It grows in the same way we do.

Born from a seed of inspiration, it grows awkwardly, messily, and unbound into adolescence. Stumbles into the teenage years, where nothing works, and everything feels out of place. Hopeless. Eventually arrives at adulthood. Though it remains eternally unfinished, it begins to take shape. Starts to resemble something whole. Complete. A fusion of ideas, observations and experiences collected into a story.

The process through which art is created is equally reminiscent of life.

The panic that it will not come together.

The fear that inspiration will not strike.

The inability to control how and when it arrives.

The effort required to maintain motivation when the initial high inevitably dwindles.

The satisfaction when everything kind of works out in the end.

And it all begins with inspiration.

Keeping my imagination consistently stimulated is essential for me. My well must be constantly overflowing with half-baked ideas, to enable me to swat away the engulfing Doom of Writer’s Block.

I’ve been analysing my relationship with inspiration. Figuring out ways to shift my mindset to keep the spark constantly flickering. It’s been interesting.

I’ve learned that my writing is comprised mostly of an amalgamation of four sources of inspiration. Shadows of ideas trickle in, are categorised and left to stew. Eventually, they bubble to the surface, revealing themselves as the missing ingredient that ties everything together.

Very satisfying.

1. The Greater Picture - Theme

This relates to the world beyond my own. A discourse around world events (SOS). A conversation that strikes a chord. Societal structures that I feel the need to explore. A moment in the cultural zeitgeist that stays with me. Something that resonates, pulls me in, compels me to engage with it. To investigate it in some way. To connect with the motivations that drive those with opposing worldviews. Not to agree, but to understand.

Which is why I write, really. Stories help me make sense of the external world.

2. The Personal - Character

I write fiction. My characters are fictional. And yet, elements of myself exist within all of them.

As if for each character, a certain part of myself is centred, amplified, modified and used as the outline within which a fictional person is created. It’s how I connect to the work. I will not centre a story around the experiences of a middle-aged man, because those are not experiences I can relate to.

There is always some of me in my characters, even though they are not me. Confusing, perhaps. A line that is easily blurred. People often struggle to separate the art from the artist. Which is fair. It is only natural that people associate your art with you. The creator.

But I think there has to exist some personal truth in art. If there weren’t, it really wouldn’t be good, and it really wouldn’t be art. An expression of the human condition cannot be created without humanity.

3. The Random

This well is filled by the mundane. The everyday. People watching. Wandering around bookshops. Browsing antique stores. Taking public transport. I’ve discovered that my daily bus route is one of the richest sources of inspiration at my disposal. Something about the routine of it all. The strangers living their lives, the interactions, the constant movement, the time to observe. I watch the scenes unfold with a near voyeuristic fascination.

This is something I learned during my acting training. And it works.

Selecting a stranger, observing them. Watching the specificity of their actions, creating a backstory, and imagining the motivations behind their decisions.

Who they are. What they want. What is their morning routine? What is their coffee order? Creating a world for them to exist within.

The stories start writing themselves.

Find myself frantically jotting down fragmented and very misspelt notes in a never-ending email chain with myself. These ideas arrive rapidly, urgently and tend not to linger. Noting them down immediately is essential. Annoying for my fellow travellers, I’m sure, when I pause suddenly on the footpath, in a busy train station, or halfway out of the bus to jot down a thought.

We spend so much of our lives racing from A to B, letting the world pass us by. Or, I do, anyway. Busy in my head, rehearsing conversations that will never happen, I disconnect from my surroundings, filtering out the abundance of inspiration around me.

Something I’ve been trying recently, and enjoying immensely, is exploring the world with focused attention, using all my senses. Plant myself down somewhere, listen to the sounds, analyse the smells, tastes, sights and feelings that I experience, and write them down. Doesn’t take me long to fill a few pages.

I quickly learned that there is a story in everything. A scrap of rubbish being trailed along the grey concrete by a lazy breeze suddenly lights up an idea that has nearly fully decayed with dormancy.

4. The Craft

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I enjoy experimenting. Selecting a specific style, genre, format or tone and challenging myself to create within that barometer.

