Sunday Blog 160 – 24th November 2024
The Blind Boy podcast I listened to last weekend dug into the topic of cringe. That when you try out things creatively, it’s cringeworthy. Because it is. And over time, it might become good, but first, there must be cringe.
My family of origin, like so many, was not always a friend to the mess of taking creative risks. However, in 1981, at the tender age of 17, I was given the journal pictured above by one of my siblings.
I instantly fell in love, indeed I fetishised it. In the front I wrote my hopes for the beautiful new journal. As if I was Anne Frank instead of a very ordinary teen in very safe, vanilla, suburban Perth Australia;
In my teens I was immersed in reading polished classics created through painstaking editing. It was all C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell. Books that had stood the test of fashion, and remained in print when so many of their contemporaries were consigned to literary oblivion. It was hard for me to see a path from where I was in 1980s Perth to where I could join them as a writer. But I really, really wanted to.
By 1987 I’d finished my Literature degree and finally, finally started journalling. Not in this divine red and gold sun journal, but in a crappy old spiral bound notebook I’d partly used for one of my subjects.
Since then I’ve journalled erratically but regularly, creating a mish-mash of agonised reckoning with the latest drama, and filling in the storyline. So much of what I read astonishes me, such as the order of when things happened. And my mother was so right. Always include the surname of people you write about. There are so many people that come and go and leave no trace but a first name in your journal. The red journal emerged from a box recently, and I decided I’m going to use it as my day to day journal once my current one is finished. Like a going back into my teens and early twenties, giving myself permission to just get going. Cringe is fine. The secret is to allow ourselves to just keep on turning up, having a go. As this Austin Kleon blog summarises, the more we create, the more likely we are to achieve the quality we crave.