I am me, I am a writer.
I am a writer
This is what I am. I define the me that is now, not what I was, though I am the sum of many parts.
I am a writer, I am an artist, I create images in many ways. This is me.
Coping, what a word! This last year we’ve had it bombarding us from all directions, media, friends, relatives and on top of all the other buzzwords like pandemic, lockdown, isolation, Joe Wicks,tier,did I say Joe Wicks? it’s been a weird year for most if not all of us. Tier, that used to belong to wedding cakes not cancelled weddings for goodness sake! Personally, I’ve had two life changing events on top of all the world stuff going on and coping has been an intense experience. I’ll touch on these events another time but all of it boils down to getting through it all in one piece! I’ve done it, coped, got through in one piece, I think, so far, so I’m going to share a bit more about me here now you’ve taken the time to click, thank you.
This year has seen so many changes for a lot of us hasn’t it? There has been a push on mindfulness and meditation; exercise has never been more popular (Joe Wicks again), and I love how so many people have realised just how good just taking a walk can be.
I’ve always loved walking, just a stroll, nothing too vigorous! I’m lucky where I live that there are some lovely walks, lanes fields, woods as well as some lovely residential streets. I find it so comforting walking after dark and seeing windows lit and cosy living rooms, family life just carrying on despite what is going on outside. So many people go on-line now that it’s almost the norm for people to find company on the screen; Zoom, Facebook, club websites,Linkedin, Instagram, YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAxW1XT0iEJo0TYlRfn6rYQ guess who this is!), so many moving away from TV to something more personal and direct.
I’m no different, I didn’t get to see anyone outside my immediate family so going online has brought a sense of community to an otherwise solitary existence. I do love solitude though, it isn’t lonely or empty, it’s filled with thoughts, ideas and plans, and I write everything down. I have a collection of notebooks, they are the eternal hard drive to my mind, storage space and file organisation to free -up space for more thinking! What you are reading now is transcribed from notes and paragraphs in one of these little books.
Writing is a remarkable coping strategy. Ofcourse I’m going to sell writing, it is my livelihood after all but it’s also a release from the pressures of everyday life. I’ve found that the more I write…the more I write! It’s a bit cliché I know for someone who’s career is to write or read what has already been written, but I love writing.
It’s not a lifelong love as far as I can remember. I’m sure I went through many years not putting pen to paper in any creative way, but now I can’t stop! I did a sort of inventory the other day of all my notebooks. What an eclectic collection! Happily, most are filled with my inspired thoughts but there are a couple that are just for me. These little gems of brilliance are literally all over my home (one is even IN my bed). By brilliance I don’t mean all my ideas are brilliant, some of them are I admit but the books are all brilliant in their purpose.
Anyway, back to the coping and this writing thing. It all came down to having too many words in my head and needing to de-clutter and surprise-surprise for me, it actually worked. Being a bit of a cynic, I hadn’t given things like this much house room in the past. You just have to get on with things, no time to implement ideas I’d offered to others in the past, I didn’t think I needed it anyway. Well lockdown came and there was no ‘getting on with it’ for anyone except keyworkers and, as a supply teacher, I wasn’t needed at the first school partial-closures. All that time on my hands and no routine wasn’t looking good for anyone in the house with me!
I have to be busy, mind and body need to keep moving. The body was sorted, sort of, with the daily walks but the mind, it needed a control.
Imagine having to think of something to engage and teach 30+ children every day, 5 days a week, six hours a day, or there abouts, needing to think what didn’t work, for whom and why. So, there was the thinking while teaching AND the thinking FOR teaching, that adds up to the average 80 hour week of thinkiness that teachers process every week. Before you say anything, this also happens during most of the ‘holidays’ that teachers are supposed to take, unpaid. How can I change it? 16 years in education is an awful lot of thinkiness to replace. Going from all that to thinking about nothing except what’s for tea or which way round the block I’ll walk. Yes there were a few other things I needed to think about but the occupation of the mind had been scaled up on a grand…scale!
So back to writing again. I have to say, for me, for spontaneity and focus, that pen and paper was more cathartic than the keyboard. I own an array of electronic devices which I love, all have a separate purpose and place in my life but none of them beat pen and paper for the thoughtful, insightful, inspirational moments in my life. I think for me it’s the symbiosis between thought and hand movement. It’s more fluid and dance-like with scribing than it is with keying. The strokes and curves rather than the tap tap tap tickety tap.
