‘We’re all Works In Progess,’ I found myself writing the other day. Another cliché/truth/ugh.
And as I’m forever banging on about my fascination with stories-within-stories, and the state of my notebooks, I wondered ‘What do other writer’s WIPs look like?’
And then: ‘As my novels are raw and introspective, and have the recurring theme of mental health, why don’t I ask other writers – writers in all genres – if they’d like a spot on my blog to tell us about their WIP as opposed to their published works? And wouldn’t it be fun to base it on the PHQ-2/9 form used by mental health professionals – after all, I’ve filled in about a million of them over the years!
Having made this decision and decided it was ‘instagramable’, I picked up my phone and opened the app. After scrolling for a bit, I saw that @inspiredtowrite, who’s a real motivator, actually, had taken her ‘as-a-creative-you-need-to-show-up-and-do-the-work’ idea, and created ‘#showyourshittyart’. Show the work as you’re doing it, and be proud of the fact that you are actually doing it. Brilliant!
My maths isn’t great, so I’ll allow myself to say that half of any story is the writing of it – I guess there’d be no point to blogs, otherwise. And the whole concept reminds me of another of my favourite books of all time, Possession, by AS Byatt. I am aware that this blog is chaos.
But then – and I’m prepared to be proved wrong in this – all WIPs are, aren’t they?
When I was sixteen, my tutor at Exeter College was called Annie. One of the first things she did was get us to make up a word out of the letters of our name and give it a meaning that defined us as students. Hers was ‘Einna’, and she said it meant ‘organized chaos’, and I could never work out if that was a paradox, a load of tripe, or whether it was profound.
Anyway, like I said, I am aware that this blog is chaos.
I hope you’re as excited as I am about welcoming the first author to my blog, to take the Writer’s WIP Questionnaire – 2. I wonder who it will be. I wonder if my theory is correct, and their WIP is chaos…
#WIP #amwriting #chaostheory
Morwenna Blackwood, Author 