2
SO WHY WRITE?
My son is a writer. He’s seventeen as I write this and about 160,000 words through writing his first novel.
I asked him, ‘Why do you write?’
He said, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘To empty my brain.’
That’s why I write, too. The day before I began writing this book, after a long period of procrastination, I sat at dinner talking to the boys about my new project. It had been brewing in my head for some time, but I probably sounded a bit downhearted about the magnitude of the task ahead of me. I was having a bit of a sook, to be honest. I had no advance, no publisher, no deadline. Just a personal challenge.
I said, ‘No-one ever writes a book because they want to. People only write a book because they have to.’ I meant they only write because they feel compelled to: they write to get the voices in their head to stop talking at them, to get the story out so people can read it, to stop their brain exploding.
Dom said, ‘That’s not true, Mum. I’m writing a book. I don’t have to.’
I replied, ‘And how would you feel if you weren’t writing it?’
Immediately, Dom replied, ‘Sad, angry, anxious, depressed. I’d probably want to kill myself.’
Point made. I feel the same way.
The medicinal benefits of writing are well documented. Journaling and storytelling are now widely accepted therapeutic tools in counselling, trauma recovery and mental health. There are hundreds of thousands of articles and studies on the benefits of writing for people suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and grief – writing can help people process emotions, elevate mood and in some cases be as effective as medication and/or counselling. Even something as simple as a gratitude diary – just writing down what you are grateful for – has been found to increase happiness and help stave off the ‘black dog’ of depression. The simple act of writing a list can reduce stress instantly.
I can vouch personally for the healing power of writing. I suffered major depression in 2008. My doctor and therapist were very keen for me to go on medication. Me? Not so much. The only thing that made me feel sane was writing, and it was also how I made my living. I was terrified of losing my creativity. I was in a very bad way and to be honest I was frightened of throwing something new and unknown into the mix. I was hanging from a precipice by my fingernails. I had an agreement with myself that I would try medication if I found myself unable to meet a deadline.
One day in mid-winter I woke anxious and depressed, with my mind racing. It felt like I was walking through a thick grey fog. I had to deliver a column to the newspaper by noon and I felt there was nothing there. I figured it was time to try the medication.
I got the three kids off to school and made an appointment to see my doctor. He couldn’t see me until 1.30 p.m. I looked at my laptop and thought, ‘I’m going to write for ten minutes and see if there is anything there.’
In the next two hours I wrote ‘Just Keep Going’, a tribute to everyday heroes, which has become one of my most well-received pieces. And one of the pieces I am most proud of. I never went to the appointment. I never ended up taking the medication.
Many, many of my Gunnas speak of the calm, peace and clarity they find when they write. Writing and therapy are exactly the same: they are about creating a narrative that makes sense to you.
No-one writes to get paid, praised, published or win prizes. Yes those things happen for some writers. But that’s not why anyone writes. We write because it empties our brains, lightens our emotions, and helps us feel more deeply, see more clearly and sleep better. We write to give our thoughts order and explore our emotions. Because it makes us feel more like ourselves; it’s our way of making sense of the world. Most importantly, we write for the same reason we exercise, eat and sleep: it makes us feel better.
The pay-off for writing is at the end. It’s crucial to remember that. When do we tip waiters? Not at the beginning of the meal: at the end. Why? Because it keeps them on their toes. It keeps them motivated. The best writing is done like that. For the pay-off and the glory of getting it done. Because we know how great we’ll feel when it’s finished.
Perhaps you have a daydream about completing your writing project. You imagine yourself typing ‘THE END’, ripping open the box containing your first book or seeing the look on your frenemy’s face when you tell them you’ve published a book, sold your screenplay, had a brilliant review for your one-woman shows or received a million hits on your YouTube series. That’s great motivation, sure! But when you actually finish something, the most exciting part is never what you imagined.
The greatest thrill is simply getting it done.
Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
GLORIA STEINEM
Write because it makes you feel satisfied. Write for catharsis, to make yourself feel more clear-headed and more engaged with yourself, the people around you and humanity at large. Write because it makes you feel more present. Write because it makes you feel calmer. Write because it makes you a better person, a better version of you. Write because you are the special one.
*
Just write what you want to write. Don’t worry about whether anyone will like it, publish it or read it. Don’t even think about structure or format yet. Just finish it for the joy of getting something done.
