On Not Writing
Because I cannot! I shan't! You can't make me!
As Ciara Mary-Alice Taylor once sang, ‘I’m a writer’. Or at least, that’s what I tell people. Relatives, acquaintances, men on dating apps or in dimly lit bars, when they bother to ask - anyone who will listen, really. And on a technicality, it’s true. I write every day in my job at a trade magazine, though it isn’t technically in my job description. I have a note on my phone called ‘fragments’ where I dump little phrases or paragraphs that might form the building blocks for The Novel, which I haven’t meaningfully started yet. I have spent about £40,000, not including interest amassed on as yet unpaid loans which I daren’t check the value of, studying two writing degrees. I spent my whole childhood and teenage years filling countless notebooks with fiction (some of which, yes, was about the characters of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables imagined for the modern era). Really, that should qualify me to call myself a writer, shouldn’t it?
So why do I always caveat it when I say it? Why have I not actually written anything I really, truly, care about in a year? Why have I come back to this document three times, getting increasingly scared that I Can’t Do It Anymore? Why has the only strategy that has forced me into actually penning this been getting myself a fun drink and cake, flirting a tiny bit with a barman, and plonking myself down in a dimly lit cinema bar after work with my laptop? Fuelled by a dark chocolate and raspberry muffin, and the time limit of drinks at the pub in less than two hours, let’s get into it. Apologies in advance for all the brackets but in my defence I’m not allowed to use them in my day job and I absolutely buzz off them. You have been warned.
Many (approx 4) people asked me when my next Substack would be debuting, after last year’s navel-gazing new years day emission about how my 2024 went (not very well) and how I anticipated my 2025 would be better (anything would be better than the trenches I found myself in two years ago). Since I published it, I have moved out, and attained both a boyfriend (no one is more surprised than me) and a job in journalism (which pays the bills but actually, if I’m honest, makes buying a fun little drink and a cake at a cinema bar slightly unsustainable as a regular strategy to encourage creative flow). I have also not written a single thing outside of work since last spring’s weird run of journalistic success (The Fence! The Guardian! Time Out! I bought myself a pair of really nice Doc Martens with my earnings and now they are broken, which feels apt). That is, unless you count a vague draft of an essay I may one day publish about my dead dog, before I convinced myself that nobody apart from me and my family cares about my dead dog. Do you care about my dead dog? Answers on a postcard please.
The issue isn’t necessarily that I haven’t been putting out vibes that I want to write. I have pitched. My God, have I pitched. The issue is actually that I get a good idea once a month on average, and then find it hard to convince editors that it’s a good idea. If anyone wants to commission me to write about any of the following (all rejected or ghosted by various good-natured editors over the past year) do let me know: death cleanses, how everyone and their mum seems to be using AI to write their dating profiles, London’s most expensive bus gate (this is actually really juicy), a Charlie Kirk memorial at a Hammersmith pub (to be fair the moment has definitely passed for this now), a definitive ranking and exploration of shark films and their relationship with genre, pay pigs. I’m sure you’ll all agree: what a cracking and entirely original list! But, as is often the case, vibes do not a creative output make. Ideas, if left uncommissioned, do not butter any parsnips or bulk out any portfolios or pay any (invoiced, chased, chased again) dividends. And thus, my journo juices have been left to go stagnant, and I have had what can only be termed as a bit of a creative crisis.
I used to be very scared that I did not have enough ideas to be a journalist, and that really, when it comes to writing, as is the case in many areas of my life, I thrive on Being Told What To Do. I had the most wonderful and creatively fulfilling time of my journalistic career thus far while freelancing for a London magazine last spring before I started my trade publication job, during which time I was mostly given press releases to turn into entertaining copy, and let myself imagine a life defined by getting invited to lovely Soho restos and press trips to the Amalfi coast and warning the British public about imminent hayfever threats. Alas, this was unsustainable because UK journalism is getting hung drawn and quartered, but it was fun while it lasted.
I think, though, my problem isn’t really the ideas, it’s the motivation to write without being rewarded for it with money or views or a ‘good job!’ from an editor. If I’m going to carve out time in between my fully office-based 9-5, my addiction to spin classes, teaching my Australian boyfriend who Gemma Collins is, and binging 24 Hours in Police Custody, I want at least a little proverbial forehead kiss for it. I am constantly horrendously busy, which is entirely my own fault, and on the rare occasion that I am in my flat with nothing to do, I’m afraid to say that my brain doesn’t cry out for pen and paper, or even google docs: it demands Phone Time In Bed Or On Sofa. I could blame social media for this but even before I had a phone I once spent a family holiday on a boat writing out the various addresses and contact details of local attractions in my notebook instead of, I don’t know, anything useful or thought-provoking or even slightly interesting. My brain has always longed for rot.
Another problem is definitely location. I can’t write in my flat because a) no desk b) my flatmate is too funny and I would always rather yap with her than face down a lonely blank page. As Woolf wrote in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, ‘the room cannot have my best friend in it because we will spend the whole evening flogging a dead horse through the medium of mid 2010s British meme quotes while vaguely watching a Netflix documentary about a cult and before we know it’s it’s 10pm which is past our bedtime’. I hear you, Virginia. I really do.
Aforementioned busyness and office working means I can’t regularly go to a cafe/similarly inspiring place to write, nor can I do it on company time (if my boss is reading this, I would literally never do that, it’s really naughty). I have convinced myself in my mind that if I could only afford to go on a writing retreat, whether organised or self-constructed, that would unlock me and I would write a whole novel in a long weekend.
I thought a recent sojourn to the Devonshire coast, funded by my friend’s parents owning a holiday home there and my 16-25 railcard, would inspire me, but all it bore was a little breakdown in the living room when it turned out I couldn’t be bothered, and a rant to my friends who were sitting happily drinking and playing cards outside. I think I might have declared at the time to a mate who works in programming (? possibly? Who knows what their STEM pals do really?) that losing my ability to write was akin to her losing her ability to do maths. I think we’ll all agree that it’s a good thing I held onto my dignity and reason throughout the ordeal.
Once, in the depths of a delusionship, I tried to subtly convince a man to drive me to Gladstone’s Library in Wales, which has rooms one can use to facilitate a writing retreat, because I couldn’t drive and he was, at the time, in possession of his sister’s Fiat 500. I’m not entirely sure what I was planning to write, or what I expected him to do while I did so (gaze at me longingly? Frolic in the nearby countryside? Write a bestseller of his own?) but the whole thing can be explained away by the fact that I was nineteen years old, which I’ve always said is the oddest age a girl can be. To be fair, I was at my most poetic during the refractory period between dumping him and realising he had essentially already dumped me by getting a girlfriend without thinking to tell me, and then didn’t write anything for a full year after finding out. Poetry! Anyway, he did not drive me to Wales, and I still haven’t been to that gorgeous library. For starters I still don’t have my license, and unless anyone wants to LARP as the third Earl of Southampton and sponsor me to unleash my lit fic on the world, the cost of a stay there is quite prohibitive. If only that man had given in! I could be on the Forbes 30 under 30 list by now.
My hands hurt now and the cinema bar has filled with old people who are here to participate in cinema, weirdly, so I will bring this to a close. The point is, I can’t write. This essay has been an exercise in proving that - one that has really brought me a lot of joy and adrenaline as I’ve sat penning it. Dead dog essay coming up, just as soon as I can remind myself that not everything has to be The Odyssey or a Guardian long-read or the flawless script to When Harry Met Sally. It just has to be something I want to sink time into, with no need for validation. (But please, do subscribe <3).