Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder (of writing)?
Having neglected my blog for several months, I finally wrote
the draft of a blog post back in December all about how I had been reconnecting
with a ms I originally wrote a few years ago. I was all fired up, having
removed redundant plots and re-plotted something more age appropriate. I wrote
about how I’d pinned up a huge piece of card on the wall and made meaningful
annotations to the story arc. But I never posted it. I think because at that
exact time, outside circumstances stepped in and took away all desire I had for
writing anything, let alone a full length novel.
I filled my time around dealing with the external stuff by
teaching some adult creative writing classes that gave me a real buzz seeing people
who were new to writing or had not written anything focussed for years blossom.
It let me still see myself as a writer although I wasn’t actually writing, just
facilitating others’ creativity.
I even thought for a while that I didn’t want to write
anymore. That I wasn’t capable of producing anything people would want to read.
That I didn’t love it enough, there were better things I could do with my time
and really, what was the point?
But then, a few weeks ago, I got a new idea for a previously
abandoned story. And then I got another. I jotted the ideas down and, as so
often happens, one spark of creativity ignited several more. Last weekend I sat
down and typed up all the new ideas, had a fresh look at the story arc and
wrote a fairly comprehensive outline. Although I had stopped wanting to write
for a while, the need to write hadn’t gone away for good. I was in love again
with my story and the prospect of writing it.
The circumstances that forced me into a writing wasteland in
December are still there but I’m not using them as an excuse anymore. Writers
write in whatever snatches of time they can grab. I don’t know how long it will
take me to write the whole ms virtually from scratch, or if it will be any good
when I do, but I’m now writing it for me, because I want to and because, as I
tell my students, there is so much to be gained from the writing process, no
matter what the outcome.
