January Blues

Reading Alongside Writing

January has been a challenging month - damp, rain filled days, a wall of grey. It’s hard to get out for long. It’s cold. For me personally, it’s brought some unexpected health challenges. Not terrible, but not great. And in February I have an eye op coming up. This, plus the news which is desperate and hard to ignore, makes me inclined to disappear. I’m trying hard not to do that, but I’m especially grateful just now for the retreat my writing provides. I am happy when I am losing myself in words. I guess that goes back to childhood when reading was a source of great wonder and comfort to me. So, the words have been flowing and in a strange way that I can’t easily describe, I’ve felt the hand of other writers at work with me. Reading their work has somehow supported my own.

Some writers contend that they cannot read while they write. I’ve been there. I’ve avoided reading at certain times. Or chosen genre fiction, a world away from my own work. But at others, like now, my reading seems to flow in tandem with my writing.

Reading Maggie O’Farrell’s, Hamnet, as I did this month, (I tried before but hadn’t got very far with it) is one example. Controversially perhaps, it’s not my favourite book of hers. I know others love it, but for me it’s feels overwritten and lacks emotion (please don’t lynch me!) But she is undoubtedly a great writer. Despite the way I feel about the book, I can still admire her skill, the world she creates, the history, the imagination, and I love the character of Agnes. Perhaps it is because of Agnes, that while I read Hamnet, my confidence in my protagonist, Elizabeth, grew. She is very different from Agnes, yet like Agnes she has a unique connection to the natural world. I took heart from this. I took heart from knowing I was just doing what all writers, unknown and known like, Maggie O’Farrell, do as they go about their work trying to bring a world and its people to life.

So often, with the way publishing operates now, writing becomes a competition between writers. It encourages bad feeling and jealousy. It’s easy to give up in this situation. Easy to feel if you are not published, not feted, not a prize-winning author you may as well not bother. This of course is nonsense but it’s hard to throw off, as are all the doubts we have. But if we can put them to one side for a moment and truly engage only with our writing, then we are free to work in a silent and supportive dialogue with other authors.

Just now, I’m reading This My Second Life, by Patrick Charnley*. It is entirely different from my current work and yet from the beginning I’ve found it inspiring. I’m inspired by its language, spare and deceptively simple. It has landed at a time when I’ve been searching too hard for words, when I’ve been writing a particular scene where Elizabeth bathes in the river Wear at dawn, when I wanted the description to be exceptional in some way, when I needed to be reminded that simple is so often best.

It goes without saying that writers need readers. But this month it occurs to me that writers need writers too, every bit as much.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Isaac Newton

Good luck with your writing. I hope it offers you the same joy and compensation that I find in mine.

Thanks for reading

Avril x

*You may be interested to know that Patrick Charnley is the son of the late Helen Dunmore, few better writers in my book. I love her work.