Not the Piece
This is the second thing that I wrote to read out in my Creative Writing class.
It explains why I lost my nerve and did not read out the first thing that I wrote!
Before I circle back to that, why am I here? Not the big question, “What’s the meaning of life?” …
Spoiler alert: the answer is 42
… but why am I here today reading the thing what I wrote (as Ernie Wise might have said).
I’m a chemical engineer by profession, writing computer software for other chemical engineers, so fittingly I have an aptitude for maths and science. I’m all about the facts and the figures.
Increasingly, I’ve felt a need to try something different, to have a go at something creative, artistic even.
Writing software can be considered as a creative activity, especially when you’re in the zone, fingers flying across the keyboard, finding bugs, fixing faults, magically transforming lines of text into a window on the screen or a correctly calculated value. But it’s not art. And as mundane, humdrum administrative tasks make those precious moments more and more rare, that geeky joyride is a scarce commodity.
So I looked for something to satisfy the artist I hoped was within me. Figuratively speaking of course, though you’d be forgiven for thinking I might have eaten an artist.
Sketching or painting appealed but I couldn’t imagine having the dexterity or the skill to wield a pencil or brush, turning a few lines and splashes of colour into a thing of beauty. Can you tell what it is yet? Yes, it’s a mess.
Creative writing, though.
Making up stuff. With words. I can read and write, hopefully well enough to give the lie to the stereotype that “yesterday I couldn’t spell engineer and now I are one”. As well as pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I might learn how to avoid a cliché like “comfort zone”.
Making up stuff. With words. How difficult could it be?
Spoiler alert: the answer is “Bloody difficult”.
I’ve not made up stuff, with words, created prose or poetry, since I sat my English Language O-level exam in 1980-something while Germany won Eurovision with a song about peace.
I had no material to start with, I felt no novel bursting to get out of me … no, I hadn’t eaten a book or an artist.
Quite literally, I was starting my creative writing with a blank sheet.
After the first couple of weeks of the course, learning of other people’s writing experience, listening to what they read out, and hearing the perceptive constructive criticism they offered, I realised the bar was set pretty high as I looked for inspiration.
Driving home from the class, a news report talked about a woman who was swimming across the English Channel four times without a break. Pretty damned inspirational. Could I write about that? Could I inhabit the mind of somebody setting out on such an intimidating challenge and describe how it feels?
Somehow, by the time my car turned into my driveway my bright idea had turned into something dark.
I’m normally a cheerful person, honestly, but I was now going to write in the first person about a man walking out into the sea with no intention of ever walking back. But I would begin as if it were about a swimmer. A few phrases had already popped into my head that I knew I just had to use.
So I sat down at home and wrote like a monkey, throwing down my clay and hoping I could shape it into something recognisable as a vase or a bowl or a poem or a story. Do you know what it is yet?
A week later I returned to it, read it, cringed as I let my inner critic loose on it. No I didn’t eat a critic either. I started rewriting. Eventually it was complete.
But did it have the elements I wanted to include?
Ambiguous title, “Making the Crossing”. Tick.
Start off light then go darker. Or heavier. Tick.
Hint at, and then reveal, the source of the protagonist’s despair. Tick.
Use water as a motif throughout. Or do I mean a device? Or am I just talking about water a lot? Tick, anyway.
But the doubts were setting in.
As I read it to myself, the implication of writing something, namely that it would be read by or to somebody else, started casting a shadow that grew, and grew.
Those phrases and images that I thought were clever, would they just seem pretentious? Or clumsy?
Would it appear gloomy and miserable, with no shades or colours or emotion?
Would my central conceit, of subverting the listeners’ expectations of what is happening just be another cliché? And what on earth is a “central conceit”? And why am I using a phrase like “subverting expectations”? Where did that come from?
Those doubts were having a field day now.
I couldn’t present that to you.
So instead I wrote this.
This piece is more personal. It’s about me and it’s honest. Yet somehow it’s easier for me to detach myself from it and to put it out there.
My original story was entirely fictional, a few hundred words about a suicidal subject a long, long way from my own reality. But I felt closer to it, more protective of it. Perhaps, for a few hours, I’d escaped my natural inhibition, shed my instinctive cynicism, and created something to which I had more of an emotional attachment than I expected, something I didn’t have the confidence to share.
Over these few weeks I feel like I’ve learnt a lot about creative writing, but perhaps not as much as I’ve learnt about myself. I’ll write more; I’ve written this after all. But this is not the piece of writing I planned to present to you.
