dear reader,
today is my birthday. how goes your day? what have you finished of late? what have you started? what have you abandoned?
a quick update on an event i’ve got coming up: i’ll be the guest of honour on Monday 25th March at Afrori Bookshop’s Supper Club in Brighton. it will be intimate, there’ll be ample opportunity to discuss Bad Love whilst eating an amazing home-cooked Caribbean meal, and i do promise to share for the first time, the real inspiration behind the messy situationship of my characters Ekuah and Dee, for those in attendance. tickets are going fast, so grab yours if you live in the Brighton area!
there is value in putting something down for a while, i think. note, i’m not saying give up on the thing completely, just put it to one side for a bit. maybe the world isn’t ready for it? maybe you’re not ready for it? unless you hate every word you’ve written and feel certain that it is pure unadulterated gibberish, maybe tuck it away in a notebook somewhere?
i enjoy going back and looking at old s***. story of my life really; i cannot stop myself from constantly looking back. at old poems, old relationships, childhood memories, old friendships, lessons i only recently learnt that could have shaped decisions i made 10 years ago. none of this looking back comes with regret - it’s more a quiet staring into the middle distance as i wonder to myself:
could this be a story?
it’s a sickness, this writing life. sometimes i cannot move for all the different stories whirring around my head. none of them are fully formed, many are just threads of things i haven’t found the ends (or beginnings) of yet. sometimes though, one stands out, and it becomes unshakeable, telling me i might have stumbled upon my next ‘thing’. potentially even my next novel idea.
the process is not organic by any means. the circumstances need to be perfect for new ideas to form. not the weather or the temperature but within myself. i need to have moved off the last project i was working on. i need to have taken some kind of break which definitely involves a change of scenery, big or small. maybe i take a different tube line, i don’t know. i also need my mental health to be on an even keel. and if it’s not, i need to understand why, and use that nugget of information as a jump off point for my writing. because if it’s bothering me, then it’s something i need to write through. there has never been a time in my life when writing through something difficult didn’t bring with it even a slither of relief in the moments after putting pen to paper. i fear losing that. i hope i never do.
but sometimes i get stuck, just as we all do. i will do everything i can to avoid calling it ‘writers block’ but that is often what it is, whatever the reason. you can’t write, therefore something is blocking you.
that’s when i return to old stuff. i go back to that folder marked ‘archive’ and sift through old poems, things i wrote ten or twenty years ago, things i really cared about then that i don’t think about now. things i wrote when i thought no one else would ever read them. i go back over them and tap into that piece of me that wrote with reckless abandon. the younger me writing a story i didn’t know the end of. the me just trying to figure the thing out. the me enraptured by the weaves of my own imagination, accidentally writing something of worth that i wouldn’t fully appreciate or even understand the meaning of until years later. the me not yet jaded by the world, still hopeful, still naive, still ‘new’.
there’s a reason returning to the idea of play, of childhood curiosity, is often a way back into creativity. yes it reminds you of who you were, but it also reminds you of who you still are. looking back can reconnect us, if we let it.
so what have you reconnected with lately? can you remember what it was like to create with reckless abandon?
maybe it’s time you went back there.
MB x