Who are you as a writer?

John Warner’s ‘The Writer’s Practice’ begins with an assignment based on a simple question. Who are you as a writer?

This is not really a simple question, as it happens, but here goes…

In my earliest memories, certainly since learning to put pen on paper, I have been compelled to write.  Flashbacks show a tiny me writing stories and making little books, some of which survive as yellowed, crumpled things caught in time. 

Despite this compulsion, writing has bubbled and spluttered rather than flowed. While the appetite for writing is vast, discipline wanes and waxes. I get excited about a project, go at it like the clappers but soon get bored, distracted or forgetful. 

Consequently there have been long, dry spells between bursts of creativity, like an inconsistent flowering plant. 

Therefore, putting a chronology around it is difficult. I’ve carried and filled notebooks for most of my adult life and often tended to writing or, minimally, thinking about writing

The journey witnessed many experiments with style, form and voice. Vague dreams and visions cast me as some kind of Renaissance scrivener , gliding between these elements with ease. 

Through school I enjoyed writing stories for English and poetry for myself. As a teenager I wrote acoustic songs that felt like hits but are now lost to time. Mainly this was to impress girls. 

Adopting blogging early, I invented characters and made several lost blogs to share them. When email was fairly new I did a monthly newsletter called ‘Observations from 66 Inches’ (estimating that 66 inches was roughly where my eye line was, in case you are wondering). 

In 2012 I joined a collective of like-minded writers to create a website, The Flack, a forum to write about whatever we liked, mostly sport and pop culture. It did pretty well for a couple of years and ended slow sudden, as things often do. 

It was deeply enjoyable to build something people liked while having the enforced discipline to publish content every day, even if it wasn’t my own work. The Flack also addressed a key issue for solo bloggers –  keeping new content coming while meeting your own expectations of quality. 

As mentioned, I’ve kept diaries and journals for some time and even turned one of them, an account of a trip down Tasmania’s Franklin River, into a paid magazine article. 

 I’ve started a number of novels,  finishing a draft of one and arguably two. They exist, which is enough on one  level, but aren’t very polished. I wrote and self published a bland semi-autobiographical travel book called ‘The Adventure’, where not much happened except trying a bit too hard to be profound. 

Ironically, since the goal had always been ‘get published’, holding that book in my hand with its dodgy printing and cheap paper took the wind from my motivation sails, like a box ticked. Getting published made me stop writing, if that makes sense.

While I shared the book with a few people, it was largely a creative secret. I was afraid to share, embarrassed really, so kept it quiet because in that way, you don’t risk anything much.

I have a shitty handwritten draft of something which is currently half typed and might be a novel if it can be unravelled, but aside from this are always a bunch of cogitating ideas which rise to the surface now and again like stonefruit pips in a garden bed.

I’ve wasted a lot of time exploring how writers work and their process but in doing so, avoided creating a routine or body of work which lives in the world and the light.

I have a blog now, which you are reading,  but publish intermittently. The pandemic allowed me to do this more often and I wrote a lot about education and my experiences and views on teaching and learning during that time. 

My writing can be funny, I think, and the best voice is irreverent and lively, perhaps bombastic or angry, with the odd morsel of wise observation and analysis. Gee, that sentence makes me sound like a wanker.

I always liked writing about sport and pop culture, but in the main I write to illuminate the world a bit, sharing what I notice or am curious about. I like the way words work together, creating rhythm or friction depending on how you mix them. 

At one point  I considered adopting a serious nom de plume, Jonathon Boyd, to maintain privacy when I got big and famous in my fantasy world. Wow.

I imagined creating a distinct and proud Australian voice rather than look lovingly over the seas to more worthy places or ways of being; a desire to tackle cultural cringe and the mania of the grass being greener elsewhere always fascinated, intrigued and maybe chafed and acted as fuel.

 Sometimes I leaned into the tortured or manic artist view, staying up late smoking, drinking and bashing away. On reflection, these were times raw material built up too much and these bouts of creativity were a necessary purge or catharsis. 

Sometimes I was in love or depressed or both; adrift in some vast space, trying to write my way back to equilibrium. 

I was striving to meet some kind of romantic creative ideal where you wait around for inspiration to well up and overflow so you had no choice but to write. 

In contrast, at other times I tried to be steady and schedule it like a job, which is where I am now – understanding the most likely path to writing is to get your reps in and accept that most of what you write will be shit.

I write because I like the solitude and the process, using music as a short cut to flow. I write about what I see and notice and try to make sense of what I am feeling or curious about. I don’t like writing on a computer but do so for convenience, preferring  to write by hand with a nice fountain pen and good paper, which is a slow process because typing second drafts is suboptimal. 

Topics or projects come to me in that halfway state between waking and sleep, on long walks or hot showers. Enduring, big, persistent ideas tend to percolate and mature somewhere just north of subconscious, a smidgen south of conscious. 

In that way I am more gardener than architect. I was fortunate enough to see George RR Martin speak in Melbourne once, just in the early part of the Game of Thrones boom, and he described writers this way. 

“Some people throw seeds in the ground and wait to see what comes up. These people are gardeners. Others need to know ahead of time what colour the walls will be and the couch cushions, or how every detail fits together. These are the architects.” Okay, I am paraphrasing, but the gist of his words stuck with me. 

I have spent a good deal of my writing life hating or punishing myself for not writing as I love it so much. This meant working in patternless short bursts, then weathering the self loathing at all other times. It was the life of a procrastinator, avoider, gunna. 

I’ve also long believed that my work, teaching, takes the best bits of my creative energy, so despite all the holidays I took a long time to feel like writing and usually inspiration would come  late in the holidays. 

Maybe some of this is true, though on reflection it looks like an excuse.

It concealed a crippling fear of rejection and criticism, I suppose, behind a veil of perfectionism too. Steven King, in ‘On Writing”, shared his maxim – ‘write with the door closed, edit with the door open.’

I heeded this advice but took it to extremes, especially the first part. I was too timid to show people my work, so edited with the door open just a crack. If I did share, it was  like shoving pages under a door late at night, knocking and running away to watch from a safe distance. 

Mostly I have written with the door closed tight against the world, protecting my dirty creative secret, with a figurative chair against the door handle to prevent surprises.

Driven by motivation, inspiration or frustration I have ‘come out’ as a writer several times, leading to me starting a new blog or sign up to a writer’s group. Yet, by habit or choice, I always returned to that locked room. 

So who am I as a writer? 

I am all the things described – a mix of personalities or voices determined by attention, curiosity and mood, too ill-disciplined and scatty to settle on any one voice or style. There is no strong through line; I lack the patience of a novelist or the earnest, consistent soul of a poet. 

 In a nutshell, a writer of all kinds of things, pin balling around like a scribbling bird but hiding it, for the most part, beneath a protective shroud.

Growing older, confronting the inevitable finitude of life, I understand better that writing goes well beyond liking to do it. I need to do it and when I don’t, or can’t,  pressure builds. 

 It is a hunger or profound need, like a vampire needs blood or a runner stretch their legs into the wind. 

Writing is, I think, the thing that I was put here to do. At least, if one does not believe in the idea of fate, it is something that I do pretty well. More than that, writing is something I must do. Writing is a compulsion and it is better for everyone, especially me, that I do it regularly, regardless of where it goes.