Finding my way to freedom
On abandoning certain notions and showing up
Why am I not writing? What’s wrong with me? - these questions come everyday, like a stray cat you fed once in your garden. I have no answers. Some day I just stopped coming up to my room every morning and stopped writing. I’ve carried my notebook everywhere with me, but I lost the routine, the ideas slowly shifted to the back drawer of my mind, the one labelled ‘not important’ and ‘for later.’
While Katie wanted to lock me in a tower, like Cassandra did with her father in ‘I Capture the Castle,’ Katie’s favourite book, we both thought it would be easier to coaxed me to my desk with some co-writing sessions. On the first day, while Katie was editing her novel, I was mostly staring out of the window or browsing bookshops, as Katie thought that me watching her write would be a little bit too creepy ( I still don’t understand why). There I was, feeling a little bit lost, until my eyes rested on ‘The Way of the Fearless Writer’ by Beth Kempton. Well then, I thought, if I’m not going to write, I can at least read about it.
There, on the page 62, I came across this sentence:
Abandon all notions of what kind of writer you think you are, and just write.
And that’s when it hit me. I wasn’t writing, because I was imposing so many rules on myself. I’ve put a frame around my writing, around the idea of a book. But what I actually needed, and still need, is a total freedom.
There’s no one way to write a book. There’s no one way how a book is supposed to look like. There’s no one way of telling stories and certainly of telling this story, my story. I can’t fit it into a fixed idea, because I don’t know where this story will lead me. I don’t know how it is supposed to look like, because the story is not here yet. It can only take its shape while I write it.
I don’t have to know what it will become. The only thing I have to do, is to show up for it. Come up to my room every morning, abandon all the expectations, all notions of how the writing must go, all the knowledge I’ve gathered about writing and then open the notebook, pick up my pen and write.
A notebook?, you ask. Well, yes, but that’s a story for another time.
That Beth Kempton quote is excellent advice!