Saving Grace

It's been a tough week, but within that difficulty, I've found a new way to connect to my writing, which I haven't much explored before. And somehow, in that new and unexplored connection it's become a saving grace. 

Transcript

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So I've just had a really shitty week. Like probably top tier of shitty weeks for the year. And one would think, because it's such a shitty week, I would just kind of abandon all my creative work and just like fuck it all off and I don't know, go curl up on a couch with a packet of chocolates and just, I don't know, try and drown myself in chocolate. But the funny thing is that that doesn't actually bring me joy. I know for some people it wouldn't, you know, good for you if you're one of them. But it doesn't that that doesn't do it for me. What does do it for me, as I've learned this week, is writing. And it's sort of funny because I take my writing quite seriously and I kind of treat it like an actual full-time job. And you know, I can get pretty hard on myself when I miss deadlines or when I don't get any writing done that day, or just to me, writing isn't just a hobby or a craft or something that I just do for kicks. It's it's something that is ingrained in me. It's something professional, it's something that I have to turn up for. But in a week like this, it's obviously very tricky to turn up for because I've got other shit going on that's just demanding my attention. Funnily enough, though, that after a couple of days of not being able to write, I generally felt disappointed and sad because I do like writing. It does bring me joy. I wouldn't say that I actually like writing a story itself. I do not recommend that at all, which is funny, but I just do like the practice of writing. And I think just being with my characters, I think when you've been writing a story like a fantasy series like I have for so many years, the characters are just kind of become your family. Like they're just really comforting beings to be around. And if you have time and space away from them too long, you generally start to miss them. I know it sounds kind of crazy, but you do. And this week, because of so much going on and so much like hard stuff going on, I've really just missed the space of being with my characters. And despite the craft of writing being fucking hard, I have just and not even generally likable a lot of the time. I have just generally missed being in the zone with my characters and just being in their world. And so I actually have been making the time to write, not to say complete any sort of achievement or task within the project itself, or you know, to get a certain chapter to a certain point or anything like that. I've literally just been opening up my laptop and just writing or working on whatever scene that just spoke loudest to me and just doing what I could. And it's funny because just doing that made me realize how much joy writing can give me and what a saving grace it can be in a week like this when real life is turning to shit. It's funny because I think we all, most writers, love to read and we love to disappear in stories for that very exact reason. We get to disappear in another world, we get to forget about our own problems and the world's problems, and it's just nice to be able to do that. But rarely I see anyone discuss what it's like to do that as a writer and disappear into our own worlds. And I have to say it's as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable, because, like I said, in this instance, I was working on the third book of my fantasy series, A Royal Life, and I've been with these characters since probably I think it's yeah, from since from the age of eight, fit from the age of 15, I've had some version of these characters with me. And I'm in my mid-30s now, so gosh, that's like way too many decades. It is decades now. I can actually make that decades, not just years. Gosh almighty. Anyway, so a really long time I've had these characters with me, some version of these characters with me. And it was just nice to be able to find time, even just a brief amount of time, to sit with them and work on them. And like I said, because I do treat my writing so seriously, this week and being able to do that just really made me remember the joy of writing itself. And the reason why I'm speaking about this is because I know all of our lives can become really inundated with shit, and that, you know, our lives can take really crappy, deep dives into wells we did not expect, and it can all start to feel a bit too much. And of course, most for most people, their creative work is going to be the first thing that falls off their silver platter of things to do because they've just got too much to do, and that's that's totally understandable. But I think there is something to be said about safeguarding the things that bring you joy and making sure you get to spend some time on them, even in the most shittiest weeks, because it will it will feed you something, it will give you a sense of happiness and joy. I mean, I do understand that there is a flip side where a writing session in a week like that can make you feel worse, especially if you feel like you've just written something completely terrible and crap. But I think in weeks like this, when you are in just such a shitty state, it just doesn't matter if you write something shit or crappy that your future self will look back on and be like, bitch, what were you doing? It just doesn't matter in weeks like this, because at this point, what your craft is doing for you is just to help you keep going. And I think it's a really beautiful thing if you can have that sort of relationship with your writing, where that it is your saving grace on weeks that they just want to make you curl up and never get back up again. And I do think if that your writing can become your saving grace at points in your life, then I don't see how or why it couldn't then become someone else's saving grace at some point. I mean, like I said, that's a funny thing. We generally love escaping into fiction worlds because it helps us escape and take a break from our shitty lives. And I think if you can create that with yourself, within yourself and your work, then I think that's a almost guarantee that it's going to be able to do that for someone else in the future. I don't know. I just I sort of just feel like it kind of creates a bit of a blueprint in the fact that if your art can help keep you going, then it sort of just leaves an imprint on it that then someone else can fall into and I suppose copy. I don't know, maybe that's just too weird for some people to believe in. But I think it's a nice idea. And at the very least, they think it's nice when your creativity can be your ally in dark times.