For the last few months I have been drifting. I’ve been busy, and we even managed to go to Italy to visit our son and his family who are living there, but in some respects I have lost my way. And with that aimlessness comes the little black cloud, the one that likes to hover and whisper, the one that makes me want to go bed and sleep all day.
Not that I do.
I am fortunate that the bouts of lowness – I can’t really say depression, they’re too fleeting and ethereal for that – don’t last long but while they do it feels as if I’m sitting in a gluey puddle. I can’t move out of it. I know I should and that I’d feel better if I made the effort but the effort is too much. Easier to sit at the computer, play pointless games of solitaire, knowing they will bring guilt and frustrate me because I’m not making the effort. But I’m unable to get out of the chair.
It’s not that bad: I could easily stand up and do things. But I don’t.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about these phases, and she used the term, ‘without creative purpose.’ She was speaking about her own life – we were having a good moan – but I knew straightaway what she meant, and could say the thing about my life.
I believe all writing, whether it’s fiction or non, is creative. That said I’ve not written any fiction since before last Christmas. And I suspect that is what I’m missing. I am without creative purpose.
I write a monthly magazine article and a weekly radio talk, as well as my blog. It’s not that I’m not writing. But what I’m not doing is visiting the land of my imagination. Letting it take me, in the form of my invented characters, to different places, and to imagine experiences outside of my own.
I suspect after about eighteen months of lockdown or varieties thereof, we all need to escape, and we all have our ways of relieving reality. Mine is to write fiction. It’s amazing really it’s taken me this long to realise what’s missing.
And that electric light bulb moment this morning gave me a silly idea. A very silly idea. As I’m typing this I am arguing with myself: don’t write it, don’t commit yourself, don’t put the idea out there. But it’s too late. I need to shake off my apathy, find myself again. So here goes.
As you may know November is NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. People all over the world take part, challenging themselves to write 50,000 words in the month. I’ve done it – and completed the task – a few times but it’s a stupid time of year to take on added pressure. A couple of years ago I decided to do it in February, with it being a flattish sort of month, and that was much better. But I can’t wait till February. Nor can I commit to writing that much in a month. So I am doing my own thing – oh, look, there, I’ve said I’m doing it when I was just meant to be contemplating the idea – and setting myself a target of writing some words every day. Whether it’s five or five hundred, I’m not going to be regimented about it; I just want to get back into fiction writing.
I am renewing my sense of creative purpose. How about you? What’s your creative purpose? Is it flourishing? Or flopping like a fish out of water?