Many people cock-block their own writing by waiting for a publisher to bestow a contract and advance on them. People feel they will have the confidence to write That Thing when an outside source approves of them enough to throw money and support behind them. Guess what? External approval and validation often stops people writing. Because whatever it is they had to prove – to whoever for whatever reason – they’ve proved it. ‘A publisher has agreed to publish my book and give me money, therefore I am officially a writer. Level unlocked … Oh GOD! What now?’
Don’t get stymied, stalled or preoccupied with whether, where, how or with whom you will publish your piece, what the best format is, how your family will react to it or what the legal constraints might be. Just write. Before you worry about any of that, you have to get it down – out of your head and heart and onto the page.
Don’t edit as you go. Let it all fall out of you exactly as it comes. If you start blocking, banning and correcting what comes out, you will lose the good as well as the bad. Getting someone to edit while they are writing is like asking someone to cut down a tree while they are climbing it. Just let her rip! Write like you are on fire. Write like your family are dead. Write like no-one will ever read it. Get it down and keep going until it’s finished. You’ll know when the tank is empty. When you have blurted, vomited and gushed out whatever it is, only then should you go over it and chop, change, polish or edit.
*
I hate writing, I love having written.
DOROTHY PARKER
I tell my Gunnas: 90% of writing never sees the light of day. But 100% of writing makes the writer feel better for having written it.
When I say it never sees the light of day, I mean it’s never seen by anyone other than the writer. They choose never to share it with anyone else. The notebooks are burned unread, the files trashed, the computers recycled. Most writing is just for the writer’s benefit. It’s them nutting out the world and making sense of relationships. It is the outcome of them diving into themselves and noodling around with concepts – one of which may one day take on a life of its own and develop into a piece they decide to publish.
Chances are, if you do finish a piece and decide you want to share it with others, you will find a way to publish it. Perhaps you’ll email it to your friends. Perhaps it will be a book. Maybe you will post it on a blog. From there, it may morph into something else entirely. This book is a perfect example: it evolved from thoughts I had, which became conversations, which turned into articles, radio interviews and talks. I turned that bundle of material into writing classes, lectures and workshops, which, in turn, evolved into my Gunnas Masterclasses – and now this book. Who knows what’s next? Podcasts? A YouTube series?
In my experience, writing either gets published or it informs the next thing you write. Either way, it makes you feel better immediately, because you’ve achieved a writing goal, it’s been a cathartic brain-dump, and it’s cleared the way for your next writing epiphany.
*
If you are interested in publishing your work eventually, don’t be disheartened by all the talk of the decline of publishing and newspapers. There has never been an era when your writing was more likely to be published – or self-published – in some form: as a physical book, an e-book, a blog, a website, or whatever else you call your online body of work. There has never been a time in human history when it was easier to reach an audience. Computers allow us to publish our own material, and the internet provides us with the fastest, widest and cheapest distribution network. The democratisation of information has created a world of people hungry for content. There have never before been so few barriers to writing whatever it is you need or want to write and getting it to people who will want to consume it.
E-books (digital books), self-publishing (publishing your own book without a publishing house), crowd-funding (raising money to fund your project) and micro payments (very small payments for access to a website, page or article) have overtaken the traditional gatekeepers of information who decided who was allowed to say what, where, how and why. Along with the loosening up of taboos and class restrictions and an increase in social critique, this has led to people feeling bolder. More people feel brave enough to get their ideas, opinions and stories out into the big wide world. And more people are reading more widely and thinking more deeply than ever before. We have a hunger to consume stories, connect with others and create our own work. To read, to write and to think.
Disregard all the gloom and doom from the funbusters who moan about the demise of the publishing industry and say you can’t make a living out of writing anymore. You know what? That’s a convenient copout. They mightn’t be able to make a living their old ways, but the rest of us, not wedded to the idea of ‘how we do things round here’, can. Humans love information, education and entertainment. We have always loved stories, because we are made of stories. Human nature hasn’t changed; technology has. Now we have more ways of saying more things to more people. And despite what you hear, people want to pay for it. Every time you spend a dollar, you are voting on how you want the world to be. Like many others, I want to pay to encourage other people’s creativity, so they keep doing what they are doing, keep making the things I want and love.
*
But you don’t have to show anyone what you write. Ever. My advice? Either way, write as if no-one will ever read it. I totally disagree with the advice to write with your audience in mind. First, the audience don’t know what they want and never have. People just read, hear or see something and think, ‘That, yes, that!’ Second, if you write to accommodate what you think the audience want, you will miss out on what your idea or story really is. All this second-guessing will pull you off course and you will end up creating something that’s a response to your assumptions about others, not what you really want to say.
