Jacqui Lofthouse: Bluethroat Morning
"A thriller full of twists and turns that keeps the reader guessing. Every word is magical, almost luminous." - Daily Mail
Jacqui Lofthouse: The Temple of Hymen
"A remarkable, often beautiful and startling piece of writing. A considerable achievement." - John Mortimer
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"Get Black on White: A guide to productivity and confidence for writers"
I do hope you continue to enjoy the Writing Coach blog and look forward to seeing you on the new site.
Recently, on a short holiday to Woodbridge, Suffolk, we took a walk in Rendlesham Forest. You can see David and the children here, striding ahead, sure of the path. Of course, it's always easier when it's a planned walk, complete with painted posts to guide the way. We barely met a soul that morning, but (after the initial townie fear of leaving our car alone in the middle of nowhere) we soon felt perfectly safe and certain of our route.
Yet I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like if one of those posts were taken away. It was a two hour walk and without doubt, we would have become hopelessly lost.
I was reminded on that walk of the words of the novelist John Fowles who compares writing fiction to a woodland walk. He extends the metaphor beautifully in his book 'The Tree'. "Behind every path and every form of expression one does finally choose," he writes, "lie the ghosts of all those that one did not. I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry. I am quite sure this is not some kind of rationalization, or irrationalization, after the fact; that having discovered I write fiction in a disgracefully haphazard sort of way, I now hit on the passage through an unknown wood as an analogy."
That passage, as many of my former students know, has always been influential in my work. I believe that fiction must grow organically - that too much pre-planning can get in the way of our best work. (There has to be a balance, in truth, but for me, the 'being lost' has to come first.) Yet if we're to believe that writing fiction is like walking through an unknown woodland (or God forbid, forest!) then we also have to get comfortable about the idea of working without 'posts' to show us the way. We have to be at ease with 'being lost' and accept uncertainty as part of our experience.
That's not always easy in practice, but I have found that over the course of a writing life it has become at least familiar - and interesting. Only last week, for example, I came away from a writing session full of uncertainty. I'm revising my fourth novel. It had been an enjoyable session, I'd felt engaged with the work and yet it struck me that the relationship between my protagonist and one of the secondary characters wasn't dynamic enough. There wasn't enough development in that relationship - and it worried me that I hadn't seen that before. How could I have come thus far and not seen it? Wasn't it a bit too late in the process for me to realise that error?
Yet I reminded myself - as these thoughts coursed through my head - that this fear of having got it 'wrong' is perfectly normal. It's a signal. If I were walking through a forest one afternoon for example (without posts) and I intended to head west, but suddenly realised that the sun was behind me, I'd feel that same slight dread in my gut. But in fact, if I looked at it logically, I'd simply have a piece of information that would help me adjust my direction and get back on track. It's the same thing with writing fiction. If we can embrace uncertainty and see it as a signal - our unconscious mind telling us that something isn't working and therefore that something needs to be changed - then we can see that 'not knowing' is a positive thing. It leads us to asking the right questions, to discovering answers.
Uncertainty is the human condition. Perhaps it's time we got used to it! The social philosopher Erich Fromm wrote: "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers." Van Gogh agreed: "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream."
I've been discussing this theme recently with members of 'The Completion Club' and what has struck many of us is that it is so easy to confuse uncertainty with negative emotion - and thus to allow it to block the creative impulse. But if we can go beyond this. If we can look at uncertainty as I imagine Benjamin Zander (conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and co-author of 'The Art of Possibility') would - and say, in Zander's words 'How Fascinating!' - then we've taken the first step towards embracing uncertainty. We do not need to overcome it but to allow it as part of our experience - to use it as a positive creative force.
This week's action:
What are you feeling uncertain about in your life at the moment? What are you feeling uncertain about in your creative work?
What will happen if you accept this uncertainty? Or can you use the questions the uncertainty throws up to enrich the creative process?
Last week was a particularly challenging week for me. As several events came together in my personal life and I naturally put family before everything else, I was also forced to confront the fact that my life was too full. As an enthusiastic person, I am given to saying 'yes' more often that 'no'. As a result, I was performing a delicate balancing act - combining being a parent, a writer and a coach with two volunteer roles. I was also squeezing in time with a personal trainer and until recently a weekly art history class. Occasionally I remembered to breathe.
One of those voluntary roles, as a School Governor, I feel totally committed to. The other was a role that I'd taken on in a moment of enthusiasm, without really thinking it through. I realised very soon that it would be difficult to manage it. Even now that my art history class is no longer running, it still felt like one commitment too many. But I didn't know how to get out of it. The argument went through my mind: 'I have children, I have to finish this novel, I have clients - how can I do this additional work as well?' Yet the people-pleaser in me was persistent: 'You can't let people down like this; you've said you'll do it, you'll just have to get on with it. Hell, you don't need SLEEP do you?'
It's interesting to me that it was the fear of being seen as a quitter, of letting people down, that held me back from saying 'I'm sorry, I've made a mistake, I can't do this'. If my Mum hadn't been in hospital last week, during the same week that I'd promised my daughter an 'Alice in Wonderland' party for her ninth birthday party - I might have carried on saying yes. But Mum was ill and that was my first priority. Nothing else mattered. It takes a crisis sometimes for us to realise what is truly important. So it was a crisis which gave me strength to say 'no'. I wrote the letter I had to write. 'I'm sorry; I can't do this; somebody else will need to take this role.' My resignation was accepted gracefully. It wasn't nearly so bad as I expected. My Mum is recovering well. The birthday party was a huge success. And in the weeks ahead, I now have one less commitment on my plate. I have one less obligation to fulfil. That means that I have an additional two to three hours each week to commit to my family or my writing.
The funny thing is, when I had that commitment, I honestly thought that I 'couldn't' give it up. Why? Because I don't like to see myself as a quitter. If I take something on, I like to see it through. But sometimes we have to be honest, we have to really look at things directly and ask 'Is this absolutely in line with my values?' and 'Even if it is, do I HONESTLY have time for this?' Sometimes I even told myself 'If I don't do this, nobody else will.' But then I had to remind myself 'If no other mug will do this, why am I?' In fact, there probably will be someone to take the role - someone who is able to give it more than I ever could.
It's for this reason that I've also decided to take a pause for breath in relation to my 'Don't Forget to Write' newsletter. I have enjoyed writing this weekly reminder for my newsletter subscribers and I will continue to write my monthly newsletter, but as this blog has been sorely neglected, I have decided to refocus my energies for a while and to write a weekly blog post here instead. For the next several weeks however, I'll send the 'Don't Forget to Write' subscribers a link to my weekly blog which will have a regular weekly exercise as ever. Later this year, I will be launching the new 'Writing Coach' website (the current one can still be accessed here) and the blog will become more active still at that stage.
It is never easy to make changes, to accept mistakes, to realign your actions with your values. But if we reassess our roles regularly, we can make giant leaps in terms of productivity as writers and we can lead lives that are more balanced and happy. Here's to those extra two hours of writing per week...
Today's Action:
What can you give up in order to create more time to write? If the answer is 'nothing', think again. Important note: don't worry what other people will think about this. What do you want?
Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.
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These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It's a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we're being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.
The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they're stuck to the outside of her hands. They're a colour that's difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.
I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I'm giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don't think I'm alone in wondering whether it's all worth it. I've seen the look in people's eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I've heard the weary grief in my dad's voice.
So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I'm Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I'm sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?
Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I've had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I've still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.
Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad's snoring was.
I've always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I'll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; 'It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for', before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It'll all be here. I'm using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I'm striping the paper. I'm near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I'm allowed to make my decision. That's it for today. It's begun.
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