Thoughts on Writing

I have always been somewhat envious of people who have an easy relationship with their creativity, though as I get older, I begin to doubt whether anyone really has. Perhaps some people see whatever they do creatively as a hobby? Sunday painters. Part-time poets. Doodling musicians. Whatever. I wish I could be a hobbyist, but I'm not.
I used to write a lot. An awful lot as it happens. Right through the nineties up until the summer of 2001. Short stories, and a few abortive attempts at longer pieces, but short stories mostly. At some point toward the end of the summer of 2001 I counted up how many stories I had written over the preceding seven years or so. I got to about two hundred before I lost count.
I hardly have any of these stories any more. The product of a difficult relationship with them I think. They get lost over the years, over the countless moves from one house to another, one city to the next. I wish I still had them. They would be interesting to read again. I still have a few. Pieces of them anyway.
I never gave any of the stories to anyone else to read.
That was one of the reasons why I made a conscious decision to give up writing back in the swansong days of summer 2001. I couldn't see the point any more, and writing the stories just for myself wasn't making me happy any more. It was a shame I stopped when I did, because if I remember rightly (and remember, memory is all too eager to provide distortions of what is being remembered) I was on the verge of discovering something that had, at least, the potentiality to be true to myself. Something original? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Memory distorts.
I destroyed all the stories I had written over the past few years (I had lost a considerable amount of them before as well). I thought that I would probably be writing within the year, but... time passed, and I didn't. I wrote poems of course. I think, even in some kind of coma, I would still somehow write poems, but poems were never meant to be for anyone to read. They were always a kind of catharsis, a kind of arcane... arcane something or another. I kept a blog -for a while- on myspace back in 2007, but my entries there were sporadic and fragmented.
And then, somehow, I came to this, Bridge 39, last November. Now, 6 months later, I'm thinking of writing again, and I wish I wasn't. I wish I could just be a Sunday painter (nothing wrong with that). I wish it could just be a hobby, something to kill the time.
The same with my art -and my guitar playing too- that... questioning I suppose. I have a half finished drawing on the floor in front of me. It seems to hang there, goading me, not allowing me to rest. Always being in orbit. Never landing. My guitar lies on the chair next to me. Unfinished songs. Unfinished drawings. All that questioning over whether or not I am wasting my time. All that self doubt.
Still that act of creativity has always been a compulsion with me, the art of transcribing the internal into the external. No, that doesn't quite work. With me, it's more kind of mediumistic. When it works anyway, when the ink flows, and the song slips, and the sentences, snake-like, rest in sunset-haunted afternoons.
Never talk to me if there is a piece of paper and a biro near (which I hate drawing -or writing with) because I'll end up not listening.
I don't mean too. It's always been this way. A compulsion as I said.

Actually, I'm not sure what the point of this entry was now! Think it could be time for a cup of tea, and a continuation of Hilary Mantelk's memoir 'Giving Up the Ghost' which is excellent.

And looking above, a note to myself; if I do start writing, please, never use the phrase 'sunset-haunted afternoons' ever again.
Oh well.