As you will have seen from my last post, not only am I back but I have decided to change the direction of my blog ever so slightly. Part of this will be introducing some creative writing!
I have never shown my personal work to anyone, bar entering a few competitions aged 16, so this is a huge step for me but one, I nevertheless feel extremely excited about. Creative writing is admittedly not my first love, but it has always been something I’ve used as a comfort when my mind has been out of kilter.
I began writing properly aged 16 after moving to a new city with my family and not knowing anyone. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, I was lonely and quite simply didn’t know how to say what I was feeling, so I opened a notebook and I started writing. Every single day I would write pages and pages of poems, short stories and letters to people in my past (including myself.) To be frank, some of it was awful, some of it was ok and some of it I tore out straight away and threw in the bin.
At around aged 17, I stopped writing for 6 months. I didn’t feel like I ‘needed’ it anymore. Yet, there was always a yearning. So, at the end of the 6 months, I signed up to some online writing courses, bought some pretty notebooks and colourful pens and started all over again. I went back and edited everything and wrote even more. I learnt that there was inspiration everywhere, I learnt different techniques and I learnt that if I put my mind to it, I would be surprised by what appeared.
And then I stopped again. Life got on top of me- I had university applications to fill out, I had a job and I had exams to revise for. Deciding not to take creative writing alongside my degree was a big decision for me at the time and absolutely is not one I regret. It did mean I neglected writing for over a year, yet again, but it led me to where I am now.
To cut a long story short, this year at university I took a theoretical module that required me to do creative writing that was not going to be assessed. I bristled at the thought, I had told myself writing creatively simply wasn’t for me anymore. As my uni friends probably remember, the first piece I wrote on the course (a cut-up poem about a hotel!) was laughably bad. Yet, as I got further and further into the module, I realised just how interesting and fulfilling creative writing could be. For the first time since that online course, I was actually being taught how to write, and although I wasn’t being assessed I was getting feedback. As part of the module, we were given source texts to rewrite and find inspiration from, a technique that really struck me. I suddenly became aware that what held me back before was feeling like I didn’t have anything other than emotion to write about, yet this proved otherwise. I could still write about emotion but there were other stimuli, other things that I could use as a springboard.
I could write about authors, places, pictures, the tree outside my window, the perspective of a friend, time, my dinner, the possibilities were endless. Which leads me to where I am now- I write every day again I feel I have grown as has my writing.
My aim for the creative writing section of this blog will be to post what I feel comfortable with as I still am finding my feet a little. I will begin each piece with a small description of the piece, contextualising it and explaining why I wrote it. I will probably begin with a few pieces I have written for university before moving on to pieces I am writing throughout this month as part of a prompts challenge, I have set myself.
This is intensely scary for me, but I can’t wait to make this leap!