A piece I wrote recently titled “Control Your Rage, Fix Your Mind, or Don’t” explores a woman attempting to control her anger.

I don’t experience anger as she does. I’m not generally an angry person.

But when I read about the 62 million Academy (the Greater Picture), I certainly felt enraged. So I magnified that feeling (the Personal), and that became the scaffolding on which I built that character. My goal was to use pace and rhythm to create a claustrophobic atmosphere. The aim was to create tension in the reader that mirrored the character’s anger. (the Craft)

The series “Nodus Tollens” I am currently writing started as a desire to centre a project around journal entries. The intimacy, honesty and unfiltered nature of the format seemed an interesting lens through which to explore a character. (the Craft)

I have had conversations with many women in my life who feel an inexplicable underlying dissatisfaction with their lives. The source of which feels impossible to identify. Like they are living a life that isn’t truly theirs. Or the life they thought they wanted isn’t what they want anymore. This idea struck a chord and swirled around my mind for a long time. (Greater Picture)

Naturally, there are aspects of this character’s journey that mirror my own life experiences. (The Personal)

The title appeared to me through a vocabulary app I downloaded. (The Random)

“Nodus Tollens - The realisation that your life story doesn’t make sense to you anymore”

This felt immediately significant and became the thread that tied these different sources together. And so, this project was born.

My short story “Mr Rooney” was inspired by my many years in the trenches of customer service.

Last year, while working at a yoga centre, a very angry man arrived at 7 am to berate me for the price of yoga mats. Jaded, (as the character is), by the relentlessness of being the punching bag on which strangers unload their misplaced anger, inspiration struck. Random. For sure. Grateful now, as this interaction led to the short story, which in turn inspired the novel I am currently writing. The piece of work I am most excited about.

(Please don’t take that as a go-ahead to be rude to customer service staff)

Anyway. It is endlessly interesting to me to talk to other artists, peek behind the curtain and learn how the proverbial sausage is made.

I really hate that expression. There must be a less visceral way to say that… “How the proverbial bread is baked?” Let’s go with that.

So this is how my bread is baked.

The Craft provides structure.

The Greater Picture provides a theme.

The Random provides specifics.

The Personal creates the character.

The Character drives the plot.

And, I’m just here for the ride.

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The Woman's Gaze TikTok

This happened to me recently. Beginning the edit on something I wrote transported me back into my childhood. Maths homework (which may as well have been rocket science) stained with tears born from a brain numbed by confusion. Utterly devoid of confidence.

Shifting between a diehard fan and the snootiest critic of your writing becomes quickly tiresome. And confusing. Hard to know which voice is truthful. Which to listen to.

The fangirl could simply be delusional. Her reverence, that of a doting mother fawning over her daughter’s mediocre doodles. Desire clouding reality.

It is also not impossible that the critic slanders, with insidious lies, to sabotage. Her nagging voice, bellowing our shortcomings with deafening conviction, the internalisation of a naysayer, haunting us from our past.

I have yet to meet a writer, or artist of any kind, for that matter, who has not felt the plague of Imposter Syndrome.

Symptoms include:

Crushing self-doubt. Life-threatening fear. Brutal self-talk. Like, extremely brutal. Procrastination. Desperation. Spiralling. The aforementioned gut-wrenching cringe. Shudders cascading from head to toes. More procrastination. Confusion. Tears.

That’s just me, though. The experience, like everything, is subjective.

A few things seem to spark this in me.

1. Too. Much. Noise.

Too much advice. The rise in AI.

Will people even read human writing anymore?

External validation. Making yourself marketable. Write like this. For them. An imaginary audience. Impossible to impress. Fictitious judgments, quickly internalised. Nattering criticisms. Spitting out comparisons. The chorus of disapproving commentary drowns out your own voice. Start second-guessing every word. Overthinking. It becomes transactional. No longer creative. No longer self-expression. No longer experimental, brave or curious. The doomful settling of writer’s block, a cape of shame, around your shoulders.

The remedy?

