Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder?

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.