Can We Fix It?

'A good writer always works at the impossible' Steinbeck wrote in his Journal of a Novel. It's one of the great books about writing, by one of the great writers of all time. I've been re-reading it, and seeing someone this good struggling to find the right words, to hold onto them once he has them is as inspiring as ever. 'I have a good feeling about this book now and I hope I can keep it' - maybe you've felt like that too? It's precisely how I'm feeling at the moment. Somewhere else this weekend I read that the process of creating something - whether it's a story, book, painting or piece of music, is like balancing a house of cards on a single fingertip.

It feels like a lot of things are in the balance at the moment, up in the air, on a personal and global level. I wonder how we'll look back at this time? Obama's defiant 'Yes We Can!' is a rallying cry familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time writing with cartoons playing in the background (Bob the Builder: 'Can we fix it? Yes we can!'). Good role models, mentors - whether cartoon, political or creative show us the way. I was lucky enough to get this sense that you can do anything if you put your mind to it instilled early on. I was awarded a painting scholarship to a boy's public school in Devon, and my tutor was like the love child of Mr Chips and Alfred E Neumann - all flapping academic gown and cheeky gap-toothed grin as he swept down the stone corridors. It was a bonkers place - the hunting parson Jack Russell (as in the dogs) was an old boy, and while I was there Christopher Ondaatje (philanthropist, adventurer, writer, Olympian and brother of Michael 'The English Patient' Ondaatje), bestowed a theatre on the school. Because of the large purple turret at the centre of the new building it became known as 'the purple condom'. When you are one of a handful of girls in a resolutely masculine environment like this, where even the buildings are phallic it's sink or swim. As a teacher, my lovely old tutor gave me the greatest gift you can give anyone - the sense that no matter how hard things get you can work through it. No matter what you are up against, you can survive. No matter how impossible the task you've set yourself seems, you can do it. The question is not 'what's going to happen to me?' but 'what can I make of this?' Can we fix it? Yes we can.

TODAY'S PROMPT: Steinbeck said: 'This book will be the most difficult of all I have ever attempted. Whether I am good enough or gifted enough remains to be seen. I do have a good background. I have love and I have had pain'. These words were written - literally - in parallel with 'East of Eden' in a single journal. That sense of not knowing if you are good enough is what stops a lot of creative acts before they begin. It's the fear of not being good enough. Today, why not have a think about your attitude to fear? What's stopping you? What's to lose? Maybe you've been lucky enough to come across some real life mentors, or found writers whose stories have inspired you? Diving into it, free falling into the words and images none of us ever knows how good the end work will be. Every writer and artist alive, I think, feels this uncertainty. Writing is a very isolated job and it's good to remind yourself of this - we're all as scared as each other. I very much feel this as I return to book three - am I good enough or gifted enough to tell the story? Since planning the book it has changed - and I've changed a great deal in the last few months. Steinbeck talked about love, pain, anger - I'm going back to the next draft with altered perceptions of all of these. It's going to make it a better book, that's my gut instinct, but right now the task, balancing the house of cards feels 'impossible'. As Annie Dillard said, leave a manuscript alone for a while and it goes feral - you had better go back to it wielding a chair and cracking a whip - bring on the lions.