Creative Writing, Writing and Balancing Life In a Crazy World

I've just submitted a poem to a creative writing course I started in October this year. Since I wrote my  'public intellectual' post I have managed to get that elusive professional-private life balance and, shock shock horror horror, my professional life hasn't suffered in the process. In fact, it's gotten better. 

So, yes, the creative writing. One of the key things I have found in life is that wherever there is black and white thinking in your psyche, it's an area that needs to be deconstructed - with care - because it represents an area of 'immature' thinking and development. Writing is writing. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The more you do it because you enjoy it, the more you want to / crave to. I saw academic and creative writing in a dichotomy, but the truth is I couldn't reconcile my own blocks around writing. I also had a pretty negative experience regarding writing when doing my PhD. Academic writing is its own beast and it takes you a while to find a voice that you are comfortable with in doing that. Again, time... and practice. Shock shock, horror horror... similar to creative writing.

For me, writing really is entangled with voice. It is about how you sound to both yourself and others. It's about accepting the voice that comes from you and not being too critical of it. That's what I struggled with in academic writing. It's almost as if you have to develop a tough inner critic to survive. Someone who will punish you first before someone else will. Ted Hughes called it the 'inner policeman'. It really is a defence mechanism, something that someone would have 'naturally' developed in an abusive environment to survive. I never really experienced it until academic writing. There's the polarisation. I'm sure if I had gone down a more committed creative writing route throughout the years, I would have adopted the 'inner policeman'. The truth is I didn't. I recongised and supported the creative process within me, despite how nascent it was in reality. I was still proud of it and saw it as life force. But, it wasn't my professional life. Writing became my professional life when I became an academic and I didn't like it one bit. There is a box, there are boundaries, there are expectations. It has taken me some time to realise that, really, few of them are real. It's still your own voice that matters. There will always be noise around that. But, if you are passionate about who you are and what you do, you learn to screen it.

I WILL be writing more. I have been writing more. In notebooks, journals, half-written journal articles and in poetry. But, that's been just for me. I started this journal to blend that. I've returned back to do exactly that...