The Plight of Writing

Kindling conviction through commitment.

Dear ones,

A couple of weeks ago I broke my self-imposed spending ban to purchase a powerful meditation on personal narrative by writer and memoirist Melissa Febos. I had been struggling to remind myself of the reasons why a woman writing herself whole is in fact a radical act and Body Work arrived and shook me out of my stupor at the very moment I needed it most.

To cut a long story short, I’ll just say that this small book had a big impact on me. So much so that upon finishing it and finding out that the author will be visiting Manchester in May for an evening in conversation with Helen Mort – whose memoir on motherhood and mountain climbing I am planning to dive into next – I took it upon myself to book a ticket to the event. This might not seem like a particularly drastic act until I mention that in order to attend, I’ll need to spend almost nine hours on a National Express, shell out the money for a hotel room for the night and then leave bright and early the next morning so I can make it back to my children by bedtime.

You might wonder what would possess me to travel such a long distance just to listen to these two women wax lyrical about writing. Well, the answer is achingly simple: Melissa’s words made me feel something. Her book was far more than food for thought, it provoked a sense of resonance that has remained with me. I didn’t even realise that I had started to place more weight, more value, on how my words were being received by others than on the rewards I reap from the process itself. I had almost discarded my dream of becoming an author, but this book implored me to recommit to my writing with my whole heart.

Since I finished reading Body Work I have been experiencing an unprecedented surge of creative inspiration: from ideas for exciting new topics that I want to explore in more depth, to paragraphs of prose that flowed so perfectly that they just had to be added to the memoir I was so sure I was finished writing. Yesterday, I found the courage and conviction to send out my next round of submissions. Here’s hoping that this time I’ve found my way into the right person’s inbox.

Before I wish you a wonderful weekend, I want to share a short passage from this wisdom filled book that helped me determine the parts of my own work where I was still holding something back. I hope it helps you find clarity too, if that’s something you have been searching for:

“Over the years, I've come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day's words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part. That resistance is a kind of imaginative prophylactic, a barrier between me and a new idea. It is the end of the ideas that I already had when I came to the page – the exhaustion of narrative threads that were previously sewn into me by sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity. It is on the other side of that threshold that the truly creative awaits me, where I might make something that did not already exist. I just have to punch through that false wall.”

– Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.

With Love,

Laura x

Body Work by Melissa Febos featuring one of my many houseplants.