Being brave enough to show some ankle – Part Two

Picture, if you will, a large room in a sprawling house, filled with curious things that are making noises, sparkling, tinkling like crystal bells and some making music. Books are piled floor to ceiling, and wisps fly around the room, looking for something or someone to grab hold of them and manifest them into an idea made real. Light spills in through large Georgian windows, falling over a haphazard collection of comfy chairs, sofas and a magnificent hand-crafted desk.

In this room, there are many excited children, chattering loudly, each eager to be heard, each brimming with the excitement of telling. These are my little blog-posts-to-be, all wanting to be written and posted and shared.

But at the middle of them, with her clothes being tugged by lots of tiny hands, is me with only a little bit of time and only one pair of hands with which to type.

But what a wonderful feeling!

I have so much I want to write about! And so little time! And I’m all excited and want to talk about all these things with all you wonderful people that are coming here and reading! And I don’t know which child to pick up, take to the desk with me and make a post with! And I might pop! And I’ve used five exclamation marks in a paragraph and I don’t care! (Six now.)

It’s ok… I have a large cup of tea right here with me, and I know what to do with it.

<Mmmmm, tea>

So I left my story at a dark point; the desert in which I stumbled about for years, studiously not writing. I say studiously, because there was some effort involved in that on some deep level. Not effort that I had any awareness of, not anything I wanted to do consciously. But at some point I crammed my writer self into an under-stairs cupboard, locked the door and went off somewhere else, and considering how much of me is made up of writing, that takes effort!

This is one of the reasons I wanted to tell you about why I almost stopped writing. It’s because I feel that the reasons why we struggle sometimes (sometimes? All the time? Never? You tell me) are the same reasons why I stopped.

I’ll warn you now that this might have turned into a little trilogy by accident, so you’ll have to wait to find out how I dug myself out of that horrid place. I didn’t realise I would need to stop here in the middle and talk about this.

The first time I nearly stopped writing, was because of that terrifying moment of exposure. But it wasn’t the  exposure alone, it was also the shock of it, and the realisation that my writing, my personal, private, safe world that I created, was actually saying more about me and my life than I had ever considered and intended. More than that – I realised that I would probably never be able to prevent that, even when aware of it.

So that block was made pretty damn fast; after all, what better way to prevent such an awful occurrence happening again? If I wrote again and someone read it, the self-protective me reasoned deep down, they’d know all about me, all my fears. All my lesser, darker, meaner parts.

This bit that protects me is very thorough, and learns lessons… too well sometimes, and it decided that it was best not to write at all, rather than writing with risk.

What’s funny about writing this now, is that the story that broke this block was so blatantly, obviously, totally my venting of an awful situation that I couldn’t handle at the time, it could not be more revealing! But something in me made me write it, you know that part of the story already. It wasn’t that I came to terms with the fact that writing and letting others read it can make us vulnerable. Not even a tiny bit – it was just so full of its own pressure it had to come out, and just barged its way past that block with no negotiation whatsoever.

There’s probably a correlation between that and the fact that it was such a brief writing revival.

So now I come to the second block. That story got me a conditional place at University – I still had to get high grades at A-level, but it won me the opportunity to study there if I came through, and happily, I did. But those grades wouldn’t have got me in without that story.

And that terrified me, again, unknowingly. I didn’t sit down at some point and say “Holy crap, that bit of success is such a huge scary thing to me I’d better not write any more.” This was all happening in the basement again.

This brings me to another weird paradox about writing – well, actually I think this paradox crosses all of our endeavours – the fear of success.

As a writer, I want people to read my book (you know, the one that brought me here in the first place that I hardly ever talk about because there is so much else to talk about!) and I want them to enjoy it. I want to take readers to post-apocalyptic London. I want them to get to know Zane and Titus and Erin, and to find out who the Giant is, and what killed almost everyone in the world. I want that so badly that it burns inside, drives me to consider this hard road.

But it also scares the beejesus out of me. Because if I achieve that, it is a success. Even if it is only one person that reads it and enjoys. Something about that is so frightening.

So frightening, and so big and (currently) inaccessible that I haven’t unpacked that one yet. Maybe I’ll ramble about that another time.

So how did this make my second block? Well, I’m still figuring that out too, as sometimes it blocks me even now. ‘Twenty Years Later’ has got something in it to suggest it could be good – nearly two contracts, and personal, positive feedback from agents with no interest in massaging my ego suggests this to me (I won’t tell you how much my internal censor is railing against me writing that – how conceited – oops, she got one out there!). But it’s true, I have had that feedback, and sometimes, thinking that it could actually be a physical book that could be read by others, and enjoyed, and give me that one-person-wide success, scares me so much that I stop.

And not even a cup of tea can fix that sometimes.

Hmm, time to go and do all those things that the real world demands to keep a house over our heads. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being with me here. I didn’t realise how much I needed this until now.

Tagged as: blocks, twenty years later, Writing