It all started quite innocently with me peeling potatoes onto newsprint from the recycling cupboard. I had been thinking about my writing for a while by then and wondering how to get over eight years of writers' block.
My biggest problem is that I am not Margaret Atwood.
Cannot write like Margaret Atwood.
And am never going to be her, or write Handmaid's Tale.
So why write?
Glancing down my eye was caught by a piece of at least 800 words about some arb man's experience with a shoddy handyman and his two garden gates. I kid you not. And they actually pay people to write this stuff? And publish it in a newspaper?
I took this as a sign. If this boring old fart writer could earn an income - then I should at least keep writing.
I may never live up to my expectations. But I love to write. And so I will.
But not about my gates.
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And since I don’t seem to be able to avoid having a quote for every occasion:
"Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome."
Marguerite Duras (Writing)