Never Allowed to Write Again

Abi Thorn bought up a really interesting metric on an interesting interview with Owen Jones recently:

To paraphrase: If someone told you that you could never do X again, how would you feel?

So, if you loved waterskiing, and someone told you that you could never do it again, you’d be sad, right? How about your job? Or how about if someone told you that you could never see X person again?

Abi used this as a metric for what parts of her life she wanted to stick with - she dropped Stand-Up Comedy because it would have felt like a relief to never do that again, but she stuck with acting because it would be devestating to let that drop.

I think this is a really interesting idea, and one I completely bounce off.

If someone told me I could never engage in creative writing again, I’d be upset, but mainly because I’ve spent so many years improving my skills in that area. It would be sad to have spent all those years for… not my prefered amount of success.

The thing is, if I wasn’t allowed to write, I’d survive. I know this because for the past decade, and more, I’ve survived. There were many points over the last decade where I might have died, for various reasons. I had to adapt and change to survive.

I think years and years of therapy, self-reflection and self-transformation have left me with quite a fluid approach to life. That’s the positive way of looking at things. The less positive way is to say that I’ve grown used to life hitting me with a hammer. It would be arbitary and cruel for someone to tell me that I couldn’t write any more, but life is arbitary and cruel so it would make sense. And, yes, there would be some relief if I was prevented from writing. I woudn’t be spending years and years working on projects only for them to get form rejections. It would still be a bad thing because…

I love playing the drums, but I’m too ill to take lessons.

I love painting, but I don’t love it enough to slow down and get to the next level, where I spend hours and hours working on one model.

I love acting, but I’d need to spend years working on the skills required to get into another character’s head.

I love travel, sport, music, filmmaking, editing, photography… it might be easier to list the creative fields that I don’t really enjoy. But, the reason I’ve stuck with writing for so long is…

With writing, I have spent years working on plotting and pacing, character growth and arcs, the hows, wheres and whys of environmental description. I’ve learned what sort of book I’m really good at writing. Where my writing really shines. It’s not that I couldn’t do this in another creative field, but I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that writing has been the one I’ve really stuck with and worked at, when I’ve tried out so many in my time.

So I wouldn’t be devestated if someone told me I couldn’t write creatively ever again, but it would be a shame, because I’m not sure I’d ever be as good at anything else as I currently am at writing.