What would you REALLY like to do with your life?

Everyone has The Thing they'd love to do more of, but they put it off to tick the Very Important Boxes of Life instead.

Lovely picture, but has anyone really sat on a cold rock on a misty day to write? (This isn’t me by the way. I am wearing a blanket and sitting at my desk in my bedroom, which is still like the middle aisle of Aldi) Photo by Ashlyn Ciara on Unsplash

This might sound ridiculous, but it’s only recently that I’ve considered myself to be A Writer, that I’ve let myself accept that being a journalist who writes a weekly newsletter about her life and other things is something that means I Am A Writer.

I’ve been a journalist for more than 15 years: I did a postgrad diploma and got my first job as a features reporter on a magazine called Construction News, then became features editor on another business title before branching out into lifestyle and travel writing.

For the past seven years, I’ve been freelance, using all my interviewing, networking, research, storytelling, creative – and yes, writing – skills to cover everything from sustainability to the stock market.

Three years ago, I wrote my first personal piece for The Guardian, about how I stopped talking about being single.

Yet when I joined the London Writers’ Salon in 2020, an organisation that runs daily online writing sprints called Writers’ Hour, as well as talks and meet-ups, I still didn’t think I was A Writer.

Being a journalist felt somehow different to being A Writer because I was interviewing people and making what they said into a story rather than conjuring a world through solely my own creative mind, using some kind of secret sauce I imagined only proper writerly writers had access to.

Writers wrote books, had wild imaginations, could create fictitious characters and put together clever plots.

Writers submitted essays to literary magazines and entered short story competitions.

Writers read Proust.

But I did none of these things.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I think many people, possibly most people, have The Thing.

It’s The Thing that you really love, or think you might love, or be skirting around something you think you might like to do. My Thing is, predictably, being A Writer Who Writes Books.

Maybe you follow people doing The Thing on Instagram, stewing silently about how come they get to do The Thing and you don’t.

You might have an inkling of something at the back of your mind but think you won’t bother with it because other people have already done it better than you or worry that if you start doing The Thing you’ll fail.

You might know a lot about what your Thing is, or you might just have a vague interest, and sometimes say things like: “Oh I’d love to do more of The Thing, but I can’t because…”

The Thing could be anything: becoming a florist, opening a community shop (I still want to do this where I live in north London), re-training as a nursery school teacher, starting a supper club, volunteering at a farm, launching a dog-walking business, taking a watercolour class, joining a middle-aged football team, doing more dance classes, you get the idea.

The Thing might be adjacent to what you do already or be something completely different.

Maybe you follow people doing The Thing on Instagram, stewing silently about how come they get to do The Thing and you don’t.

Or you might persuade yourself you don’t have time right now, that The Thing will never pay the bills, that you don’t want to give up something else to do The Thing because you don’t like change and anyway you have a nice enough life and maybe you’ll do The Thing one day when you’ve ticked the Very Important Boxes of Life, and we all know what those are.

Your Thing might feel too big to even try to do, so you stop before you’ve started.

To deal with my Thing, I joined the online writing sprints to feel less isolated in lockdown; I even did online yoga before the 8am writing session. (This version of me never, ever happens now - we’d need another pandemic for this behaviour to occur again.)

But Matt and Parul, founders of the London Writers’ Salon (you can join from anywhere in the world) emphasised that everyone is welcome at Writers’ Hour – you can write emails the entire time if you like, you don’t need to be crafting a tome.

So that’s what I did: sometimes I wrote my usual work emails approaching people I wanted to interview, and other times I wrote those interviews into stories.

But then I realised that some of the real writers on these writing sprints did something called morning pages, a technique where you write three pages of whatever passes through your mind.

It’s something Julia Cameron, a novelist, playwright, director, filmmaker and journalist, teaches, and purists write those three pages longhand as soon as they wake up.

It doesn’t matter what you get on the page, it just matters that you show up to do it.

So I started there, and here’s a snippet from those days:

Morning pages, 8 January 2021

This is really hard. Getting the words down when I don’t know what they’re going to be or are. Is this writer’s block?

