I’ve signed up to a month-long writing course on wordpress – Writing 101 – building a blogging habit. The assignment for day one is to write for twenty minutes about anything. A sort of stream of consciousness type thing.
I’m kind of scared of doing this. I’m a harpist, not a writer. Doing a month-long writing course is like admitting to the world that I do actually want to write. The truth is, I love writing my blog and I would jump at the chance to do more and improve my writing, so here I am. Every weekday this month there will be a writing assignment – I still want to write my posts about gigs and my career – this is in addition to that. So if you are a regular reader of my blog, firstly, thank you! secondly, feel free to ignore these posts as they probably won’t be about the harp or gigs. It’ll just be me – expressing the innermost workings of my mind.
I have always written – I still have my first journals, from back when I was about 10. I would write every evening before bed about what had happened that day – I loved having the record of my thoughts and feelings, I also loved being able to look back one, two, three years down the line to see what I was up to, to laugh at how immature I sounded and to realise how much I’d learnt in the meantime. I even took my journal on holiday, I would keep tickets, programmes and leaflets from places we visited and write about what we did, where we ate, what the weather was like. I just loved it.
I probably got into it through a book I read as a kid. I was pretty much obsessed with ‘Harriet the Spy’ and loved that she would just snoop on her family and write about it in secret. At the risk of sounding old – when I was growing up, none of my siblings lived with me and the internet wasn’t around yet, so when I wasn’t practising either the harp, piano or cello (how did I have any spare time?!) I would write, draw, or read.
So I pretty much need to write. I would love to write for a publication. Being paid to write would be an absolute dream. Not instead of music, but as well as music. Ahh, the joys of freelancing.
I may be experimenting with writing some fiction this month too. I haven’t done a lot of this but I would love to try. Writing a ‘stream of consciousness’ post on a public blog is rather daunting. Plus, every time I think of a stream of consciousness I’m reminded of the novel ‘Catcher in the Rye’ by J. D. Salinger. I studied this book for my english literature GCSE and really enjoyed it. I loved the idea of seeing reality through someone else’s perspective and realising that what you’re ‘seeing’ may be very different from ‘reality’ – ‘The Wasp Factory’ springs to mind here too.
So that’s my twenty minutes of free writing done! Any feedback or comments, please do let me know.