I’ve been thinking about slow creation lately (not sure if that’s a real phrase but for the sake of this post I’m running with it). I whole heartily blame crocheting for this as if you’ve ever tried to crochet a whole tote bag with a 3mm hook and cotton yarn, it is very much slow creation.
For the first few years of this blog (can you believe this blog is 10 years old now?) my posts would fall into 3 main categories:
- Listicles
- Book reviews
- Rambles about my own writing practises
I’d say those 3 areas were pretty standard for blog posts at the time. Blogging wasn’t in its prime by any means but I still could get the occasional post to pop off and rank quite high up with the overlord that is Google’s SEO. These posts tended to be in the first two categories.
A decade, a degree, a book and a few jobs later, the online space this blog exists in now just isn’t what it used to be. There are many reasons for this but for this post today I wanted to briefly touch on the use of AI and a few of my feelings about it as a poet, author and blogger (how many different ways can you say ‘writer’).
Now I did start to write a whole section about what I think is going on here but, lets be honest, all of our attention spans have been destroyed so I will sum it up instead – I feel that AI can do 2 out of the 3 things I most commonly blog about. It can write listicles very easily and it can also create book reviews. But do you know what it can’t do? Write about my personal experiences as a writer. It can go through all of my blog posts and create something in the style of my witing but it will never be able to create a post that talks about my individual writing practises because it doesn’t know what’s in my head at this very second.
So that is what I will write about.
Perhaps all of this is a bit of a rebellion for AI being such a commonly used tool within my job that I am needing a brief creative rebellion at this moment. Perhaps I’m just bored. Either way I hope you enjoy the following human wrote ramble bellow.
When I started writing my book Empty Vessels I was a very outward poet.
My work was heavily inspired by the likes of Georges Perec’s ‘AN ATTEMPT AT EXHAUSING A PLACE IN PARIS’ and Frank O’Hara’s ‘Lunch Poems’. The first is creative non-fiction and the second poetry but both explore the more mundane moments of life. I would highly recommend them both.
Now if you’ve ever read my poetry collection (I’d like to say thank you to start with if you have) you will know that my book also explored similar themes. I approached it as an experiment to not write about the self but rather write as an observer to those around me, specifically strangers.
In short, my creative work for years was looking outwards, I didn’t write about me. That’s not to say my own life and experiences didn’t shape what I was writing but none of my poems were about me personally and I thought that would always be the case.
I knew I’d grow and develop as a poet but for some reason I just assumed my work would always look outwards, would explore topics that were bigger than me if you will. But that’s not what’s happened.
It’s no secret that I stopped writing after I published my book. I had poured so much of my creative energy into one project that I had completely lost a sense of self as a writer. If you’ve read my last post you’ll also know there were a few other things going on in the background that led me to stop writing for well over a year.
This morning I sat in the very coffee shop I’d say about 20+ of the poems in my book were written in. I pulled out my notebook and my laptop with no intention of writing but rather trying to find a burnt orange rug for my living room. So you can imagine my surprise that by the time I was packing up to go home the thought of the rug had been completely disregarded and instead in my notebook were two brand new poems!
These aren’t the first poems I’ve written since publishing my book but they are poems number 5 and 6 and I’d say 6 poems is enough to be able to spot and develop themes in what I’m writing, and trust me, there is a theme.
Every single one of those poems look inwards, they are an exploration of myself and the pain I’ve carried over my life. They are visceral, painful glimpses into the events that shaped me as a person.
For you that may feel insignificant, but for me to have every new poem I’ve written be about myself is a very big shift in my work.
One of the reasons I always looked outward for my work is because I didn’t quite want to show the world what was inward.
Writing is very exposing and an intimate act when you share it with the world, especially when the writing is about yourself. I would argue that even this blog is opening myself up to the possibility of those who know me finding it and mocking me for having a blog with the good old line of ‘who does she think she is?’. This isn’t to say that the poems I’m writing now will ever see the light of day (my publisher would have to do some real sweet talking to convince me to ever put these in a second book – hi Becca if you’re reading this!) but I will acknowledge that they exist.
They exist and they are harrowing reads.
I have tried to force myself to go back to my ‘old way’ of writing poems but I have not been successful, it always comes back to the same themes.
So where does that leave me now?
I don’t particularly want to be writing in the style that I am. I’ve gone from writing about observation to now writing poems that could fall into the category of body horror – I don’t like that! But I don’t think fighting it is the correct approach either and clearly it hasn’t worked.
For the time being I’m going to embrace this new style of writing, I’ll accept that the words on the page that make me wince when I read them are of my own creation. I won’t deny that the horrors on that page came from me (does sound slightly dramatic when I put it like that).
I will continue to write, I will continue to grow and see just where this new style of writing will take me.
I am as excited as I am scared.
Thank you so much for taking a few minutes out of your day to read my thoughts and ramblings. If you’d like to order a copy of my book you can order it direct from my publisher (we love to support small publishing houses direct on this blog) or for ease of international shipping you can find it on Amazon too.
Lost in the Story 
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