Beginning, middle and end

Is anyone not trying to write a story?! Why we labour to write is hard to understand for those who do not feel this compulsion. Why ruin our leisure time with such whimsy? Why live for fantasy? Why bother when there’s so much rubbish on the market anyway, and your material will never see the light of day? Why create when the world will self-destruct in X number of years? And so the demons of lethargy call to us.  And yet, most of us will have had a moment when we thought: that would make a good story – and further, I am the one to tell it.

I’ve been a card-carrying believer in stories all my life – nothing unusual there. It is so rewarding to find the story at the heart of so much cultural and social research – from literary criticism to psychoanalysis. For me, studying the Middle Ages elevated the power of story as a world view. For the medievals, the world was a book written by the ultimate author, God. Our place within it was as reader, glossator, explainer, commentator, and, in very exceptional circumstances, author. Stories to assess, even construct, reality. Metaphors to live by.

So when we say ‘I write’, we could mean the mere act of living, remembering and sharing ourselves. We all have our favourite words for ourselves, our preferred ways of telling certain episodes, and indeed our fantasies – ambitions – of where we see ourselves when we imagine something other than our present. These are all stories we write. But we can also of course mean the novels, short stories, emails, projects, greetings cards, blog posts, graffiti, to do lists, and reminders.

And it’s this kind of writing I’m celebrating. After six months of wrestling, and a handful of sessions with a writing group, I have an outline for the story I’ve been trying to tell for three or four years. Beginning, middle and end. Boom.

Next step? Well this programme from BBC Radio 4 – The Sins of Literature – certainly gave me some tasks. I’m particularly intrigued by Deborah Moggach’s practice of inhabiting her character for 3-4 days before she starts writing. This could be fun to try with a full time job! (*Imagines how obsessive, reclusive convicted sex-offender would go about my cycling commute and email responses.)

Have you ever tried to inhabit characters before writing them down? Any funny experiences, or good lessons learnt?

How to write a mission statement (for your blog)

Jenny of Dinner, A Love Story, wrote this piece: her rules of blogging. Lesson 2: write your mission. Work out exactly what your blog is going to deliver, write it down, include it in your ‘About’ section, and it will help not only you, the writer, in determining your content, but also your readers, helping them to navigate and understand your content better.

So I started brainstorming what I wanted for this blog, which is not something I’ve really thoughts about, as my current content (at the grand total of 24 posts! whoop! yeah! writing prizes for me! ha) probably shows.

This blog was started just to get me writing. It was to help me overcome the sheer embarrassment of seeing my words OUT THERE. It was to help me practice a craft. Publicly. Like doing squat jumps in front of fifty apartment windows on a Sunday. It was meant to be a kick up the bum. It wasn’t meant to be for readers.

So why do it publicly? Good question. Well, it does have a bit of the exhibitionist about it. But I know that if I write something on my computer, or in a notebook, I leave it in draft. I never work at it. I never have the pressure of a readership. Online, getting noticed big time is the hard part, but getting a few readers here and there? Not that hard. I even started getting the odd comment, the odd ‘like’. You mean someone bothered to read though my stuff and click ‘like’? Wow. That makes me want to get better.

So I did want a readership. Of sorts.

I also knew I remembered things better when I wrote about them – hence my recent posts about theatre performances I went to: In the beginning was the end and The Great Gatsby. But they weren’t very popular. They were too long and, to be honest, a bit poncey. And who was I, to mouth off or delineate in prosy ways the merits and faults of works of art that actually made it onto a stage?

Right then. What is this blog for? A meandering account of me, in London, being interested in “culture” and going to a few things when I could afford them? Hardly the stuff of dreams.

So, today I started thinking about how I could make this blog a bit special, a bit different. Objectively I tried to find out whether I was interesting enough to support this by thinking of things that maybe I knew a bit more about than everyone else (inspired by Jeff Goins’ blog advice: be a resource). Then I tried to think of the things that people marvel at when I bring them up in conversation, when they say “Gosh that’s so interesting”. (This sometimes happens, even to me!) Then I tried to remember the things I was good at. And I started to make a list…

But…! This post has already wittered on enough about me (I’m truly sorry for that, another bad blogging indicator). So the list is going to wait a day or two.

And you? Have you determined a mission for your blog? Was that the whole point for you? Or did you just start writing hoping something would turn up? Can you list the things you know about easily? Let me know!