Fuck an advance or a contract. Write because it makes you a better, smarter person. Write to make sense of yourself. Write to teach yourself what you have to learn. Write to explain to yourself what you think. Write to make something beautiful. Write because it’s time well spent. Write to get those voices out of your head.
We do not write because we are happy; we are happy because we write.
*
Writing changes the world. It connects people. Writing – writing your own words and reading other people’s – saves lives. I know: writing, stories and words saved my life. As a little girl, I wrote my emotions out to try to make sense of my unhappy childhood and the people around me. I wrote mountains of letters in order to connect with people. When they wrote back, I felt less alone. I read about other people’s lives – particularly those of women who did not follow the rules or do the done thing and yet lived ‘happily ever after’ – and they made me realise I could live the life I wanted, not the life others wanted me to live. I have made a career out of writing: it has bought me a house, reputation and career. I have been able to live my life my way. My life looks so different to all of the women who have come before me on either side of my family. Writing gave me a voice and independence. Writing saved my life.
I write this book in an attempt to save yours.
*
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
W.H. AUDEN
As bizarre as this sounds, you should write now because one day you will die. And you might die much sooner than you expect. Write like you have six months to live. That – or even less – might be all you have. In 2014 two planes fell out of the sky. You could have been on one of them. Or someone you loved could have been. How much more difficult would it be to write with grief like that? I think about death all the time – in a good way. And not just about death, but about all the huge, horrible, disruptive things that could happen to make it difficult, harder or impossible to write:
chronic, inescapable pain
rapid early-onset dementia
frustrating and inescapable tinnitus
the death of a loved one in horrific circumstances
a medical condition requiring a huge amount of time spent in the medical system
an unexpected relationship breakdown
a life-changing accident or injury that would result in huge changes in your lifestyle, career and finances
a coma
severe and chronic depression and anxiety
war
homelessness
your house burning down
becoming a full-time carer to a family member or friend
addiction
sudden and long-term unemployment.
Anything can happen and I assure you it does. And any of these things would make writing much more difficult than it is now. Hell, if you keep putting off writing, you could wake up one day with triplets, mastitis, and your homeless sister’s family moved in with you, thinking, ‘Why didn’t I write when I had the chance?’
You have the chance. It’s now.
So I’m asking you, darling reader, something I always ask my Gunnas. What would you do if you had six months to live? And what’s stopping you from doing it now?
Have a read of this passage from philosopher Alan Watts:
What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?
Let’s suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, ‘we’re getting out of college and we haven't the faintest idea what we want to do’. So I always ask the question, ‘what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?’
Well, it’s so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?
When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually turn it – you could eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. That’s everybody is – somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like, in order to go on spending on things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow in the same track.
See what we are doing, is we’re bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lives we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it’s all retch, and no vomit it never gets there.
And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
Think about this question from Watts, and write your answers down. What would you do if you had six months to live? And what’s stopping you from doing it now? Go on. It’s okay – I’ll wait. Write it down.
People never regret the risks they took that didn’t work out. They regret the risks they never took. When they are dying, no-one wishes they’d spent more time on Facebook, Candy Crush, Instagram, Etsy, Pinterest, World of Warcraft or Twitter. Nor do they wish they’d spent more time doing what they thought they should do – what they felt obliged to do – than what they wanted to do. No-one ever took their last breath thinking, ‘I wish I’d spent more time making other people happy at the expense of my own happiness, satisfaction, peace and fulfilment.’
An Australian palliative care worker, Bronnie Ware, put a list together of the most common regrets of the dying:
1.I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2.I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3.I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
4.I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5.I wish that I had let myself be happier.
John Izzo, a former pastor who is now a motivational speaker, wrote a book called The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. He interviewed 200 people considered ‘wise elders’ who had lived ‘meaningful and happy lives’ and his ‘secrets’ ended up looking pretty similar to the ‘regrets’ listed above.
1.Be true to yourself.
2.Leave no regrets.
3.Become love.
4.Live in the moment.
5.Give more than you take.
I reckon that the key to a happy life is to have no regrets – and the only way to do this is to take more risks.
Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.
ANNE LAMOTT
I met an 87-year-old woman at a party the other day. I asked her if she had her time over again what would she do.
She said ‘everything’.
That’s what this book is all about.
There’s plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.