I love to paint, to create. My writing, especially the physical act of scribing with pen and paper is, to me, like painting. I love the smooth flow of paint and the mental process of mixing and applying colour, blending, scraping and smoothing until all the mush combines in an image. Well, I do that with words as well. There are more, or as many, words as there are shades and hues of colour, each one having a subtle or not so subtle effect on the viewer.
https://uk.bic.com/en My favourite pens!
Oh dear, I’m rambling off again! My notebooks, some I’ve owned for quite some time, most are re-used, their original purpose redundant. Take for instance the one I’m writing in now, that you are reading the transcription of, was originally part of my freebie pack from university for my teacher training year. Lecture notes removed; it serves a new purpose now. I’m the sort of person that is always getting ‘ideas’. Things just pop into my head relating to ‘this’ or ’that’ at the most unexpected times! They are almost like dreams and if they aren’t noted down, risk disappearing into the ether, fragmented. This happens a lot, the ideas not the fragmenting thing! This was something I loved about teaching, the child or class just stuck on a concept and not moving forward, my job to get that thing going one way or another. I’ve had some corkers in the past, for me and the kids more than anyone else!
The science lesson where it took me over an hour to clean up the classroom after the children had gone home or the maths lesson where I turned the classroom into a dangerous island where blindfold pupils had to cross it with the verbal directions of their classmates. So much fun and so much learned!
I think it’s all about using creative thinking to get the message across. Oh dear, here I go again, off on one! Focus, I have to focus, it’s trained into me and after years in the classroom, has become as much a part of who I am as the pop-up ideas and notebooks.
I have a beautiful, burgundy embossed leather-bound notebook with thick cream pages and a secret pocket. It was a precious gift a few years ago from a dear friend. There is little in this one at this point. The beginnings of ‘Life dreams’ were carefully recorded with accompanying illustrations. Then, oh my goodness, how things took a turn. Swept along on a tsunami of change it was consigned to a corner of my bedroom. Back out again now of course. So many ideas, so many things to put in there…SO MUCH WRITING! I love it! So many people don’t love it, I know. I’ve been there at the sharp end. For some it’s just a chore, some it’s a complete struggle and some it’s just ‘not their thing’.
The ’In my bed’ book has a soft, brown cover embroidered with an owl motif. It smells comfortingly of must and old churches. I hope I get a warning when it’s my time to ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’ so I get a chance to dispose of it safely. I get a bit spooked when I re-read some of the scribbles in there. It was supposed to be used for compiling notes and ideas for a novel; my jottings have deviated a little since then to say the least. It is very strange looking back at some of the things I’ve written, not in the too distant past, recapturing the feelings I had when I wrote them, some like smoke impossible to grasp, some all too real. Then there are the ‘middle of the night notes’! What were they all about? Not quite the pop-up in the day ideas for certain...! Maybe I’ll publish them one day for everyone to have a go at deciphering them!
My Black ‘n’ Red A6 pocket notebook is the elder of my assemblage. It once belonged to my big brother and being the notebook collector that I am, I kept it when I didn’t have him anymore. He’d put a few notes in there, none of which I understand but I let them be and found plenty of space for what I needed. It is the smallest of my books but the most travelled and has witnessed most of my life events in the last 6 years or so and its contents are the most diverse. Haphazardly crammed together are notes for biology GCSE, jargon that still baffles me, how I wish I’d taken physics instead (I was a mature student sitting among children younger than my own when I re-sat my exams!) These jostle for attention, nestled on pages beside lesson inspirations (remember the science and maths lessons!?) and job application ‘super sentences. It is, I suppose, the Concise Book of Me. Part student, part teacher, part artist, always a learner = total writer!
One of my favourites isn’t actually a notebook, it’s one of my sketchbooks. Spiral bound with thick textured paper, the perfect home for the ink from my Bic Crystal pens (shameless plug there Mr Bic https://uk.bic.com/en ). I love the feel of the sticky soft ink oozing silkily across the page. This is my ‘New Beginnings’ book. Full of vibrant mind maps, with colour coded (well, colourful to be truthful, more colour themed) notes and lists. Having my book and pens always at hand means all my plans are visualised, all the steps I want to take are illustrated and annotated so that no flash of inspiration is missed or forgotten. Jot, write, draw. So, there we are, a fragment of me, there will be more. This amalgamation of art and writing sums me up, I like…love to communicate visually. I like people to see my messages in their own time and digest and absorb at their leisure. Messages penetrate deeper and last longer if they are absorbed in personal time. Nothing in writing isn’t art, the art of communication.