Reader/writer

Some recent reading loves.

Sometimes I feel like I am inhaling words.

I veer in and out of reading novels obsessively, but with a subscription to two weekend papers, as well as The New Statesman and the London Review of Books, I am always consuming a substantial amount of journalism. I say this not to show off – I haven’t a hope of getting through all of them each week, and could probably do with casting my net slightly wider in terms of political viewpoint – but reading fills me up. It always has. I read print media and blogs and email newsletters and Instagram captions. Reading helps me access as much language as possible in order to nurture, untangle and articulate my own thoughts. A favourite teacher at school instilled in me that one of the main ways to become a better writer is to read, and it’s one of my favourite eternal and enduring truths.

An ongoing pull to put more words of my own onto paper – or screen – led me, a year or so ago, to take the plunge and sign up to a creative writing course. I subsequently set up this blog, only about ten years after everyone else, and an age of thinking about it myself. The blog was to be a low-stakes space to try and share my thoughts and my writing. It’s undoubtedly fulfilled this purpose, but it’s also been, in its own quiet way, pretty monumental for me. A seemingly small but symbolically huge act, embodying a greater shift. And something that has prompted a fair amount of reflection, as I considered the origins of my love for reading and writing, and of language more generally.

Aged seven, I produced countless stories at school, in that classic split A4 page format: picture above the line, writing below. Many of these were adapted from other things I’d read, tweaked depending on my own experiences of the world, which now feels like a perfect representation of how many people find their own writing practices. I loved magazines, and took to editing and producing my own, the ambitiously titled Cool! My parents produced a copy as part of their speech at my wedding a few years ago, and my complete embarrassment competed with a weird sense of pride for my nine-year old self. When I became a teenager, I took solace in song lyrics, writing out those I resonated with; sometimes because they gave words to my feelings, sometimes because l just really loved the way they sounded. Back in the earlier days of the internet, I was one of those people with a lyric as my MSN instant messenger name, often carefully chosen to convey whatever inner turmoil I was immersed in.

I relished exploring themes and character development and poetic techniques in English throughout secondary school, all about words, words, words. It was a natural choice for me to select a double helping of the subject at A Level, and to go on to study it at university. During my degree, I dived deeper into narrative form, into the way women have explored and expressed their stories in literature, and into poetry. I fell in love, in particular, with Dylan Thomas’ weird and wonderful use of English, akin to a kind of sub-language in itself; the way he talks about “fire green as grass”, “syllabic blood”, “walking tears”. I have also often loved books that do unusual things with form, that play with perspective, stream-of-consciousness narratives, and mix up the standard conventions of structure: Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.

I never quite felt ready to leap into creating my own fiction, but I wrote a smattering of news stories for the online student newspaper. Since university, I’ve worked in editing and communications jobs, and always written for myself, filling journals and secret Word documents with ideas, feelings and frustrations.

The written word is a tool I am relatively comfortable with, and helps me express myself in a way that feel truthful. It feels grounded in integrity and nuance, and not at the mercy of the anxieties that, for me, sometimes come with more spontaneous, off-the-cuff verbal communication.

Yet writing is kind of scary, too. I sometimes feel like I can’t express myself particularly effectively in person, especially if I feel under pressure, or am with people I don’t know very well. I don’t like this sense of being misunderstood, but I’m somewhat used to it. It’s frustrating, but I tell myself it doesn’t matter too much if I struggle to connect or convey exactly what I want through speech, because there’s a reason for this difficulty. Because still, at 32, my slight shyness persists. And it’s something I can blame any shortcomings on, a handy excuse for not being fully and clearly known.

Sharing myself through writing feels exposing, then, because I get to deliberate and carefully choose my words, in a considered way. And even though I can’t control other people’s reactions, I can control what I select to put down on a page. Of course, it might still be read in a way that wasn’t quite my intention, but I think I can more easily accept this. Perhaps it comes from my own experience of studying literature, and the work I did many years ago facilitating shared reading groups, but I am (mostly) ok with the idea that meaning can be made just as much from a reader’s understanding as from a writer’s intention. How it’s something that a writer can influence but not fully dictate. For some reason, I’m (if somewhat reluctantly) at peace with that. I know – I love – that part of the beauty of writing is the potential for a specific connection with the reader, an opportunity to create a unique understanding and experience, influenced by a person’s individual circumstances.

Musings on meaning aside, choosing to write feels to me like a commitment to my own convictions. And my blog feels – tentatively – like coming back to myself. After years of editing other people’s writing, and of thinking about (and always previously talking myself out of) setting something up for my own work, it feels like a process of learning to trust my voice and my ideas again. Experimenting with how best to express myself – and hoping, as alluded to above, that other people might connect to what I say, too.

It’s also an admittance of the fact that I want to write. That I want it to be part of what I do – perhaps in a professional sense, but also just as a human that exists in the word and does things. It’s a way of giving myself permission to explore this part of myself, and some of the things that I’m interested in, and step into the doing, the writing. To try things out, be brave, and stop ignoring the bit of me that wants – is pulled – to do this. To create, tell stories, share; exhale as well as inhale. Be a writer, as well as a reader.