I'm Back, Witches

getting out there

That flow state. It’s intoxicating. Like the first flush of young love. I had it when I was in the thick of my last novel. Sure, I’d had my bad days with it, but that book had consumed me.

Then Agenty Things happened. I lost one. I gained one with whom I didn’t gel. I got dumped by another. Meanwhile the market was getting tougher and tougher. I started desperately scratching around, jotting down panicked thoughts about what to write next. I tried crafting funny picture books. They sucked. I tried a young fiction idea. It didn’t ring true. I drafted and pitched and pitched drafted, forcing my words into shapes that didn’t sound like my voice.

One day, quite suddenly, I woke up and couldn’t face it any more. What was the point? No one was going to read my writing anyway. It had all become too heavy, too impossible. I was washed up. Finished.

I began to avoid my desk for anything other than the day job. Instead I spent my time finding anything to do that was not writing. Cleaning out the fridge suddenly became the most enticing activity. Saying yes to coffee with that person I didn’t especially like but had been putting off while I was in the zone, so might as well meet now. I walked the dog for an hour longer than even the dog had capacity for. I reorganised drawers, sorted through clothes to take to charity, made soup from scratch, wiped the surfaces down again.

All the while, a crushing sense of guilt was building. I needed to write. I was not me without writing. I was tight-chested and breathless without it. I missed it while at the same time dreading it.

I knew all the things. I said them to other writers often enough:

“Sit down for ten minutes a day.”

“Do the pomodoro technique.”

“Do a bit more character development.”

“Do some big-picture planning.”

“Just write - it doesn’t matter if it’s crap.”

“Write somewhere different.”

“Write longhand.”

“Do morning pages.”

(Fucking morning pages…)

Just - DO IT, for godssake.

All these tips and hints I’d picked up and passed on over the years - from courses I’d been on, from podcasts I’d listened to, from craft books I’d read, from literary festivals I’d been to. They went around and around my head on a loop, taunting me until my Inner Critic (aka Brian) got a hold of them and started using them as evidence. “You are a Failure, Buddy.” (Piss off, Brian.)

So, what to do?

I’d been there before of course.

Me and Dad in happier times

The most memorable time was when I was sitting by my dad’s hospital bed in the last weeks of his life. He asked me how the writing was going, as people do, and I told him that I was in a writing slump. I had a properly understandable reason for it that time I guess, as I was already grieving losing him and was wrapped up in the admin of end of life care as well as looking after my mentally ill mum.

We didn’t dwell on this, though. Dad wanted to know what I was going to do about getting back into writing. I told him that the day before I had been to a café to write to see if a change of scene might help.

“And did it?” he asked.

“Mmm. Kind of. I didn’t write my book, but I started writing down what the people around me were saying.”

Dad looked at me then with an intensity I had not seen in him for a long time.

“You need to get out more, Anna,” he said.

To anyone else, that phrase might sound like a clichéd response. But to me, knowing my dad as I did, I felt the words land like an arrow in the bullseye of my heart. He knew. He just knew that I wasn’t being true to my writing. That the reason I had fallen out of love with it was that I had been playing it safe, writing what was expected of me and saying yes to commissions that didn’t make my soul sing. I had been going through the motions. That was why I was in a slump.

Yes, I could blame it on Life (or rather Death). I could talk about the Muse having left me. I could moan on - as writers love to do - about any number of excuses. What I really needed to do was to get out into the world and watch and listen and smell and taste and FEEL, and then write it all down.

I moved the conversation on quickly. It felt too much, suddenly. Too close to the truth. So much so that I couldn’t articulate what it meant to me to have Dad know me that well. I look back and realise it was the first of a set of goodbyes that we would exchange in the following weeks. Dad was sending me out into the world with my best and toughest commission yet: “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”, as Thoreau would have it.

“You need to get out more, Anna.”

That phrase galvanised me to write my memoir. I also held it in my heart while I was writing my novel. I’d all but forgotten it until this week.

It was Dad’s birthday this week. It was also London Book Fair. I had talked myself into buying a ticket, half-wondering why, as it’s been a few years now of feeling untethered, of considering perhaps that I no longer belong in this world that has been my tribe, my life-blood for 30 years.

The fair was just what I needed, thank god. It was buzzy and energising and exciting. I saw author friends, met with my lovely new agent, reconnected with editors and caught up with fellow London Writers’ Salon folk. The experience had me racing back to my desk with new ideas and a renewed commitment to my writing.

In case I needed another sign that the tide had turned, I went for a run after the fair and saw this little mosaic, stuck into the wall of an underpass near the Thames Path:

“I’m back, witches.” Properly punctuated as well, so surely a sign I should heed.

Hell, yeah.

Dear Dad. He was right, as he so often was in his quiet, wise way.

Do it. Get out there. Live deliberately. And write it all down. I highly recommend it.