It explains why I lost my nerve and did not read out the first thing that I wrote!
Not the Piece
This is not the piece of writing I planned to present to you. This is about that piece. A “meta piece” perhaps? But definitely not the piece.Before I circle back to that, why am I here? Not the big question, “What’s the meaning of life?” …
Spoiler alert: the answer is 42
… but why am I here today reading the thing what I wrote (as Ernie Wise might have said).
I’m a chemical engineer by profession, writing computer software for other chemical engineers, so fittingly I have an aptitude for maths and science. I’m all about the facts and the figures.
Increasingly, I’ve felt a need to try something different, to have a go at something creative, artistic even.
Writing software can be considered as a creative activity, especially when you’re in the zone, fingers flying across the keyboard, finding bugs, fixing faults, magically transforming lines of text into a window on the screen or a correctly calculated value. But it’s not art. And as mundane, humdrum administrative tasks make those precious moments more and more rare, that geeky joyride is a scarce commodity.
So I looked for something to satisfy the artist I hoped was within me. Figuratively speaking of course, though you’d be forgiven for thinking I might have eaten an artist.
Sketching or painting appealed but I couldn’t imagine having the dexterity or the skill to wield a pencil or brush, turning a few lines and splashes of colour into a thing of beauty. Can you tell what it is yet? Yes, it’s a mess.
Creative writing, though.
Making up stuff. With words. I can read and write, hopefully well enough to give the lie to the stereotype that “yesterday I couldn’t spell engineer and now I are one”. As well as pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I might learn how to avoid a cliché like “comfort zone”.
Making up stuff. With words. How difficult could it be?
Spoiler alert: the answer is “Bloody difficult”.
I’ve not made up stuff, with words, created prose or poetry, since I sat my English Language O-level exam in 1980-something while Germany won Eurovision with a song about peace.
I had no material to start with, I felt no novel bursting to get out of me … no, I hadn’t eaten a book or an artist.
Quite literally, I was starting my creative writing with a blank sheet.
After the first couple of weeks of the course, learning of other people’s writing experience, listening to what they read out, and hearing the perceptive constructive criticism they offered, I realised the bar was set pretty high as I looked for inspiration.
Driving home from the class, a news report talked about a woman who was swimming across the English Channel four times without a break. Pretty damned inspirational. Could I write about that? Could I inhabit the mind of somebody setting out on such an intimidating challenge and describe how it feels?
Somehow, by the time my car turned into my driveway my bright idea had turned into something dark.
I’m normally a cheerful person, honestly, but I was now going to write in the first person about a man walking out into the sea with no intention of ever walking back. But I would begin as if it were about a swimmer. A few phrases had already popped into my head that I knew I just had to use.
So I sat down at home and wrote like a monkey, throwing down my clay and hoping I could shape it into something recognisable as a vase or a bowl or a poem or a story. Do you know what it is yet?
A week later I returned to it, read it, cringed as I let my inner critic loose on it. No I didn’t eat a critic either. I started rewriting. Eventually it was complete.
But did it have the elements I wanted to include?
Ambiguous title, “Making the Crossing”. Tick.
Start off light then go darker. Or heavier. Tick.
Hint at, and then reveal, the source of the protagonist’s despair. Tick.
Use water as a motif throughout. Or do I mean a device? Or am I just talking about water a lot? Tick, anyway.
But the doubts were setting in.
As I read it to myself, the implication of writing something, namely that it would be read by or to somebody else, started casting a shadow that grew, and grew.
Those phrases and images that I thought were clever, would they just seem pretentious? Or clumsy?
Would it appear gloomy and miserable, with no shades or colours or emotion?
Would my central conceit, of subverting the listeners’ expectations of what is happening just be another cliché? And what on earth is a “central conceit”? And why am I using a phrase like “subverting expectations”? Where did that come from?
Those doubts were having a field day now.
I couldn’t present that to you.
So instead I wrote this.
This piece is more personal. It’s about me and it’s honest. Yet somehow it’s easier for me to detach myself from it and to put it out there.
My original story was entirely fictional, a few hundred words about a suicidal subject a long, long way from my own reality. But I felt closer to it, more protective of it. Perhaps, for a few hours, I’d escaped my natural inhibition, shed my instinctive cynicism, and created something to which I had more of an emotional attachment than I expected, something I didn’t have the confidence to share.
Over these few weeks I feel like I’ve learnt a lot about creative writing, but perhaps not as much as I’ve learnt about myself. I’ll write more; I’ve written this after all. But this is not the piece of writing I planned to present to you.
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