Ah practice. I am out of practice. I need to practise. I am practising. Say it often enough, and like all words, meaning falls away and you’re left with a bunch of useless syllables rolling around your mouth like copper marbles. The aftertaste isn’t great and you can’t even remember why you put them in your mouth.

The question I’m facing now is why I have left it so long. Why have I not written in years. I’ve not been idle – there was another blog, there were other (self-imposed, other-directed) preoccupations, and most encompassing of the lot, I had a child. But among all of that clamour for my attention I could still hear the small voice that said ‘you really ought to be writing, you know’ and inexplicably, I reached out and turned the volume down on that voice as low as I could get it.

The trouble was, it was still there, however faint, and starting to make me feel crazy.

Perhaps you’ve done the same thing. Turned your back on the thing you do best, like most. I’ve always known that the written word was my thing, and by thing I mean the way I communicate myself best. Some people are great speakers, some people draw, some are patissiers. It’s how it is. If you’re lucky you find your thing, pursue it and feel less mentally unwell. (Although note I only say ‘less’, since I still hold with David Mitchell‘s notion that writers are ‘mentally not very well’, what with the whole isolation, lost in a world of their own creation thing. Not to mention the general writerly antipathy to the telephone.)

Recently I lost my grip on the volume control. The buzz was getting louder, but at first I didn’t hear it properly – I simply felt out of kilter with my life. Not a new feeling, obviously. In the past I’ve always been able to respond to it by immediately taking up a japanese class or learning to use an old slr camera, but this time I was slow on the uptake. Perhaps it was having a child that did it – in the beginning everything is pushed to the edges, and when you get some time to yourself back you naturally try to do the things you did before.

Only it wasn’t working. None of it was working. I felt as if I was forcing myself to have hobbies, rather than doing things I loved whenever I had a spare minute, and then I simply started to feel a bit bonkers, and incapable of doing anything. I’d like to say I had a big ‘ah-ha!’ moment when it all became clear, but in truth the idea crept up slowly.

I needed to write again.

There is, unfortunately, no other way to do it than to do it. It’s called practice. If your writing brain is rusty from lack of use you might have to practice long and hard before anything good comes out of it, but I can tell you right now that if you don’t write at all, you won’t have anything, let alone anything good.

You can find some of my practices at Five Minute Fictions.

Traditionally, ‘hello world’ is the phrase computer programmers use as test output. Things are working properly if they run their program and the words appear. If they don’t then it’s back to the keyboard, and searching through lines and lines of code to fix the thing(s) that went wrong.

But if the words do appear, then there is a feeling of relief, of accomplishment, of breakthrough. This is exactly how I feel when I’ve written. ‘There. I did it. I feel better now.’ This is not how I feel when I’m writing. That’s hardly ever good at all. And the feeling I have before I sit down to write? Worst of all. Terrible.

So why do it? Because writing is my computer program. It’s how I say hello to the world, how I try to untangle the mess of feelings and ideas I have inside my mind, and reach out to find the others like me. It’s true that there are other ways of doing it – you can paint, or dance, or act, or make sculptures, or whittle – but I think you are usually only given a passion for one of these things.

I write. Maybe you do too. Everything else is just distraction.

 

I was getting into the swing of it again for a little bit. Not long enough, but a little bit. Then my son had his first birthday. The days were full of all sorts of things, like visitors, cake, parties, duck watching outings, fingers in jelly… All very necessary and correct, but distracting, and I hadn’t made this writing habit enough of a habit before I was pulled in this other direction. It’s necessary sometimes, to be present in your life, and be a witness to the big moments. And afterwards it can be good to resume normality, and pick up whatever batons you may have dropped.

Here we go again.

Many years ago I went to an Arvon centre and spent a week writing in the company of some fantastic people and fantastic tutors. It was such a good experience I repeated it a year later, and met even more fantastic people and fantastic tutors. Something magical happens at Arvon, a kind of infection that stays in your blood, so that you only have to recall lying drunk on a barn floor, or shrieking with laughter in a car on the way home to feel the tingle of the headrush that comes from devoting a week to your writing, from exposing your writing, from doing the writing.

At the first week one of the tutors was Anna Burns, who told us about her practice writing. She carried a notebook as all writers do, and if she saw something while she was out and about, or a thought or an image occurred to her, she would note it down next to the initials PW, as something she could work on later. When she took herself to her desk she then had a store of little seeds she could use for practice. And practice is just that – a limbering up, a stretching of the lexicon, a throwaway exercise. It is not critical but it is vital.

I have had a hiatus from my writing life. It’s been a busy time, but since life is not going to get any less busy, it’s time for me to shoehorn in some practice. Five minutes some days. An hour on others. It’s practice. Remember that. I’m just practising.