I remember the moment I realised that my boyfriend and I belonged to two distinct types of the same species. Those for whom the famous Nike slogan represents a lofty and unfeeling commentary on their repeated personal failure to put their aspirations into practice (think becoming fluent in French, cutting down on sugar), and those who simply and truly ‘just do it’.
I had asked him whether he could hide away the remains of my chocolate stash to prevent me from entering certain cocoa coma and was met with utter incomprehension: ‘If you don’t want to eat the chocolate, why don’t you just not do it?’. Oh, my sweet, innocent babe. How many of my darkest longings and most contradictory urges he was yet to discover.
Since then, I have fared pretty well with finding accountability to make myself do the things I want outside of our couple. The fact that we still have a relationship deserving of that term seven years on, perhaps suggests that this was the right call. However, there remained one thing I hadn’t yet cracked – writing.
I have loved writing stories since I learned how to write. But as usual, the more I became preoccupied with having to make a living, the more I distanced myself from the risky business of creativity (or perhaps you could say, the more I stopped living – deep stuff). Finally enjoying a semblance of financial predictability in my early thirties, I reduced my working hours and started a good old WordPress blog in 2023. However, after the initial enthusiasm had ebbed, I struggled to publish even one post per month. Each new calendar leaf resulting inevitably in a mad rush to get something on the page. Why weren’t all the words penned up from over a decade of silence flowing out of me? When I did manage to write a first draft, I loved the process of editing and sharing it. But getting started was writhing-on-the-ground, drawing-blood-from-a-stone awful.
I think the main culprit was the cornucopia of oh-so-sweet distractions that exist in the world today. All the habits of procrastination I thought I had left behind with my student cards promptly popped back up the moment I set out to write. A Vogue France YouTube video about an unbeknown-to-me fashion editor’s flat in Paris? A must watch. Plucking that coarse hair from my chin? Can’t wait. Brushing up those dust bunnies from under the sofa? Now or never. After 10 months of watching Netflix instead of writing witty prose it was clear – I needed to step it up or stop (now that’s a slogan that I can get behind).
That’s how I landed on City University’s Narrative Non-Fiction course webpage. I was unsure about joining at first. Somehow, the mere thought of a formal writing course conjured up images of tweed-wearing gentlemen, sucking on wooden pipes, intermittently ejaculating erudite adjectives into the room. Signing up also came with a free serving of mean self-talk alla ‘talent can’t be taught’. But my biggest hesitation around joining the course was that I worried about putting something I did for fun on yet another productive ‘growth trajectory’.
One look at my blinking cursor and April’s empty blog page later and I clicked join. Let’s face it: too much growth was really not the problem I was dealing with.
The first Thursday evening class came and the moment the teacher said the beauty of a phrase ‘This class is very much genre-fluid’, all my preconceptions dissolved. I was in the right place. A certainty that grew with each grounding practice we did at the beginning of class.
Before all the meditation-sceptic readers jump to conclusions, this didn’t mean that we were back-rubbing each other into creative ecstasy. Every week, we were asked to bring 1000 shiny, hard-earned words of writing which would form the basis of teaching and our group discussions. The course’s philosophy was very much about getting shit written first, worrying about self-doubts later. Reminiscent of ‘Just do it’ but with the small yet mighty additive ‘together’ and the universal tagline of care and kindness ‘absolutely no worries if not’.
Here I could go on about how inspired and safe and energised the all-women group made me feel over the ten weeks. That it is only thanks to the prospect of hearing their thoughts on my writing, that I produced more words in 10 weeks than I had in the 10 months prior. But we all know how amazing women are (plus in sisterly solidarity, they currently make up 90% of my subscriber list, which makes overt gushing intensely awkward). Suffice to say that I can’t begin to describe what a massive, gaping hole these classes will leave in my Thursday evenings from now on.
So how to keep going without class? Although the teacher’s method got me to write regularly, it wasn’t all sunshine and sonnets. The main change was that I got through the hard bit of getting started with a new piece faster and more frequently, but that didn’t make it any less difficult. And while writing has been a constant over the past two months, other parts of my life have reached increasing stages of unravelling, so making another financial commitment to guided writing activities is not in the cards (or should I say on my card, double sigh – one for the bad joke, one for the sad fact).
It will come as no surprise that eventually I decided to do what any sane/desperate 21st century individual would do in search of a free (read paid for with your data) shortcut to community and accountability – resort to technology. Halfway through the course, I moved my blog from WordPress to Substack. It is here that I will emulate what I was asked to do at City: share a piece of new writing every Thursday night at 7.30pm BST.
City and Nike can thank me when this blog inevitably goes through the roof.