What’s in my head right now is distraction, 17 pages of writers on Zoom, some of whom I recognise, many who have their cameras off.

So, I’m going to force myself to come up with some chapter ideas for my book. All I can think of is that I can’t write fiction, I’m not that imaginative.

It’s not just me, even people like XXXX, who is a successful broadcaster - I don’t think she can write fiction either.

I didn’t care about her book XXXX, for example. I didn’t care about the characters. Some of the scenes were imaginatively written but the people were dull. But it’s probably about the level of writing I could get to.

Ouch! So that’s where I started: so and so is very successful at this particular job, and I’m jealous of her, but even she can’t write a good book – so what chance do I have? Oh well, I won’t bother.

What Julia Cameron guides you through in her book The Artists’ Way, are approaches to help you stop yourself getting in your own way and realise that you are a highly creative, imaginative being.

She helps you find time to let your mind wander, to challenge your beliefs about yourself, and to be gentle to your inner artist.

My biggest thing was that I didn’t trust myself to complete a long writing project, and I also feared starting something, giving up and never reaching my potential, so it was easier to not bother and stick with the day job.

Most of the time I sit down with a blank page in front of me and no effing idea of what I’m going to write about in this newsletter

I also hoped that a process of osmosis would somehow make me into a writer. If I understood the industry then that would help me write a book that would sell. So I went to talks on how to pitch your work to agents, even though I didn’t have a bloody book.

(Side note: I am someone who loves to understand context and the bigger picture around something - it helps me do my job better and hopefully be a better human. So, going to talks by agents helped me understand that publishing can be ruthless and random, and it’s actually made me focus less on the outcome - A Book By Me In A Bookshop - and more on the actual writing.)

So I’ll tell you what I did to actually believe that I Am A Writer.

Step number one was to go to a thing where people identified as writers, namely the London Writers’ Salon.

Some of them were names you might know or people ‘finishing their final draft ready for their agent to send to publishers’ (I hated those people. I’m sure they are all very nice and deserving and talented and I will read and love their books. But still, I hated them).

The second one is something called Just Bloody Write.

This newsletter is helping me work out what it is I care about, what I want to write about – and most importantly, what I think would be useful or interesting to you.

It’s made me carve time to write, and made me become a better writer.

Because I know that you and hundreds of other people have given me their email addresses and effectively said, ‘yes, please send me your stuff,’ I have to do it.

The third thing has been join writing classes with someone brilliant to teach me how to write, to learn to write dialogue, to bring tension into stories, to know that it’s OK to base a scene on my life and add sprinkles of fiction, to slow down my writing and know how to describe something where nothing really happens – and that’s all right.

Most of the time I sit down on a Friday or Saturday night with a blank page in front of me and no effing idea of what I’m going to write about in this newsletter.

Do the smallest thing you can possibly think of to let The Thing have its first breath this week.

Today, I thought I might be writing about depression, but then I saw something I scribbled down that my writing teacher said, which changed my mind: ‘There is only one subconscious of Lucy.’

This means that only I can write what I write - from my mind, my own original thought will come.

That’s probably one of the most pretentious sentences I’ve ever written, but I think you know what I mean: you are wonderful you, and only you can create that unique dog walking business that’s going to lift pet owners’ hearts or nurture children at the nursery in a way that solely you can do.

No-one else can paint that tree in a field with watercolours in the way that you do - whether it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ it comes from glorious, wonderful you.

It’s taken me at least three years to accept that I Am A Writer, and for me, a slow and gentle process has been what I needed, full of procrastination tinged with helping myself be accountable (I’m a classic ‘Obliger’ - to everyone else - read more about that here.)

I’m also trying positive reinforcement: I store homework exercises I do for my writing classes in a folder called 1 I Am A Writer, meaning my Thing is now top of my list of files every day.

So if you have The Thing in the back of your mind, can you gently try to let it out, just a little and in your own way?

Do the smallest thing you can possibly think of to let The Thing have its first breath this week (put one flower in a vase, pat one dog, put one photo of food on Instagram), and then see how that feels.

Let me know!