In six days’ time, I’ll be embarking on a thrilling/foolhardy (you decide which) literary experiment, writing a 90,000-word novel in the space of a calendar month — and not only that, I’ll be on show for at least 20 of those days, in full public view, so that anyone who chooses can watch the joy/panic (either or both) on my face as I’m doing it. (The project in question is True Voyage Is Return which takes places at The Exchange, University of Birmingham’s city centre public engagement space.)
True Voyage isn’t just about my own writing, though. I’ll be joined by eight professional writers across the month, who are each given a week to write something new, and there’s also a public callout inviting anthology submissions from people right across Birmingham and the Black Country.
And it’s got me thinking about the conditions that enable people to write, or which prevent them from doing so. I hear variations on this theme all the time. Money is the main enabler/preventer. We can all relate to that. Others which rank high on the list include kids, those great swallowers of time. (In The Dispossessed, the Ursula K Le Guin novel which helped to inspire my project, she writes about “that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood.” Few things seem to make people feel they’ve got no spare time to write in quite the same way that raising a family does. But surely raising a family is infinitely harder than writing — so if you’re already doing the hard thing, I’d have thought that writing would feel like the easy part.)
What else is there? Work, in the sense of having a job other than writing — that pulls a great many people away. (Back to money again.) Health, physical and mental — days or weeks or even years when picking up a pen or opening a laptop is the last thing you can face doing. I’m not being facetious or dismissive when I say that there have been times when writing has been the very (or only) thing which helped to lift me out of such a state. I don’t insist that it can or should work for everyone — I’m simply stating something that has worked for me.
There are plenty more factors at play, and we could bounce them around all day between us, but we won’t. There is one vague and subtle and insidious factor that’s absolutely worth mentioning, though.
Permission.
It’s such an important thing to consider that I went so far as to put it in bold.
Where does permission to write come from? We’re most used to having it come from someone else — a funder, a commissioner, a publisher, perhaps. Money often plays into these things, once again. Sometimes it’s a teacher, a workshop leader, a facilitator of some kind, whose role it is to make us believe in our ability to do something, to override the voice in our heads telling us we’re no good at writing, the voice which questions why we’re even bothering to write in the first place.
This realisation is key — the understanding that the person whose permission we most desperately need, but find hardest to get, is usually ourselves. No permission, however, lies more readily within our grasp and our control than our own.
99 times out of 100, when you’re reaching for wisdom on something, the bearded and bespectacled legend that is Austin Kleon has already had that wise thought for you, or else he has read/heard about someone else having that thought and has made the time to share it. His take on permission is one of his greatest gifts to us, so click here to see it for yourself in all its glory.
(I didn’t know whether it would be okay to insert an image of Kleon’s actual drawing in this post, so instead I picked a stock image of a tree stump with a little shoot growing out of it, as the shoot makes a good metaphor for the thing you will be giving yourself permission to write.)
So there we are. You don’t need permission. But if you insist, here it is. Don’t thank me. Thank Austin Kleon.
True Voyage Is Return is just around the next bend. I’ll be writing a blog each week for the next five weeks to chart the progress of the project and of my new novel. And if you’re someone in Birmingham or the Black Country who’s reading this and wondering if maybe you should write something now too, for my anthology or, even more importantly, purely for yourself and for the sheer pleasure of doing it, then remember Austin Kleon’s Log Of Permission, and remember this blog — and write.
