Ease

Hello, happy Sunday, friends. Did you miss your hour, and did you notice that the morning was darker? I went to bed late and woke bright and early to write a story I hope I’ll be able to share with you soon. I’ve just finished it, and I’ve spent all day at my desk so now I am going out into the sunshine and I’ll keep this newsletter short.

Story writing is relatively new to me. Or, I should say, finishing stories is new to me. I have started plenty of projects, unsure of how they would finish, all of which are now carcassed on my desktop or in my notebooks. But, in the last year, I’ve written three or four full short stories. Story-writing is a particular skill that requires deft world-building and character development, within the space of a few sentences, and the rapid unspooling of plot. Novels can take their time, but stories have to assemble themselves and unravel you within the space of a few short pages, and this takes a different skill than those I am used to working with. I have been deliberate with these stories — they are outside my usual range, and I am still learning how to make them.

If you are new to my newsletter or my writing, you will know that I started writing seriously in my early twenties, some years an experience of sexual violence for which I struggled for a long time to find words. I have written two novels about sexual violence, and I am writing a third non-fiction book on the same topic. Writing has always been my way to express difficult things as well as joy, and I started this newsletter nearly five years ago now as a means of leaning more towards the latter — to share with you the things that have helped me over the years, in the hope that they might resonate.

This newsletter has been varied — I write about books, films, television, art, politics, my own life, nature. My fiction, though, in the eight or so years since I started writing seriously, has always gravitated back to the same subject. For a time, this troubled me. I thought that I might be writing myself into a corner, that I might be trapping myself with my material and therefore preventing myself from establishing a life beyond it.

I expressed this concern to a friend a little more than a year ago, and she told me, emphatically, to keep telling the story until I was done with it. Or, she said, to keep telling the story until it was done with me. So I have. I had altogether given up resistance, the guilty feeling that I shouldn’t be telling something that needed to be told, and I have continued to write on the same topic. It has been easy sometimes and sometimes it has caused me pain, which I have cushioned, rather than with guilt, but more deliberately with other reading — myth, fantasy, science, philosophy, and things that bring me joy. Friends, art, comedy, movement. People I love. I have thought about what will happen when I finish the book I am working on now, and I have thought about giving up writing. I have come to understand that even if I give up this thing that defines me, my life will still be whole, who I am as a person will still be whole. I have given in to ease. I have come to realise that not everything worthwhile has to be a struggle — in fact, the things that are meant for you may not be a struggle at all.

Of course, what happens when you are easeful and when you are happy — which, I have to say, I am entirely — is that all the ideas that felt too difficult to express come to the surface. This is what is happening with my story-writing, and it is why I am still sitting at my desk close to 4pm when it is a beautiful sunny Sunday. All I have wanted to do today is write, and to create, and to find words for stories that are not only to do with those memories that first compelled me to write but with other things, other parts of me I am only just learning to express, and the words have come easily to me, as if they were always already there.

Sending you love, Rosie x