Sharing as a Shy Writer

By Lorna Dawson

Everyone who knows me knows that I am not the most talkative person in the world. In fact I am the complete opposite. On several occasions I have even been accused of actively surrounding myself with chatty people so that I don’t have to talk myself. Guilty as charged.

When it comes to writing though, I think it’s not inaccurate to say that my style can quite often come across as grandiose and verbose, especially when it comes to verbal imagery. (This sentence is perhaps a good example – I could have just said that ‘My writing, however, is the complete opposite’, but no, I had to hedge, give two adjectives instead of one, and then self-analyse just to really hammer the point home when you would have understood perfectly from that seven word alternative statement.)

Since January, I have been taking a course that will ultimately lead to teaching a creative writing to seven years olds after the Easter holidays. Part of the method for devising workshops has actually involved a lot of reflection on personal creative processes and exploring your relationship with writing. It is through this self-analysis that I started to really notice and unpack this absurd phenomenon of having almost opposing identities when it comes to communicating through speaking and writing.

In a nutshell, the blank page is a space of complete freedom for me. When talking to people, I am constantly conscious that I have to alter what I say depending on who I’m speaking to. The blank page does not judge, it does not have a limited spectrum of interests, it doesn’t care about spelling, it doesn’t care if what you say is outrageous and completely goes against social norms, it doesn’t care how many attempts it takes you to get the right words. It is a safe space for me to say whatever I want. Hence the verbosity in my writing in general.

This got me wondering though. Because, from my self-indulgent self-analysis, there’s a really strong impression that my writing is simply for myself. It’s a process of catharsis. There is no reader in mind (supposedly), often even I don’t re-read my own private scribblings. One of the things I noticed though, was that I always write to someone. Sometimes I write song lyrics talking about “you”, sometimes I write letters. I would never voluntarily say that I write for anyone other than myself. But I must do.

Which got me thinking. Because whenever I write truly cathartically, it is like a one-sided argument. I pour out my heart onto this page, the ink and scribbles like intricate scars etched by my soul. It’s passionate, it asks questions, it addresses this unresponding other and is never answered. And as much as I can keep trying to tell myself that my writing is just for me, no-one else, I know it’s not. It begs a response; it’s practically grovelling for it.

Having said all this, that doesn’t mean that the next time I scribe my heart in red ink on lined paper, I’m going to immediately send it first class to its intended addressee. And, just a disclaimer, this doesn’t mean that everything I write is deeply personal. I still have difficulty showing whatever I write to other people. But … having analysed my own paradoxical writing habits, I’ve kind of come to realise that I don’t just use writing as a form of catharsis and as a safe space.

This is probably stating the obvious to most people, but it was in fact really eye-opening to me. From this analysis, I discovered that, for me, writing can also be (and deep down, I wanted it to be), a form of communication. It’s something that wants to be responded to, wants other people to comment, wants other peoples’ thoughts and ideas so it can develop and grow and be explored further.

I think, since I’ve realised this, I’ve started having a whole new outlook on sharing writing. Something that was completely new to me this academic year was the concept of workshopping pieces of work. If you’ve never done it before, it’s where you submit your piece of writing to the group, and they give you constructive feedback on it. And it can be terrifying! I found it so. No matter how much I told myself that it didn’t matter what other people said, I knew that wasn’t true. I would create a self-deluding situation, where the people who criticised me harshly didn’t count, but the people who praised me did. But underlying this was a constant sense of trying to figure out whether other peoples’ opinions about my writing were really of any value or not.

My new and recent realisation, that writing is about exploring ideas, about getting a response, even if it’s a completely unexpected one, is something that I find really valuable in the workshop situation now. Instead of the workshop being a place where people say whether my writing is good or not, it’s a space where I can learn about how to improve your ideas, how to explore them further, to pick up advice, to be inspired and to develop. I can still be shy, I can still be protective about my work, but I am slowly realising that the ideas of others are also really important in developing my writing further and a valuable part of sharing my writing.

It’s more than this. It’s about accepting that what I write is not going to be perfect first time round; it’s valuing the fact that each reader is different and will interpret things in a different way to me so I may need to explain things a little more or in a different way; it’s also accepting that a piece of writing is never going to be entirely my own.

A few nights ago, I had a wonderful moment on the bus when a fellow writer was talking about a piece of my writing he’d workshopped. He was telling me how he loved what I was doing with the themes and power relations between the characters in that particular scene: they were ideas I had never thought of before, that I hadn’t intentionally written in, but sure enough, they were there, and what he’d said made me think about how I could develop these themes even further. As long as I continue with that piece, I will be indebted to his insight.