But It Helps

They are all around the house - lurking in dark corners as little beacons of light.

Sounds like the beginnings of a ghost story doesn’t it?

The truth is less terrifying than that.

Probably.

I write little notes and leave them all around the house, where they will do the most good.  Sometimes they are there to inspire, sometimes to offer comfort, and sometimes they even work.

Every writer knows how hard it can be to keep going.

It’s not like being the member of a band, where even if it takes them half a lifetime to reach the platform they were striving for, they are there for each other, offering a helping hand when they need it, ready to be the voice of motivation and inspiration.

Writers have something similar.

We have social networking, book events, writers festivals, and the like, but when we go home at night, it’s just us - the empty rooms full of furniture, and the darkness.

This really is beginning to sound more and more like a ghost story.

Hopefully, a good one.

But not too good.  I have to go to bed soon, and do not want to be up all night with the light on.

I digress.

Those empty cluttered rooms are a great place for padding around in while I collect my thoughts, and it’s useful to look around and see something that helps.  Even if it’s just a few words on a battered post-it note to keep me going, or to help me re-focus when my mind is wandering.

Which, you may have noticed, happens rather a lot.

Over the years they have built up into a little collection all their own.  I sometimes wish they had dates on them, but I know better.  Those dates would lead me off down a path of forgotten thought I can ill afford when I'm in padding mode.

The point of having them there is not to send me further off inside my own mind.

And usually it only takes one to bring me back.

Two at most.

Then the other day I began to notice a pattern forming.

Yes, you’ve guessed it.

They had been arranged into a meaningful symbol on the seemingly blank wall, spelling out a message from beyond the grave…

Kidding.

But there is a recurrent theme, and one  I was not consciously aware of until I saw them all together.  Each one was there to reassure the solitary, tangled writer, that she chose this life for herself.  And that she was right to do so.

Taking about yourself in the third person again?

Really?

That’s just weird.

It is true that I chose it, and that I continue to seek a solitary state of being when and where I can, so I can think and write without interruption or disruption.

There is a reason why the solitary, tangled writer lives in the middle of nowhere, on top of a lonely windswept hill, with little more than sheep as her company.

Little much, don’t you think?

You have plenty of neighbours around you, and willing to help you out should you ask, but it is your choice to close the curtains and hide inside your world.

And that third person thing really is weird.

Even weirder than the noises that come in the night, the scratching in the walls, the eerie sounds that pass by in the darkness, the creaking of floorboards in the empty attic above your head…

Thanks.

That’s just what I need.

Yes, what I really needed to help me sleep tonight was another round of ‘Guess the Noise’ when my logical brain has gone to sleep, my overactive imagination has taken control, and sounds that make sense in the light of day, somehow gain a new and unknown resonance in the darkness.

Alone.

But by choice.

That’s what the little sayings and notes scribbled in moments of blind inspiration say to me, from their deliberately random places around the house.

You chose to be on your own because you understood that in order to give yourself the time and space to write, particularly when you have to work a full-time day job to pay the bills, you have to give yourself…

...well, the time and space to write.

The solitary, tangled writer had to see if she really was a writer, with the passion to write her words every day, or if for her it was just a hobby, one that would peter out with the wide open space of freedom for her mind.

Okay, that third person thing is really weirding me out now so I’m going to go and read something nice and calming, then perhaps I will sleep later.

M.R. James perhaps.

Or a little Edgar Allan Poe.

Hey, if I’m going to be up all night, might as well make it worthwhile.

Remember, you don’t have to be alone to be a writer…

But it helps.