Fictional musings

I have been doing a bit of editing this past while (and loving it) and have been asked by several different people if I intend on writing anything myself at any time soon. This is a question that I have struggled with on and off ever since starting my University career. Before that time I would write little dribbles of stories and had several more ideas brewing at all times. But then all that was cut off partially by being busy developing actual writing skills (although I never took part in a creative writing workshop so just dealing with the mechanics of writing) and partially by seeing what good writing truly looks like from the inside. I realize now that what I liked to compose during my highschool days were really just written-out daydreams. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I've just passed by the stage in which I want to imagine my life being lived out in a multitude of other ways. What it all comes down to is that I have very little inspiration left.

So now I generally fill any creative writing desire (along with satisfactions of other kinds) with the type of editing I have been doing recently - working with an author to improve a text. But unexpectedly, having been asked to write a review of the text as a whole I found myself plunged into the musings of what writing is all about. The whole process (to a certain extent) came back at me and I found myself asking myself the same questions I have been asked as to why I haven't been writing more.

At just this point in time I was loaned a book written by Fay Weldon called Letters to Alice, on first reading Jane Austen in which Fay writes to a (fictional) niece who is an aspiring writer. The book is a blend of a lovely critique of Austen and of sage, and occasionally off-beat, advice on what it is like to be a writer. This book came to me at the exact time when what she had to say fit perfectly both with what I was hoping to articulate in my review and with what I needed to hear personally.

I still do not know if I shall ever take up my pen to attempt to compose literature (I find that Fay expressed my position better than I could with the simple phrase: "the paralysis of the over-literate") but I now have the urge to work on that side of my creativity more so it's a start. And I have plans on sharing some of my favourite quotes from the book here in the near future so it will not all be in vain in any case. I shall leave you at this point with one of the quotes that should give me a certain amount of comfort: "Fiction is much safer than non-fiction. You can be accused of being boring, but seldom of being wrong."