'I do not write to keep. I write to feel.'
Finding fragments of old writing, writing excavations, signals from the past and the future.
🗓 Dates to note: Restorative Writing Season 1 - Core Practices
☀️ Launches Monday 6 May
✨ Next live Zoom Writing Together session:
Sat 11 May 4-5pm (UK summertime)
Hello, dear writing friends.
If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll know that I’m currently on a short sabbatical from my teaching in a Creative Writing department and, as part of the projects I have planned, I’m looking back through work I’ve done from over the past twenty years or so.
This means that I keep finding notebooks and Google documents full of surprises: essays, poems, doodled outlines, books I began then had to put aside because life or work took over, or perhaps because the writing just began to feel all wrong in some way and I had to cut, cut, cut.
talks about this in her gorgeous Substack . She tells us that every novel she writes has its own ‘ghost novel,’ the words that she cuts and files away in another document. She says:‘The only way I can write is by stripping any notion of preciousness from the words I write with, to completely squander them and tell myself every one is provisional, every one can be changed, if it has to be and if I will it. Otherwise I will just sit there and terrify myself with the idea of perfection.’
The documents in which she keeps these cut away words are ‘documents not of failure, but of proof of moving and trying.’
I love this.
It’s also fascinating to read that Sophie originally cut the first half of her novel Cursed Bread and started again, writing from a different character’s point of view. Cursed Bread is a stunning novel that I couldn’t put down.