There Is Nothing To Writing – just Your Blood on the Page!

‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed’ Ernest Hemingway    

I wouldn’t have fully understood this before I’d completed my first novel and its final draft, and I may not have understood it fully if I hadn’t written my book with the help of my ‘Muse’. Creating a dialogue with my Muse and asking her what she suggested I write opened many a can of worms, leaving me squirming with horror at what she wanted me to explore and then express. And yet each time I stepped across the threshold to take up her writing gauntlet I knew the truth of what she offered me. I had to go deep within the first time I wrote each of her most powerful scenes and then deeper still when it came to refining through the second draft. My own learning about myself has been extraordinary and this is where my blood is most visible on the page. I laugh to hide my terror when I say I’m anxious about people reading my book because they’ll know what was inside my head!

So last night I dreamed of lions. They haven’t made an appearance in my sleep for a while. There was a tiny one, no more than the size of an embryo although it was alive. Then there was a teenager, ready to go out in the world but naive. And then in the woods was an unknown full sized male lion on the hunt. I assumed he’d take the teenager and kill him and it was up to me to bring the youngster to safety without putting myself on the line too…..

Could this be my fear of being vulnerable and visible in the world coming to me in the symbolism of the lions I’ve awoken in the first of my trilogy ‘Waking the Lions’?

So I have bled at my laptop. I have shed blood I didn’t even know I had until I wrote it down, and some I didn’t know about until I wrote it down a number of times more. Writing like this may be simple but it isn’t necessarily easy. There are deep demons to face. But the demons become angels once you see the end result is in harmony with what you wanted in the first place….my Muse knew so much better than the conscious ‘me’ about what story to write to fulfil the end result I had in my imagination.

Now wonder she gave me the theme that ‘love is the vital force which brings our imagination to life’.

(Opening chapters are available as a free download by clicking on the link in the right hand sidebar)