“A book must start somewhere”

By Kath, Co-Host of book(ish)

It’s Friday afternoon and I’ve finished work for the bank holiday weekend. In a few hours time, I’ll be out and about at the first of my many plans for the weekend, but for now I actually have a couple of hours to myself. 

We get Friday afternoons as free time where I work and it really helps me unwind into the weekend, maybe I’ll clean my bathroom (everyone knows I love a clean bathroom), or chill out and read a book, go for a walk etc. But recently, I’ve been feeling like I should maybe be using the time a bit more productively. There’s some weeks when I’ve packed my schedule so tightly that it is literally my only chill time, so using it to chill ~is~ productive, but often I just waste the time until 6pm when everyone else is finished for the weekend and launch into whatever social plans I have.

I have been calling myself a writer (ish) for a few years now and sure, I write at work, I write comms, copy, and content as a Marketing and PR Manager all the time, but these days, I find myself now rarely writing for the pure joy of putting words onto paper.

A few weeks ago I took myself off to my favourite coffee shop, sat down with an oat milk flat white and wrote a long old blog about how much of a triumph for me it was to no longer be branded as a plant killer and my transition into becoming a plant mom. 

It was a therapeutic piece to write and I really enjoyed writing it. It pretty much came from nowhere as I had no plan about what I was going to write that day. I didn’t publish it anywhere because actually it was super personal and I don’t think I’m quite ready to put myself out there quite that openly on the internet just yet. But the process was great.

So anyway, it’s a few Fridays later and I’ve just been lying on my bed scrolling through TikTok, waiting for my lunch to go down before I do my daily yoga flow (on day 11 of my streak people!) and, after seeing 10 videos of cats in a row, I decided to open my laptop and put some words down. 

The problem is that I just don’t really know what to write about. The world is quite literally falling apart around us and I don’t really have the cohesive thoughts to write about what’s happening, and enough other people are doing so, if anybody needs that comfort. 

I’ve been chatting shit about writing a book for years now but I am yet to put any words on paper or think of a good enough topic to write about for more than 1000 words blog post. So, when I sat down to write today, my head was mostly full of thoughts about how I need to start writing more if I ever want to write more (you following?) and so, I decided to write about writing…

I don’t really know what it is about putting words into sentences that I like so much. I don’t even think I’m that good at it to be honest. Sure, I must have some sort of skills considering that I use them at work (and therefore am paid for them) but I’ve never actually put myself out there enough to have been told I’m actually any good at it. 

I rarely enter writing competitions. I don’t share my work unless I’m absolutely 100% pleased with it. And the only thing I publish now is blogs about books for our podcast website (hi). 

But does that really matter? 

I recently read a book called The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. It’s a pretty well respected piece of literature. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year and is on multiple bookish lists. I wasn’t super compelled to pick it up but it was chosen for my South London bookclub and honestly it really surprised me. 

I think the thing I liked most about it was how meta and, I guess, ‘deep’ it was about books. ‘The Book’ is a character and actually has a voice, so yeah the book talks in the book about books. Essentially, it (being The Book in both senses) makes some pretty profound statements about books, literature, and stories which really stood out to me when I was reading it. 

The first page of the book says: 

“A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being.”

And I guess, when I opened a new document to start writing today, I didn’t have a plan (or even a pl in the words of Phoebe Bouffet, if you know, you know), or even a single idea of what I was going to write about. I was just reading a book and felt like I wanted to get some of my own words out.

I love listening to authors talk about how they wrote books, sign me up to an author event anyday, and once I went to a bookclub in my hometown to discuss the novel ‘Once Upon a River’. The author, Diane Setterfield, came to the bookclub to answer questions and talk with us about the book.

In the session, she talked about how she felt like her characters wrote themselves, and that she didn’t really know how they would turn out when she first started writing. 

I was truly fascinated. It was the first time I’d heard an author talk like that about a book, and it was the first time I realised that not every writer will have a plan before they start to create something and it doesn’t mean they won’t create anything. And having ‘a plan’ doesn’t automatically make you a successful writer I guess. 

Most of the stuff I’ve ever written has come from seemingly absolutely nowhere. I might have written a note to myself on my notes app one time about something I saw out and about, but most of the time I just sit down in front of my laptop and see what words and what letters come to me.

In our next episode we discuss Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason and when interviewed by The Women’s Prize about the book, Mason describes it as “Everything I have seen or felt, thought or read somewhere and found funny or sad, saved up and put into a single story.” I think if you’ve read the book, this makes total sense, and given that the book is ~phenomenal~ it was quite inspiring to hear. 

And, as I said earlier, I haven’t shared much of my writing anywhere but I guess that’s not really the point of blabbering on about this. I guess the point is that I need to start somewhere if I ever want to be able to call myself a writer, without the ish. And I think you can consider this post a bit of a note to self to open my laptop, and type that first letter and allow my heart (or head or whatever) to follow through and start to create. Add the words together to form sentences, which will form paragraphs and eventually pages. 

Trust the process or something like that, right?