Achievements in small steps
I totter, I stumble, I pick myself up of the icy paving – ouch! – examine my hands for punctures and bleeding, and get up again in ungainly fashion. Doubtless someone is watching me, but I’ve got only one aim, and don’t care what I look like. As soon as I can, I forget – forget – about that; think about something else because doing so helps everything to heal better, and I feel much less pain when I raise my thoughts to something else.
Arriving back indoors, it would be so very easy to give up. Swallow the age-old dirge that “Life is just too hard, a shitty, bloody mess that gets harder all the time.”
I’m afraid I used to talk to myself like that all the time. But now, I can’t help noticing that, even as I get up off the carpark, actually, doing so is an achievement, something to be pleased about, a step in the right direction. Which makes me naturally inclined to look back at all the other steps I have taken – so many! – to arrive at this point, and to consider what I would like to do next.
I used to be so impatient. Always rushing, pushing, desperate to get finished. Perhaps that was a consequence of chronic discomfort, yearning to arrive somewhere softer, or perhaps I was not taught to see all the joys of careful patience. These are many, varied and ever changing. As is my appreciation for the way in which life unfolds, when we have the courage to take our time, break each task into small parts, and succeed by having the courage not to look always beyond to the horizon, but often, to simply keep on keeping on with what is directly before us.
Thanks for listening.
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February 5, 2019
To turn my mistakes into opportunities
Fran Macilvey Fran's School of Hard Knocks, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing, Women's fiction and chic lit 10 Comments
To turn my mistakes into opportunities
By some miracle, I now have three books published, two more written, and another underway. What will I do with myself when I’ve finished writing my latest book? Write another?
I endow my characters with more practical skills than I have, more confidence, as well as the hope that everything will work out in the end: I am writing women’s fiction, after all, and it seems only right to have an optimistic ending. But also, I write because I can make use, then, of some of my mistakes and turn them to more hopeful account. Writing is not merely wish fulfilment, it is also a form of apology, it allows us to consider different endings, and maybe, just maybe, it gives us extra courage to try for happy endings ourselves.
There is no doubt that an eventful life is excellent fodder for fiction. So is a life littered with wrong paths, poor choices, and the boulders that crop up when we know we are going the wrong way, but seem powerless to turn away. In some ways, fiction represents a synthesis of the best and the worst bits of life lived thus far, with a sprinkling of magic and strong characters whom – oh, yes – we can love and loathe, but whom it is hard for us to ignore.
It seems a very worth-while thing to do; to take a million-and-one mistakes and turn them to good account by writing about them, so that I can laugh and learn the lessons of acceptance. Letting go of my mistakes in such entertaining fashion, I move forward into something better.
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