writing

On Making a Creative Comeback (With Carmel)

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Carmel Bird is holding a writing workshop here in Hobart next week. That’s good. Ms Bird is an Australian literary legend, something most tutors can’t claim to be.

What’s not so good, though, is my reluctance to attend.

So why won’t I be making a creative comeback with Carmel, having spent years hiding my literary lights – dim though they be – under a bushel?

Money, first of all. I’m on a ‘smash the mortgage’ kick at the moment so there ain’t much left over for luxuries, literary or otherwise.

Pride, too. I hate admitting to myself – less so to others – that I’m not king of this writing caper. Did I tell you that I’ve published three stories?

And anxiety, last of all. About writing to please others and not just myself. Therein lies the secret to my startling (lack of) success.

Carmel, here I come!

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I Write Therefore I Am (Not Necessarily Read)

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Frustrated. It’s one of those rare things: a song by The Knack that isn’t ‘My Sharona’. It’s also what I’ve been feeling for months. For decades, even, if I count the rest.

I’m no different, I know, to all the other unfulfilled lucky white guys who ever lived – in Maslow we trust – and yet knowing this doesn’t make my frustration any less, er, frustrating.

Or bearable. For a day doesn’t go by without me dreaming up some half-baked solution.

What is it, then, that I so badly need to let out? Energy? Emotion? Spermatozoa? I think not. Words, most likely: those little whizzbangs that build up in people like me, people who know they’re not being noticed.

The antidote? Writing, of course. A daily twelve-dozen (d12d) words on any trope, topic or theme.

I write therefore I am. Half-baked if ever I heard it.

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