In this Issue:
Being a writer - do you need permission?
Checking in
The importance of getting away
Not all creative work happens on the page
What does it mean to be a writer?
Hi everyone!
For the next six months, at least, I give you permission to think of yourself as a writer.
I’ve been musing a fair bit recently on what it means to be a writer of fiction. It might sound obvious — surely a writer is merely one who writes? — but I think there's more to it than that.
I remember back in the dark ages (i.e. 2009), when I started my course at The Faber Academy. On the first night, during her welcome talk, then tutor Louise Doughty said to us, ‘For the next six months at least, I give you permission to think of yourselves as writers.’
For me, it was a profound moment. Until then, I suppose subconsciously, I’d been thinking of myself as ‘someone who’s trying to write', or even ‘a clinical scientist working in the NHS who’s also dabbling in fiction’. The point is, I hadn’t yet put my writing front and centre of my life. In fact, I was perhaps still a little bit embarrassed about that part of my life, of what I was trying to do. Walk into any party and you’ll find someone who’s writing a novel — or who wants to write a novel, or intends to write a novel just as soon as they get round to it — so what made me think I was any different? Wouldn’t it just be massively pretentious of me to start thinking of myself as a writer, certainly before I was published, let alone before I’d even finished a draft? Surely the best thing would be to keep quiet about it for now.
Louise’s comment blew that out of the water. We can go into the reasons I needed permission from someone else, but the important thing is that from that day on, I told myself I would think of myself as a writer. For six months at least. When people asked what I did I would say I was a writer, my day job was in the NHS but I was working on a novel at the same time. When they asked what I’d had published I’d say, ‘Nothing, yet,’ and I wouldn’t be ashamed or embarrassed about that. When my friends invited me out, to the cinema or the pub or whatever, I wouldn’t make up an excuse. Instead I’d say ‘I’d love to but I can’t, I have to work on my book,’ and when they said I was a part-timer now (having dropped from 5 days a week in the hospital to 3) I replied that no, actually, I now had two jobs, one that paid and one that (at that time, anyway) didn’t.