Left foot, right foot

I should probably start with a very obvious disclaimer, because I am here to make generalisations. Lately – the past decade or so – I’ve had this mental picture of myself in a balancing act, with two feet in different boats. The boats represent the left and right side of my brain, respectively. This is where the disclaimer comes in. I am not a neuroscientist. I am pretty sure the left brain/right brain dichotomy of rationality/creativity doesn’t have a solid basis in (contemporary, at least) science. But I do feel as though there’s a tug-of-war going on inside me. I witness it in my friends, too – though often favouring one side overall, maybe at a ratio of forty-sixty or even eighty-twenty. For me it’s fifty-fifty, smack down the middle. Half of me wants to live in the mountains with a goat or three and write poetry, and the other half wants a high-backed office chair and the addictive adrenaline of imposing deadlines.

Like most creatives, I have a long and complicated relationship with creativity. After a childhood of reading and drawing and writing and climbing trees, I was moved to a new school with a new phenomenon: homework. It would be years before I wrote for pleasure again. My relationship with the act of writing had changed – it was less for entertainment, for the joy of the process. I got to the point where I couldn’t even imagine writing for fun. Then, alone and under-stimulated at university, I found the weird and esoteric world of poetry and I started to find my way back in.

To me, writing is about being a fly on the wall – not only around other people, but also in my own life. It takes a certain type of headspace to be able to step out of your body and watch the scene unfold from the neutral position of an outsider; someone whose only motive is curiosity. I had lost that curiosity somewhere in my early teens, but it was starting to creep back in. This time I wanted to give it a real chance. I graduated last year and took some time off before starting my first job. The key, for me, was time. I thought that if I had all that free time of childhood, the curiosity and creativity would have to come back.

But of course was never about time, not exactly. I had the time and now I wanted to fill it, to be productive, to make checklists and tick them off, all with the outcome in mind. And I did that. Sometimes I wrote up to three thousand words in a day – terrible, awful words. Sentences filled with clichés – as these ones are, no doubt. Empty, lifeless characters. I had plotted a book, with an ending and a middle and a beginning. (In that order: I had worked backwards, on some Internet-person’s advice.) Six months later I shook myself awake. I had fifty thousand words that were supposed to be exactly what I wanted – and then some bizarre phenomenon came and knocked me sideways.

I had been wrestling with this script, with the story I thought I was writing, and it had started to wrestle with me. There was a story in there that wanted to be told, and I was doing my best to resist telling it, just so I could check the next box on the list. And instead of looking and my dull, clunky story and thinking what a waste of time it had been, writing this thing that no one would ever read, I realised that the spark, the muse – whatever it was – had come out to play. And with this sudden realisation, what did I do? I got a job in an unrelated industry and left those fifty thousand words to stew on their own.

I thought about those lifeless words, sure, but the story itself felt more like a memory, or maybe a movie I had seen. I didn’t feel like it was waiting for me to open the document and start generating words. I got the sense it was there, watching me, ready when I needed it. I felt as though we were watching each other, two flies on the wall, two parallel universes and I could walk through the doorway and access the story at any moment.

It’s a feeling I associate with reading other people’s stories, but definitely not writing my own. I feel ready to approach it with curiosity now. Beginner’s mind, if you will. I am open to stepping through the doorway, and discovering what lies beyond instead of trying to make it up from scratch.

And why now? I started a new job last week and it works out that I get Wednesdays off. Aside from meaning I only have to work two-day weeks at a time, it also feels significant. It isn’t a Friday off, so it isn’t a long weekend. It’s a Wednesday. Everyone else is working. The prospect of these 25 Wednesdays is beckoning to me. That’s almost a full month of writing. It’s like NaNoWriMo but without that awful nagging feeling of inadequacy – because it’s just Wednesdays. You would think.

The fear will always be here. The voice in my head insisting I time travel, that I think about the future and the past, the things written and unwritten… I will have to get comfortable with that voice. I will have to come to terms with being tugged in two directions. Half of me, my left brain, wants to draw a map of every Wednesday with a word count and a plot point to hit. My right brain tells me I should just crack open the keyboard and hope for the best. My cat tells me, loudest of all, that I should stay in bed and rub her chin.

And it’s only as I've been writing this now that another phrase has nudged its way into my head, in that strange and wonderful way that language works. The process is always the same, really, when I break it down into the simplest of steps. It’s just one foot in front of the other: left foot, right foot. Whether dealing with the rigid checklists of my workdays or the chaos of creativity, it’s still a process. Starting with nothing and ending up with something. And then maybe tossing that aside, and attempting it again.

I am here for a number of reasons. I want to be accountable in my creativity, for the first time ever. I want to honour the advice and the efforts of my friends, who I admire above all else because I see the work they put in every day, even when the outcome seems a long way off. Finally – in keeping with the tradition of putting things in writing that I will inevitably regret later – it can’t be that hard, right? Left foot, right foot. It’s just one foot in front of the other.