Refine what matters to you, drop everything else. Focus on the ideas that spark your curiosity. Write. Write more. Write badly. Write the bad to get to the good. Write only for yourself. Keep learning. Becoming better is a gift. Not a punishment.

2. Deviation from initial vision

When the work begins to take on a life of its own. You, the creator, are at the whim of the story. No longer in control. A beautiful feeling. When you can let go. Let it flow. That’s the sauce. The peak. The pinnacle of creativity.

Sometimes, however, relinquishing control can be difficult. You resist the flow because it takes you down a path not outlined. Clinging to the initial spark with a determined grip. Stubbornly committed to a story that is not the one that needs to be told. Holding onto a boulder, about to topple off a mountain, whilst wearing a parachute.

The remedy?

Submit. Release control. Write to understand the story. The world. The character. Not to control them. Strive for expression, not perfection.

Easy as that, right?

Thinking of art as a representation of life is helpful. For me, at least. Sometimes, a mere week of trudging through life’s ordeals can deliver a new perspective. Illuminate a path previously concealed by a lack of experience. It often feels like this results in endlessly extended finish lines, inescapable editing loops. Frustrating, for sure. Not necessarily a bad thing, though. More colour to your story. More life in your world. Evidence of growth.

Life is messy. So why can’t art be messy too?

That’s the contradiction. You love it, you hate it. You’re brilliant, you’re awful. You want to give up, but you simply cannot.

That is the essence of art, and also maybe the essence of life.

So (and this is mostly me talking to myself), get over it. Move on. Keep going.

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Repeating until it became gospel, that whatever it was, wasn’t right. Convincing myself it wouldn’t work for me. Wasn’t something I could or would do. Too risky.

Hindsight, age, (a little more) wisdom, experience, whatever you want to call it, has me looking at it with fresh eyes. The problem was not that I couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t. The issue was that the voice of reason was fear in disguise. Anxiety masked as sensibility.

It hasn’t delivered on the safety and security it promised.

Being a kid or teenager who is often in trouble can create an ever-present, underlying guilt. A feeling that you’re doing something wrong, about to be caught out. For me, that manifested as a distrust towards my instincts. I allowed things that could have made me really happy to fade away, hearty notions.

This led me to embrace choices that weren’t right for me, but I knew people I looked up to and was surrounded by would approve of them. Or, even society as a whole.

Following the carefully laid out rulebook that’s dictated to us. Laws for a happy life. I don’t think any of those decisions made me happy.

I kept finding myself back in the same place. Longing for more. The only way I’ve found to satisfy that longing is to lean into the chaos. Embrace the things that scare me. Scare me in a good way. Not a claustrophobic fear. A toeing the precipice kind of fear.

The voice saying, “I just want to see what happens.” Listen to that, the curiosity in it. Doing what might feel a little bit unhinged and a little bit like a bad idea. And maybe it is, and maybe it goes terribly wrong, and maybe it doesn’t give you everything that you wanted. But it might teach you something. About yourself. You’ll evolve. Forward motion. From stagnation to movement.

It feels like the most painful memories aren’t of being laughed at when trying something (which, honestly, rarely happens), or rejection or even failure. It’s the unclosed loops. The things you wanted that still live in you, now doused in regret. The only way to guarantee failure is to give up. The only way to guarantee rejection is to talk yourself out of something before you even attempt to reach for it.

Also, an important thing to remember… Most people don’t care about what you’re doing.

That’s the advice I’m trying to follow. Even writing this piece. I don’t think anyone cares about my opinion. Why should they? But fuck it, I’m putting it out there.

Check back in a few months. Maybe I’ll have completely changed my tune and decided that a little bit of trepidation is a good thing.

But, for now, I’m not listening to that voice. I’m not listening to the story it tells me anymore. Instead, I’m going to pay attention to the feelings that come up in my body. What makes my heart beat faster, what makes my breath catch in my throat, what sends tingles through me. That’s a good indication that it might be something worth pursuing. Not without fear, but despite it.

Anyway, this might all blow up on my face, but at least it will make a good story. Hopefully.