This week is about my journey to discovering, to re-discovering really, the wonder of writing for its own sake, personal writing as I call it. And how that is different from other kinds of writing I’ve done. And how that difference is what helped me develop a practice of writing that enhances my life every day that I do it. I’m going to tell it as a kind of a story rather than a history, because I’m making it up from scraps of memory I’m piecing together. This is the way I remember most of my life anyway, if I’m honest about it.

I think most of us play creatively when we are younger and get great value and enjoyment from it. I remember that as children we would make up songs and poems, play with words, even write plays and perform them. I remember drawing in bed in the early morning when I woke up before my two brothers that I shared the bedroom with. One particular morning I had a drawing that I thought was pretty good until I got towards finishing it. I knew I wanted it to be a certain way but couldn’t figure out how to get there. I ended up making a mess of it and crumpling it up and throwing it away in frustration. And I never drew again after that. 

With writing the way it ended for me was less dramatic. Somehow, we, my brothers and sister and I, stopped doing it. But when that stopped, why or where or even what took its place, I’ve no memory of. I remember something similar happening with my own children. They used to adapt or make things up for themselves and then it tailed off somehow at some point I didn’t notice or see. Maybe it’s a phase we have to go through – something has to stop for something else to grow – something along those lines.                                        

In any case, I never got back to it. The urge to write would flare up again when I started having relationships or was going through an intense emotional period. I would write things to the person I was getting involved with or about my feelings at that time. But then this would peter out gradually once the relationship was underway or the emotional extremes had abated. 

I used to keep diaries or journals from time to time as well. Most of these were, I think now, a history of my days in different ways, or, at least, the days I remembered to write in them. Some of them were attempts to understand myself and my life, about which I would write at length and in great detail. They were partly historical, partly confessional. Interestingly enough, I don’t think of them as writing for pleasure or personal benefit in the way that I now think of my writing practice.

I don’t actually have any of them anymore. One time, while I was traveling around, I asked someone to forward these and my books to my new address in another country. I never got them and by the time I followed up both he and they had disappeared. I remember that I wasn’t as upset as I would have expected. In fact, I felt a kind of lightness about it, which surprised me enough at the time that I still remember it. I think I knew, even then, that the journals, notebooks, diaries, didn’t really contain anything profound for or about me. 

I think I was imitating styles I had learned, rather than freely expressing my experiences. I was writing my journals as a performance I had learned, not as an experience I was having. It was the same with the letters I wrote – they were what I thought letters should be - based on what I had learned or had been taught. There was little of anything truly personal. I was limiting myself, rather than discovering myself. through writing. This is why, I think, I didn’t feel it as a great loss.  

And then, of course, life happened. I found myself married, with a family, and a career to pursue. And then that phase ended and I moved into a new phase of my life, the one I’m in now. And in this new phase I knew I had to find a way to keep my mind active if I wasn’t going to let it get flabby. For sure there are plenty of ways to occupy my mind - with television, the internet, and what have you. But I wanted to keep my ability to focus, to concentrate, to pay attention. And I felt these were beginning to slip a bit through not getting enough action, enough experience, enough exercise.

So, I thought about taking up painting, or learning an instrument, even studying another language. I, eventually, - (as I’ve said before I am not the most insightful of people) -, asked myself what would I like to do? The answer was really simple, I realized, I’d like to try writing again. However, I knew I had to find a different way to approach this so that it wasn’t the kind of performative writing I’d done in those journals or letters. I didn’t want to get published, nor did I want to learn how to write really. I simply wanted to know how to express what was pent up in a way that would release it, validate it in some way. 

So, I started researching. This was a bit of fun and I got to read a lot more than I would have normally. I didn’t find anything useful to me until – cometh the hour, cometh the man, as the old saw goes - I came across William Stafford. And that changed everything.

William Stafford is a 20th century American poet.  Originally from Kansas he spent most of his life in Oregon, where he was a teacher. He created a habit for himself of writing at least one poem, and usually more than one, every morning. He kept this habit for fifty years and wrote tens of thousands of poems, most of which never went beyond his desk. He reckoned that less than one per cent of what he wrote got published. But, as he says himself, that wasn’t the point. He wrote primarily for the sake of his own self - it helped him understand his life in the world, made him feel good.

He wrote essays as well, talking about his approach to writing. One collection of them is called Writing the Australian Crawl. And this is the one that had the big impact on me. In the title essay he’s referring to the swimming stroke now commonly known as freestyle or the front crawl. In it he talks about how any reasonable person after putting their hand through water, would conclude it’s not an element that could support anyone. And yet, if you can take the leap of faith, push yourself off the ground into the water and reach forward, one hand after the other, you find you can float, and move as well. But you have to go beyond what your rational mind is telling you, has shown you. You have to be willing to make that leap of faith.

He compares this to the experience of writing, it seems implausible, impossible, yet if you relax into it and put one word after another, something amazing happens. Stafford helped me to see that writing is like this – you can’t believe it’s possible until you actually do it. And that the personal is what is truly valuable and liberating in writing. Reading Stafford helped me see through the assumptions I had about writing and get to the attitude I needed to start writing again in a way that has been life-changing. 

I found myself thinking about that morning I stopped drawing and how I stopped playing with words the ways we used to as children, and wondering what it might have led to if I’d had the patience to persevere, to continue. But now I do have the patience and the perspective to value persevering. So, I thought I might give it another go. I also have the time. This is a gift that only one or two of the generations that came before me have had the opportunity to experience.

Very few people in the generations that went before us, other than the very wealthy, have lived as long as we’re living. And this gives us the opportunity to discover things about life that we’ve never had before. I think almost all the literature and writing about age is from a tiny subset that’s an exception, completely atypical and can’t be used as examples of how to grow older and experience aging. Writing is a way into exploring and discovering those possibilities for me. It opens up a whole vista I’ve never thought about, never seen was there, or had the time to explore before this. And now I have the patience to keep going, the time to keep digging, and the tool that makes it enjoyable and rewarding for me. It helped me to create a practice that enabled me to write regularly. 

When I started writing every day, following whatever cropped up or pulled my line, for the joy and discovery of it, then writing became a source of magic for me. I’ve seen things that were invisible to me before I started writing about them. I’ve heard sounds that didn’t exist for me before I started listening more closely so I could write about them. My thoughts and emotions have been transformed on multiple occasions after I wrote them down. 

It’s amazing what happens when you go swimming in your own thoughts. Writing things down - whether it’s an interaction with your imagination, or simply a description of where you are at the time - changes what comes next in your life. This is what matters most - the ability of writing to do this and finding what works for you to get you to this place. 

This wonder, this magic, this gift is available to us all. We’ve all been taught how to use it. It’s simple. And it’s free to use. For me to figure out how to use it again needed a degree of trust in the unknown, which becomes harder as you get more experience in the world. I needed the same kind of trust in the process that you need when learning to swim – that when you let go of the ground and reach out, that you are going to float and move. I needed to trust myself as well, that what I was writing and how I was writing it were exactly what I needed and what was needed from me at that time. 

Now that I have discovered the experience that writing for pleasure and personal benefit can be and bring, that’s what matters and makes a difference for me. This has opened a whole realm for exploration that had been closed off to me since childhood. The events of my life, regardless of size, have taken on a life and significance they didn’t have before. 

I’ll be exploring this more in future installments. I hope you’ll join me.

RESOURCES:

William Stafford: Writing the Australian Crawl