Stepping Into The Future

'Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.'

Anaïs Nin, Diary, 1969

This is a shorter post than usual because I'm on the move, or at least I'm about to be. Good news is that my publisher has lifted the geographical restrictions from my new novel, Flight, so if you are outside of Australia or New Zealand, you can now buy the ebook through Amazon. Unfortunately these restrictions haven't yet been lifted on my earlier novel, Gathering Storm, so that might still be difficult to obtain.

Over the past week or two I've begun packing my study into boxes, sorting my books and notes into three categories: those I no longer need, those I want but can be parted with for a few years, and those that I will need with me in Wales. This last category will take three months to reach me, and as I pack them away I feel more and more bereft, cut off from the knowledge within their pages and afraid that there isn't enough knowledge within me to draw on in their place. I've become reliant on the knowledge of others, subsumed into the academic way of thinking that demands arguments are supported by the weight of history not personal experience. Now, or at least for a few months, I will need to draw on my own reserves. Perhaps this will be good for me. But nevertheless I feel a surge of trepidation as I tape up the last of the boxes and wait for the removal company to collect them.

I look around my empty writing room. I have written novels here, completed my PhD, written numerous blog posts and essays. . . This space and I have got along together, understood each others needs and over time become an effective writing team. But now the comfortable writing space that I have constructed over a number of years is gone. The atmosphere has changed beyond recognition. Noises bounce around the bare walls; it feels colder, less friendly, a room that awaits a new occupant, a new stage in its history. Perhaps I will come back to it one day, perhaps not. Either way, for the next few months I will be writing in strange places: motel rooms, airports, planes, trains, the homes of friends and relatives, a caravan . . . Until I find a new home, I will have to make do, be less precious about shutting the door to the rest of the world, less precious about my writing rituals, and instead carry my creativity with me, drawing on it as and when I get the opportunity. I think back to all the excuses I've used in the past for not writing (see Writing Space and Time) no space (physical or mental), no time, no focus, no confidence. . . all of the excuses inspired by fear: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of confronting what is inside me that needs to be written, fear of writing what I have confronted inside myself. . . I have forced myself to overcome so many fears, rarely understanding their source, only recognising the danger of the paralysis they create.

All this time spent cocooned inside my writing room has meant a good deal of looking inwards, numerous terrifying and exhilarating descents into the psyche to dig up the shadows within. No doubt there will be many more of these descents because life was never intended to be static. And who would want it that way? But for now it feels as if I am suddenly being turned inside out. Forced to emerge blinking into the light. A butterfly? Perhaps not, but transformed nevertheless. And ready to live well in the world. Now I will write wherever I find myself, drawing on that reserve of strength and confidence which we all carry within ourselves. There will always be fear but this time, instead of overcoming it, I will take its hand and together we will step into the future.

Posts on Writer's Block:

Sticking Points

Coming Unstuck

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Banishing The Fear

'We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path: and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; and where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; and where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.'

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

There's no doubt about it, I'm afraid to begin my new novel. This happens to me every time I am about to launch into a new project. Perhaps it happens to everyone, I don't know, but I do know that the thought of sitting down and committing words to paper sends my stomach into somersaults and my heart rate soaring. Perhaps it is a simple fear of failure, the fear that this time I will have nothing to say, or no proper means to say it. The fear that my muse/s will abandon me, that inspiration will dry up and I will be left with empty words. Or perhaps it is a reluctance to mark the page because each mark is a choice and each choice closes off other choices, so as a new story begins to expand, paradoxically its potential begins to contract. Perhaps it's a fear of the commitment, which once taken will absorb much of my life for a period of time, turning me into a distant figure to my family and friends. I know from past experience that I will once again become immersed in the world of my story and the characters who inhabit it, and begin to resent any intrusions into that world. However, my reluctance to begin doesn't just relate to the time it will take to write this novel, or the immersion in another realm that is inevitable; it's also the journey itself that frightens me, with its peaks and troughs, because although this novel is a work of fiction it is filtered through me. In order to write it I will once again be forced to venture deep into the underworld in order to face my demons and bring them out into the light.

In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood states that she believes all writing 'of the narrative kind. . . is motivated by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.' As I see it, the underworld represents our unconscious selves and the journey to it, a delving into what is long buried. Writing a story for me is a way of reclaiming the pieces of myself, of my soul, that have been lost, either given away or stolen. It is a way of gathering myself back together again - of making myself whole.

These journeys into the underworld are an initiation of sorts, into a deeper form of perception, a new esoteric understanding of the deeper laws of the universe. In Shapeshifters, writer, storyteller and healer, Luisah Teish describes a personal life changing experience: 'When I talk about the me that I was before that experience, I find myself saying, “she,” a third person. I understand that it's my personal history. It's not like a slate was wiped clean, but everything that plagued me before has been turned into compost out of which the new me was growing.'

Whatever their genre or medium, many contemporary stories mirror heroic myths, both in their structure and in the elements that make up their plots. Each story involves a character leaving the safety and stasis of their ordinary world and being plunged into a new and dangerous world, one in which they don't know the rules and where they must undergo a series of adventures. The second stage of the journey involves accepting change, stepping into the abyss with no idea what lies ahead. Like birds we must be willing to fall in order to fly. Risks are taken, and if successful there is a reward of some kind. The final stage involves returning to the 'ordinary world', understanding and integrating the reward and using it as is appropriate. A new status quo is reached and the protagonist has changed in some way.

When I complete a novel, in a sense I have become a new person, as have my characters. According to Christopher Vogler, in The Writer's Journey, 'The Hero's Journey and the Writer's Journey are one and the same. Anyone setting out to write a story soon encounters all the tests, trials, ordeals, joys and rewards of the Hero's journey. . . Writing is an often perilous journey inward to probe the depths of one's soul and bring back the Elixir of experience. ' The act of writing changes the writer. To write a story is to descend into the underworld with only a few clues and no guarantee of a way back out again. It's a dangerous process, exhausting and filled with apprehension, but it's also a magical journey. This is what I must remember as I embark on my new novel, because although it is natural to feel fear, it's not okay to allow ourselves to be limited by it. And if I'm honest with myself, this fear I'm feeling is mixed with a delicious anticipation. . . It is time to begin.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/