Breathe of Life

Brilliant, you have an idea, now what to do with that idea and how to get started…. A dilemma every writer faces.

For a few years, I was simply allowed to explore the contents and depths of Eveline’s story and world and I revelled in it and the excitement it brought me. I was working hard, writing essays and doing exams, I had little time to write a pretty lengthy novel so I simply told myself ‘When you have finished university you can sit down properly and begin’. Well, personally for me, actually beginning projects is the hardest part. Sure I can dream about them till my heart’s content, but actually putting pen to paper as they say, is a little hard for those blessed with procrastination like myself. Once I start a project I’m great, in fact I become a little competitive and obsessed with my work. But getting to that point takes an awful lot of pushing and encouragement.

So how did I finally manage to put pen to paper?

My master’s course was cancelled at the last minute due to lack of funding and I was stuck. In that moment I was standing before two lanes. Lane number one would let me walk down the road of finding another course elsewhere and lane number two would completely turn me inside out for several reasons. I am a creature of routine, my life revolves around it and I become pretty anxious if my routine isn’t met with. If there is an alteration in that routine, I feel it deeply, a pain not even I can fully understand. One of my biggest problems in life is being able to chill. I always need to have goals but as Marx often said, once we have met our goals we become dissatisfied again and need to reach for something new. He hit the nail on the head with this theory, because it sums me up perfectly. Sitting around and doing nothing, is a foreign concept to me. And so lane number two was quite dangerous. I re applied to another university one day and the next I was accepted, everything had turned out perfectly, I was still on chart. My mother is forever telling me off for not being able to stand still, she is always chiding at me to for example, ‘look at the sea properly and stop being so anxious to get home’.

Lane number two represented to me an opportunity to simply stand back for a year and try something new. This is hard when you are seriously a penniless writer etc. But I took some time to think about this idea seriously and I came to a conclusion. I needed to be able to somehow learn to move differently, in fact to not move at all. And the space in which to try and experiment with this idea would also give me the time to put pen to paper. For years I have been constantly moving about, shifting through chapters of my life, shifting through my parents’ divorce and shifting through my own personal problems which seem to never fade away. One wave crashing against the shore is then replaced by another, and I for a very long time felt like the shore and still to a large degree do. I purchased this incredible book called Fuck It! And if you haven’t read it, I urge you to purchase a copy. Of course my life has not been transformed, no, it hasn’t altered much but there are signs of change and Fuck It! really helped. The core of the book’s theory is simply to stand before a decision and openly say Fuck It! Of course not life altering decisions that should be thought through with a pragmatic and rationale mind set, but the little decisions or moments in your day. For instance, I find it really hard to simply sit in a café by myself, an act that I believe many other people share. But over the last few months I have been teaching myself to simply say Fuck It! And go into that café, buy a coffee and sit down and read a book, even if it kills me to do so.

And so after a few days consideration, weighing up the pro’s and con’s off taking a year out, I decided to go ahead with it and try to see how I could change certain aspects of myself in the process. But what it really enabled me to do was to begin writing my novel. And I did. Because I had all this spare time to myself, I felt physically ill at the prospect of another twelve months of the same perplexing realisation. I’ve written books before and with each one, the same ritual applies. I hover about my desk, filled with papers and books and I simply glance down at it for a few days. Then I sit down at my desk and sieve through the work, like a lion spying on its prey. And then I open my laptop and open a new file and type in my book title. There is something about typing out your book title, it somehow breathes life into your work. From that moment, I am hooked to my work and that is it. It is as if I have been standing at the line awaiting my race to begin and someone with beautiful, all be it ancient Greek horn, heralds the start of the race and off I run. And when I start running, well there’s no stopping me. And for a good while that’s brilliant, you have all this energy that you have been harnessing for quite some time and you have a clear goal in which to reach for.

What can possible go wrong?

Iseult x