Guess Who Is Trying To Write A Book Again

Me!

I can’t count how many times I’ve sat down to write a book. Nor the amount of times I’ve given up before I’ve even hit a thousand words. It’s one thing writing for my blog and writing for work. Marketers help tell the story, they rarely write it themselves.

For years I’ve sat and tried to convey the same story to paper. To get the characters from point A to point B with very little success. I still keenly remember Rupi Kaur’s poem at the start of lockdown. Reminding us that this is a time for creativity and wondrous things will be birthed from this time in our lives. I hope she’s right, I mean we did get Clubhouse from it… I feel like now is probably the best time for me to sit and try again. Almost like my own National Novel Writing Month, I want to see how far I get. If it ever gets published great if not then at least I’ve finally ticked it off my bucket list. The 8 year long procrastination of this book is killing me a bit, I want the satisfaction of saying I’ve done it. I think I’ve finally cracked. the format that will allow me to do it too - every time I’ve sat down to write this book I’ve stopped because of the same issue, I know my key plot points and at this point the characters are the equivalent of close family friends. But I didn’t have a fucking clue how to get them to the parts of the story I know so vividly.

Growing up, I had absolutely no direction in life. Sure, if someone asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’d give them some sort of answer based on what I had watched on TV or heard my friends talking about that morning. But I never grew up knowing what my next steps were. My friends have always wanted to be actresses, psychiatrists, and journalists - I’ve just followed the stream and applied for jobs that fit my skill set. That method had brought me to a pretty cool role as a Marketer for a software company.

Writing is my constant, it never changes and it never abandons me. As a child I’d look for ways and reasons to write, from shopping lists to Doctor Who magazines in notebooks. Writing was the equivalent to a blanket for a baby. It soothed me to escape into a world of my own imagination. If something didn’t go right in the real world, like the boy I fancied thought I was too fat, I’d remedy the situation in my own mind. I’d become skinny, I’d do something cool like save his life or become famous, just so he’d like me back in my own head.

I don’t think it’s a particularly healthy coping mechanism. But it’s an effective one. Stories have been an escape for children for years. My father used to write small stories for me, mainly about a burn out house just outside of town. He’d fill it with monsters, ghosts and murder mysteries to make my bedtimes as magical as possible. I vaguely remember one involving me and my mother befriending the illustrator who once owned the house. Yet I was quite little at the time and I lost the stories long before he passed away. If he was still around, I’d ask him if it ran in the family. Did he want to be a writer? What does he think of my work now that I'm all grown up? There’s too many questions to even ponder there.

So you may hear me rant about the struggles of writing more often this coming months. You might see my blogs less frequently too, I did promise myself I’d go back to the usual three posts a week. But resolutions are made to be broken.