Study. Be silent. Die.
When I was eleven or twelve, as a birthday present, my Mum bought me a two-day writing workshop at a beautiful English-style country house in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia, where I grew up. I attended with my friend Lily, who also had her mind set on a career as an author.
The instructor was a lady in her sixties who seemed perfectly happy hosting two precocious youngsters at her writing retreat which was otherwise attended by ‘Mountains folks in their forties and fifties. I remember sitting around a large wooden table reading aloud something I had written and feeling exquisitely adult and literate. We had writing sessions in the sun-drenched garden where I sat with a notebook and a pen, and began almost immediately to experience the unnerving combination of intense excitement, invited by the unlimited possibility of a blank page and a pen, and the overwhelming fear and anxiety that inevitably accompanies it.
The instructor sat with me and offered me consolation and advice. This is a natural feeling, she tried to explain, and you must sit with it. Pass through it. “If you sit long enough, the fire of inspiration will come”, she said.
It’s true, of course, that if you sit long enough with a piece of paper and a pen, you will find something to say (though you may not much like what you do end up saying). This is particularly true if you are sitting somewhere beautiful, like a garden or a world heritage national park, or in the case of my eleven- or twelve-year old self, a garden inside a world heritage national park. But it is tough advice to hear when you’re young and full of the desire to be a writer, but none of the experience of having actually written anything.
I don’t think anything interesting came out of that workshop, but I still remember that advice and those words, and I still hear them every time I sit down at my computer and feel that swelling feeling of infinity radiating at me from the vastness of the empty page.
It is intimidating, and it is much easier to do nothing, to be silent, to read what others have written but only synthesise it in our minds, and to ourselves, than it is to write. Writing it down is the next step, if you are lucky enough that the “fires of inspiration” catch your pen and coax something out before they devour all the oxygen, you will then have something for your efforts, like a lump of carbon left in a calorimeter. Probably you will hate it, and will have to decide: was it better to stay silent than to create this?
Photographs
- Graffiti at Sydney University, 2014.
- Looking up at the sandstone escarpment from National Pass, near Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, 2019.
- The same cliff, from the top.
- Leura Station, a few hundred metres from the location of my writing retreat, at sunset in 2022.