Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
T.S. Eliot – East Coker
I measure my life in words. Words written, unwritten, spoken, regretted, remembered.
For some of my working life, I have been paid to produce words. Long before the internet, before Amazon, I wrote Online Searching Made Simple – a guide for healthcare industries. Hopelessly, hilariously out of date, it’s now a museum piece, evidence to show how complex it used to be if you wanted to find information online. The day I found it on Amazon is one of my favourite stories:
When I started blogging, I thought I would like to use my maiden name, Stack. Before making the decision (characteristically thorough and cautious) I searched ‘Harriet Stack’ on Amazon just to check there was no famous author of the same name. Imagine my disappointment when ‘Harriet Stack’ popped right up! After a few moments, I decided to take a deep breath and see what this woman had written. I expected beautiful, lyrical novels, academic works or interesting poetry. I clicked. It was me. My out-of-date book on online searching had been posted on Amazon by the publishing company which used to employ me as a journalist. By this time unavailable but still, incontrovertibly, on Amazon.
It’s not there any more, but there are still no other Harriet Stacks.
I’ve always written poetry, but it remains mostly unshared. I did include a collection of poems as the optional creative writing module of my English degree, and, once, had one of my poems published in an anthology of Cambridge students’ writing. My dear, late mother, Caroline, also wrote a surprising amount of poetry which I would like to organise, somehow, into some sort of publication. A lot of it was about living with disability and might be helpful.
And then there’s all the rest of it. The odd article, hundreds of thousands of words of marketing material and much more, probably, of legal documents. Sixty-six thousand words of a whole book on worry which I wrote in 2013 and now no longer want to publish. Twenty-two thousand words in my masters’ dissertation. And this very blog, thousands and thousands of words tracing my ups and downs, odd ideas, professional interests and projects.
Almost all of these words are housed either physically or digitally in the tiny office I use for work and general life admin. There is just about space for me to wave my arms around as I try to communicate my enthusiasm for Shakespeare, poetry, language in general, to my students through the magical medium of Zoom.
Writing is like breathing, necessary for life. If I don’t write it down, I fear it will be lost for ever. As Hamlet said, having seen his father’s ghost, ‘My tables – meet it is I set it down.’
And so, for the past almost three years, I have followed Julia Cameron’s advice to write three pages every morning: Morning Pages. I tell my students that both writing and reading are skills and we have to practise them both. Then I tell them I write three pages every day, just for practice. Making sentences is challenging and surprisingly creative; we can’t just assume that we will be able to write effortlessly when we need to, without putting in regular practice. That’s like a musician, having reached Grade 8, believing they can play their instrument whenever they want without playing scales in between. So I write my morning pages. Some writers believe you have to write a certain proportion of bad stuff before you can get to the good. Perhaps like the first pancake always turning out terrible and ending up as the cook’s treat? Anyway, if that’s true, I am stacking the odds (sorry about the pun!) by allowing myself to write three pages of possible rubbish every morning. Measuring my life, day by day, in words.
So, what now? No-one is telling me what to write, these days, and there is no need for a middle person, now we have blogs and easy ways to publish.
Maybe words written and regretted are better than words unwritten. There will never be time to write all the words. Perhaps that’s the wonder of it all: infinite potential.
