I am sitting across the dinner table from
my sister-in-law when I realise something: I don’t want to be with my husband
anymore. The thought comes together innocently enough. It’s one of those
background thoughts that play over someone’s conversation. You’re not fully
committed to what the other person is saying, and so you have a few tabs open
in the background: Bugger, I forgot washing up liquid; Did I send that email,
or just draft it – must check; Can’t remember whether the car is booked in for
the morning or the afternoon, better check that too; I think I want to leave my
husband; Is this chicken cooked?
*
The title of this post is slightly disingenuous; let me
just be up front and admit that to you right now. I didn’t do a bad thing, at
all. In fact, I did what I think is probably a very smart thing.
If you follow my PhD posts then you know I am about to
start what will be the fourth – and, I hope, final – edit on my PhD novel. At this
stage it is very much a labour of love because, while I am as passionate about
my protagonist as I was three years ago, it is still three years spent working
on the same book with some level of intensity – and that, my friends, can get a
little tiring. I am happy – that’s an overstatement but I’ll edit a better
emotion in at some point – to be going back to the book, even though I am
slightly nervous about it, too. My supervisor tells me that it will work my
creativity a little; although the stroppy child that is my creative brain is
going: ‘But whhhhyyy do I have to ediiiiiit mooooooore?’ It’s creative editing,
if you will, because there will be new writing – but there will also be more
line edits, and we all know how much writers just love line edits...
Enter complicating action: While I am on the cusp of
editing one book, my brain is cracking its knuckles and making plans for
another. And I will not succumb to the temptation. I want to – God only knows
how much I want to – but I also know that I cannot give enough time to two
projects of this magnitude to do them both justice, particularly when I am so
close to finishing one of them already. I will wait – because the idea will
still be there; the perfect notebook (given to me by a dear friend at my book
launch), will still be there; my words will still be there – and better still,
I will have the time to write that with the intensity and enthusiasm with which
I have written my PhD novel and that, I think, is the key to sticking it
through these longer projects.
This is all logical – especially for the creative brains
who may be reading this. It makes sense and I have thought about this long and
hard, discussing it with fellow creatives along the way.
‘You can’t give yourself entirely to two projects; it’s
definitely best to wait,’ one writer-friend recently told me – and she’s right.
So I – the human, logical individual I – am waiting. My
brain:
Not so good with the waiting...
So this morning after I had rolled downstairs – not literally,
although you can pull on that funny image whenever you need it today – I made
my tea, I booted up my laptop, and I opened a fresh word document. I had a line
rattling around my brain: ‘That’s when I realised I wanted to leave my husband’,
and I ran with it. For just over 1000 words, I ran with it. It isn’t a story –
although one day I may discover that it’s part of one, or a prompt for one, we’ll
see – but it was forty minutes of unencumbered creativity and my brain? Well...
It was good stretch, and whether it amounts to anything or
not seems entirely inconsequential given how good my brain feels for having
done it. So my bad thing – ignoring my book for an hour to write something else
– may actually have been a smart move for the book overall. And even if it wasn’t
– at least I took my brain for a walk...
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