A Journey Back To Art

Bringing back the colour

When I started writing my first book, I had no idea that’s what I was doing.

It sounds a bit nonsensical now but it’s true. And when eventually it became clear that I was, in fact, writing a book, nobody was more surprised than me. Let me explain…

As a child I was always a story-lover. I started reading early and from then on I spent much of my time either reading stories, writing them or (most often) making them up in my head. The reading and the daydreaming endured but, sadly, I lost the art of writing somewhere around entering teenage-hood and forgot all about it until almost two decades later.

Approaching thirty, in the process of burning out in a career that was increasingly obviously not for me, I started to think about a story that had been in my head for a decade. It was a daydream, nothing more. A few scenes that would loop around my head on and off over the years without me ever thinking much of it.

I don’t remember the exact day I decided to put pen to paper or what prompted me to do it. All I know is that one evening, exhausted and feeling spiritually bereft, I picked up a notebook and began writing this little scene down. It was a distraction from the heaviness, and it made me feel just a little bit lighter. The idea that these scribbles would ever turn into anything approaching a book never entered my head.

Over the course of the following weeks and months, writing these scenes became an outlet, something I would look forward to doing in the evenings. I always wrote pen and paper, often in a frantic and sometimes illegible way which was fine because I wasn’t likely to ever even read any of this back myself—never mind consider letting someone else read it.

I feel it’s only fair for me to be honest and tell you that, at this stage, I both loved what I was doing and creating AND I was deeply embarrassed by it. For months, I didn’t tell a single soul outside my household what I was doing. And if those in my household so much as glanced in my direction whilst I was writing I would defensively hide my notebook and snap at them not to ever open it—heaven forbid someone should see my work!

If you, like me, are someone who found their way to (or back to) creativity as an adult, you may understand what I’m talking about here. I now know that what I was feeling was partly The Fear (to be explored in future posts) alongside a healthy dose of societal conditioning which would go through various iterations and which I would have to, and continue to have to, unpick on a daily basis.

HOWEVER, no matter the complex feelings I had towards picking up my pen and paper once more, I was completely and utterly compelled to keep doing it. Like some invisible hand was guiding me along a path in the dark and something in me had decided to follow. And somewhere along the way, it slowly dawned on me that the disjointed, ill-thought out paragraphs and scenes that I’d been writing, were beginning to form themselves into something more. Something bigger. Something almost coherent. That maybe, just maybe, there was a story in amongst my scribbles.

I began to think about this story more and more. I started to think about what it was that I wanted to say; what story was I trying to tell? Ideas began to hit me out of nowhere. I’d hash out dialogue in the shower, holding conversations back and forth with myself. Inspiration struck in the middle of the night and had me squinting into my phone, frantically typing into my notes app. I started to write my story again, from scratch this time and with a goal in mind—I would turn my little daydream into a fully fledged book.

Many more months of scribbling in the evenings and at weekends went by before I had a full, coherent first draft. It took a fair amount of time after that before I began to tell anyone outside of my house what I was creating. And still more before I dared call myself a writer. The journey was as much mental as it was creative but, eventually, out of that process several things happened… I course-corrected, left my misaligned career, began burnout recovery and rethought my priorities. I eventually dared to begin to call myself a writer, to allow people to read my work and to decide that I would put that work out into the world. My debut novel, All The Things I Wasn’t, was born. And, most importantly, I found my way back to my art. And that? That was the greatest gift of all.

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Amy

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