This is one of those writing about writing posts
But it's also about our relationship with writing
Happy Wednesday! Hope you’re doing well.
A bonus for you this week as there will be two posts here on TBOI.
My original plan was to share with you the completed exercises for the past four weeks of ‘A Novel in a Year’, but I’ve had some friends visiting for a few days, and I haven’t been able to quite finish them all. Therefore, you’ll receive an additional post with a summary of these exercises on Friday.
In the meantime, I wanted to share a post with you that I very nearly threw out a few weeks ago, as in, emptied the bin, gone. But rather than deleting it completely, instead I left the post to rest and returned to it, sensing that there was something worth saving.
I hope that you like what I recovered here.
Sarah xx
I went back and forth with this post. I wrote a lot of words, deleted a chunk of them, made a duplicate document and wrote some more, and kept on cutting throughout. Finally, I removed an entire psychology-related section as it felt too heavy.
Then, feeling frustrated, I moved the whole thing to my ‘cuts file’, where a lot of words go to die.
But then I started thinking about writing and this weird relationship dance that I have with it; a tentative approach, the back and forth, the joy that can come with the freedom of movement and inspiration, and of course, there is the rejection.
Substack first came onto my radar a few years ago when an American writer that I follow said that she was moving her writing here. I love this writer’s work, and so when the email came through about the move, I didn’t think twice about signing up. But I do recall wondering briefly, what are these newsletter thingys, and what the heck is Substack?
Fast forward a few years, and I had become more aware of Substack through following other writers who had also started using the platform. However, at first, it did not occur to me that I could write here too. The Substack pond has some big (even huge) fish (did someone say that Margaret Atwood is on Substack? And more recently Stephen Fry joined!). It was hardly going to be a place for small fry (excuse the pun) like me… surely not?
My early (online) writing relationship
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t written stuff and shared it publicly before. I’ve done some blogging in my time. But I did this under a pseudonym.
You might wonder why I choose to do this.
Well, it was more of an imperative to not piss off my then-employers. My posts were mostly a chaotic mess that revolved around me bitching about work and the state of education (if you’re new here, I was a classroom teacher for 16 years). Whenever I tried to get into a creative headspace to write, whatever had irked me about my then-job would come pouring out of my brain and bleed onto the page. So, many of the posts were not worth reading!
I also posted on the blog irregularly; a few weeks of enthusiasm, only for things to be dampened by a few months of doing nothing. In the end, I lost interest and focus, and found myself unable to write much at all. (I eventually shut the blog down).
But perhaps the bigger issue in my mind was that I never believed that I would ever be able to call myself a writer.
For a long, long time, I believed that being a writer was something that other people did. I didn’t believe that I had the intellect, training, or the skills to write anything of worth. This belief was compounded by an assumption that writing was for people who honed their craft at university and had studied English and other related degrees (I studied Business and then Psychology), and/or it was for those who had the means to attend writing retreats and participate in writing workshops1.
These beliefs were foolish and naive, I know.
Not all writers have English degrees, or regularly attend writing retreats (or have the means to), but it’s crazy how I built such a detailed and warped image in my mind.
But what I have found interesting more recently, was that I wasn’t helping my relationship with writing by re-sharing these same warped images over and over again.
My relationship with writing now
I want to be clear with you that Substack has not magically transformed or erased some of the images/ideas that I mentioned above, but this platform has changed my relationship with writing for the better.
This newsletter is now a key creative outlet for me. Here, I am able to practice my writing and learn more about the craft in real-time. It’s a place where I can read a range of work, and receive advice and feedback on what I share.
And speaking of advice and feedback, there is the Substack community. I have been able to connect with writer’s both new and familiar, and explore other creative work. I cannot begin to describe the joy I’ve experienced in the number of vibrant and stimulating conversations I’ve had since joining the platform. It turns out that other people want to cultivate relationships here too!
This newsletter is not the only relationship that I have with writing and nor is it my only creative outlet. My creativity, in particular has a tendency to scarper and hide when I apply too much pressure, much like how I can operate when it comes to some in-person relationships.
Therefore, as I look forward, I am going to try and approach my relationship with writing (and creativity) much like I do with most of my other relationships, with kindness, an open-heart and mind, and see where that takes me.
Plus, I am going to better appreciate my ‘cuts file’ - you never know when you might want to return to something you wrote two months earlier, and find that it provides the perfect introduction for that next dance with your writing.
The cuts file recommendation actually came from the organiser of the writing course that I participated in during those COVID years. Mine is a mess, and I have various ones for different themes and projects, but I am glad that I use this now.
Do you use a cuts file? If so, how do you make it work for you? I am always open to new ideas and keen to hear what works for other people. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
I did join an online writing workshop during the summer of 2020 (the COVID years…). For a few reasons, this was a less than satisfying experience primarily because the man who was running it referred to all of the work of the women who participated as writing ‘women’s literature’, while the men who participated appeared to be able to write under a number of different genres.
So much of it is giving ourselves permission and meeting ourselves however we arrive at the page. I'm a late-in-life writer, so I feel like I am learning HOW to "be" it alongside learning the craft. It's quite a journey! As for cuts, I have a file for each project. It's funny how, on the one hand, we're supposed to "kill our darlings," yet "never throw anything away." 😂