.  But how can I write about this?  The Positive Thinking Police will never allow it to pass into real circulation as an idea.

Don’t panic.  I’m not about to start promoting grumpiness as a way to cultivate your creative flow.  However, you might like to think about this first before you dismiss me as a total crank:

A psychology expert in Australia, who has been carrying out a study into emotions at the University of New South Wales, has found that being grumpy can be good for you.  Apparently, being grumpy makes you think more clearly and miserable people are better at decision-making.  In a series of tasks carried out by his subjects, he found that that those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly.  How surprising is that?  And this is where it gets particularly interesting for those of us who spend a lot of time writing: he found that sad people were better at stating their case through written argument and had a more successful communication style.

Embracing dissatisfaction

Is contentment antagonistic to my creative process?  Well, does it really matter?  I won’t always be this ridiculously happy.  The sheen of new love will one day fade to the pleasant fulfilment of building an ordinary life together (please, I’m just being realistic).  I won’t always feel satisfied with the way things are right now.

And this is where I think the Positive Thinking Cult can do us a little more harm than good.  Because it’s ok to want to strive for excellence in your art.  In fact, I firmly believe it’s good to know your weaknesses and keep pushing yourself to achieve mastery.  But if we’re always repeating the mantra of gratitude and appreciation for what we have, then aren’t we always saying that we accept things the way they are and we’re not really hungry for more?

What’s wrong with wanting more anyway?  Because more is what brings us great changes and developments in human evolution.  Wanting more is what drives social changes and makes the world a better place.  And in order to want more we have to be a little bit dissatisfied with what we’ve got right now.  I know I am.  Aren’t you?

I’m signing off today with an open mind to the notion that maybe my Muse loves a little bit of misery.  And I think that that’s ok.  I also think that we’d all do well to embrace our grumpiness a bit more readily, because though there may be beasties within, there also may be diamonds.

{This article was first published as a guest post at Who Said Mermaids Can’t Tango? on Thursday 28th January 2010}