So I recently joined a Life Writing Skills workshop. It popped up in an email one day through the Yarra Ranges Council Website, and it felt as though it had been emailed just to me! I always thought I’d rather like to write a book…. hence the reason I started my last blog in 2013. I learned during the course that my style of writing read as though it was coming straight from a wound. I typed exactly what I was feeling as I was feeling it. Something that perhaps not everyone is willing or even able to do.
When I read back through my entries recently to get some inspiration to try and meet the challenges that I was being asked to do by the writers running the workshop, it took me on quite the journey. I realized I have not often gone back through my blogs. The first one I wrote began in late November of 2013, the year I lost my beautiful husband and the father of my then six and ten year old daughters. It was absolutely the most tragic event I had ever witnessed or survived. Which made for some really deep, dark, gut wrenching, heart breaking, skin tingling, tear jerking and occasionally funny blog entries. In other words – a great read. I have learned in this course that a great story can come when ones life is torn apart in an instant.
ie; “The day my world changed forever”.
When writing a book, you must consider your audience. So if your book is about your life, you need to think about what you are sharing, and during that time of my life, everything I was living through was nothing short of what I would call soul destroying, and I guess from the perspective of a reader, it was juicy! Looking back at the 2013 version of me, I was so vulnerable, but I hid that in my public persona, and wore it in my writing. I couldn’t say out loud the things that I was sharing late at night in my blogs, and perhaps this was my way of reaching out to my family and friends and not shutting down. I’m so glad now that I did.
In the seven years since my husband died, the adversities that my children and I, and now my partner and his three children and I have faced are many. What is left behind when someone is ripped from your life in an instant is fragments of your former self that you have attempted to put back together using other peoples strength and support as the glue. You never quite look or feel the same way as you once did, and during this Life Writing Skills course I realised that through death, I was reborn.
I started the course thinking that I wanted to write about my life with my husband, and by doing so I’d be honouring his life in a way. But all I could think about what was life had been like since he’d been taken away, and the stories were still current. The sleepless nights, the pain and grief, the girls and how differently they’d coped with everything, the many schools they’d attended and left, the pottery/pub nights, the eighty plus ambulance trips we’d been on, the police that had attended our home, the overseas trips, the caravanning adventures, the feeling of judgement in our decisions, the loss of lifelong friends, the birth of new ones, the fight to keep the family together, getting a Degree and a career, moving house, drinking too much, running a Widow Support Group, losing the boys and facing so many different mental health challenges that I can’t even remember.
So when asked to write down forty life changing experiences by my hosts to kick off my story writing, (in chronological order, no less) I really struggled. What made an experience “life changing?” And even though it was life changing for me, was it interesting enough to write an entire paragraph, or even a chapter on? And if it was still current, was it life changing yet?
I sat down and wrote them out, but I went back to that list a hundred times over the next fortnight, and I was never happy with it. And I realised this book is not yet ready to be written. Although I am now writing from the scar and not the wound, I am still living the story, and I don’t have a good ending just yet.
So for now the course had reignited my love for writing via my Blog, and I have been lucky enough to have met some wonderfully interesting and creative people along the way. It got me doing something during a pandemic that wasn’t work or helping kids home school, and it has piqued my interest in wanting to be creative with my writing once again, and so I shall……
You must log in to post a comment.