Habit of mind

Do you find writing really easy? Does it come straight away, or do you have to think a lot to get your greatest works out?

I tend to write about things that annoy me, and not just annoy, but I am constantly looking at things and going, ‘That’s not right. This should be put forward’, and just look at things like that…. go I am lucky I have the opportunity to write and go, ‘Look at this. What do you think about this?’ Basically that’s how I approach it, that I am looking at situations, and going ‘This is wrong. Why is this like that?’ And a lot of the time it’s about those people not having a voice, or that opportunity not being able to be put forward. So that’s kind of how…. so I have always got something on the boil, and thinking about things, and looking at you know, constantly the question ‘Why?’ So for me it’s really easy. I could be going for a swim, or just a run, or mucking around with friends and stuff like that, and I am always writing. That’s how I look at it.

Yeah, there’s lots of similarities and I think for obvious reasons I’m sure…. I think…yeah, that notion of curiosity is really important, and I think writing is a habit. It is. It’s a habit of mind. And I constantly am in the habit of having conversations with myself. Whether that is healthy or not I don’t know. But you know that is what I do, and because I am forever holding arguments in my head, and I’ll be out biking, I really enjoy cycling, and for whatever reason, going up hills is the very best time for me thinking, and it may well have something to do with blood flow, it may just be trying to ignore the pain or whatever. But it is, it’s like everything else, it’s absolutely a habit.

You know if you go overseas and for whatever reason you are not driving for three years cos you haven’t got a car, and you come back and suddenly driving feels really weird and awkward again, although it seemed very natural, and then you get back into the habit. So, I find writing badly, very, very easy, and I find writing well, very, very hard. I guess that’s the other thing. It’s that getting it out there in the first place. Getting it on paper is the easy part. And then looking at it and going, ‘Well that’s actually really awful. How do I now make it good?’ is the blood sweat and tears part. And it’s sort of both.

Totally agree with both of these guys. I have the same…. I get very passionate about something, and Hone talks about minority voices, or voices that aren’t heard, those are the things that I see…things that are wrong. Similar to Hone, I get stirred up. And I go, I’ve got to write about this. I’ve got to say something, but just like Bernard, its easy to go blahhhh, and do your big proverbial vomit on the page, but you’ve actually got to tidy it up and make it really good and that’s the hard part. That’s really hard, the editing and the rewriting and so on.