Kia ora koutou, we all have different attitudes/feelings to that thing we call work. Sometimes we mean housework, washing, cleaning, occasional ironing, cooking, shopping, gardening (in my case, more like organising the doing of some of these things now).
I still love to work, which for me means writing and teaching. When I try to sort out why, there’s a lot of reasons. I think the main one is that exercising my brain is good for me. There’s also the journey.
I’ve been doing it a long time now and I know only too well when I start a new novel that its going to be frustrating, muddly and extremely irritating. This is possibly because I’m not a planner but I’m not sure that planners endure any less annoyance.
There’s something, some goddess out there, who loves to see me struggle to get the work started in a way that pleases me. You see the thing is I know when its right, when I’ve cracked the first layer of the story that’s been rolling around in my brain for a while. The sad fact is that thinking up a good story, or an idea is the merest beginning, a little mark on the wall of the cave called my brain and the servant called a computer.
I have a great idea for the first chapter, write it down, I’m rapturous, delighted, ecstatic. Next day I see it for the crap that it is but one thing about having done it for a while, I now know its part of the process of eventually getting to a good opening for the first chapter.
I don’t believe in inspiration but I believe that a sudden insight, a fresh illumination, a ‘click’, comes only after you start work. And it doesn’t happen very often.
Like Leonard Cohen said, ‘You go to work every day, but you don’t get it every day’.
But hey – plug on, right? The hero’s journey begins here.
And my first crime novel, The Wild Card, will be published very soon so I have to have a new one on the go, right?
Right. And as someone called Red Smith said, ‘There’s nothing to writing – all you have to do is sit down at a computer and open a vein.’
Renée
