Slipstream

Some thoughts on why I write

I don’t really know why I write. I wonder this more than sometimes.

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster drew attention to this lovely line: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

Let me see what I say, then. All I know is that writing is the purest feeling of escape I can get that is neither illegal nor dangerous (except probably for my sleep hygiene).

I write, certainly, to find out things about myself, to find out why and how I am feeling; I write, often, to reach out randomly for connection. And I write, sometimes, to be admired—I hate this about myself, but there it is.

Whatever this engine’s fuel, I’d like my words to sing. But I’d also like them to be honest, even if they tease (especially if they tease).

So I’ve been holding up a looking glass to my scribblings (though it seems reflection is too gauche for the philosophies of today: a colleague observing a seminar I was chairing mentioned that to sit alone with one’s thoughts is primitive. My psychotherapy bill trembled slightly.)

Photo by Martti Salmi on Unsplash

I then did some thinking in the dark.

I found I’m rather fond of an elevated register, perhaps too fond. I, too, have my jargon (my profession being saturated with it).

There was a time I might have joined the fashionable academic camps, had I not found much of it austere and self-congratulatory.

I was never really able to distil frankenwords with too many syllables into something the living might find useful. And that is probably on me, not the system’s. Much great work is done there. I lack the social stamina.

I think reader and writer get on best when caught in a mutual slipstream. Here are some words that I’d like to show you, says the writer: Here are some thoughts, some images and events that meant something to me, maybe you will like them?

Hopefully the reader responds: oh, I see. I have felt this. I have wanted to feel that but never had the opportunity. Now I’m losing you a bit here… but, oh, yes, here is the way in again.

Then both might go—I need a break, will you still be here when I come back?

I find lately that reading and writing connect best in swirls and eddies, as the ebbs and flows that form around imagining other lives and other selves. Not an “us vs them” situation, at most a “here’s a this and there’s that”. It generates lift. It soars, it hovers. And then, far below, a muddy forest floor of thought becomes consecrated ground as words and words and words settle down on it like so many autumn leaves, leaves that soaked up the day and breathed in the night and now yield their atoms to the earth.

But many words I love are so opaque now, so ironed out, that they are flatter and thinner than paper, paper with which one must now fold a plane and hope that it will fly.

Flight always creates slipstreams.

Now that I am writing more, I am learning to fly in the slipstream of everything else that has been said or written.

And I’ll be posting more frequently here. Hopefully twice a month.

If I am piloting a plane of words, I hope the journey’s turbulence and sudden decompressions will be balanced by an excellent in-flight service.

No passports are required, and there is ample legroom. Please pay attention to the safety announcements: overtly pretentious language will be disposed of as radioactive waste.

I say this because I am now wrestling with Act 2 of a short urban fantasy novel that requires some heavy edits. I will hopefully complete the whole thing by January, so I can hand it in as the dissertation for my MA in Creative Writing that has been a decade-long ongoing procrastination.

But I am writing. And I will continue to drop things here.

I may not have many followers, but it is special to me that you all pitch up and read my little diatribes.

So this is for you, my readers, who keep me accountable. Thank you for caring. And thank you for reading.