Try Not to Fill the Creative Space

To the weary and unseeing eye (mine, I'll admit) my house-shaped shed looks almost exactly the same as it did when I was blogging on February 15...

If anything, the sense of chaos is even more pronounced than it was back then...

Add to this the fact that my agent is starting to send my novel The Dragonfly round to publishers - eliciting an eerie silence after the noise made by the Steves - and there is the definite sense that everything which matters is completely on hold.

My default position, both as a writer and as a woman trying to get her life back, is to slide into a decline, but somewhere inside me is the sense that it would be an opportunity missed.  It's in these rare, weightless, transitional moments that magic can sometimes occur:  When you feel precarious and unprotected perhaps you see things obliquely, or allow different and unexpected ideas to slip through your defences. Tectonic plates only need to shift a tiny bit to create an earthquake. It's a question of learning to accept that everything  will remain in suspension for the time being, however uncomfortable that might feel.

Try to think of these spaces in your life as creative ones.  Steel yourself to listen attentively to the cool acoustic, the unsettling silence, and perhaps you'll hear the rumble of the ground starting to move beneath your feet.

Watch this Space

I went and saw the watercolour exhibition at Tate Britain last weekend and one of the most haunting images was  Ruin, painted by Uwe Wittwer in 2008, in which the artist overpaints a digitally copied shot of a Frankfurt bombing raid. It is extraordinarily stark: the remnants of buildings shown in heavy black, while everything that has been destroyed is indicated by plain white spaces in which there is nothing.

The effect is uncannily suggestive.  The devastation is shown in outline, the detail is terrifyingly absent..I stood looking at it for a long time, bringing to bear my own fearful apprehension of what might have been.  The picture was a complete and finished statement in itself, but because of what Wittwer didn't show, it worked profoundly on my imagination.

I think the same applies when you are writing.  A few deft strokes of your pen can be enough to inspire your reader to filling in the spaces for themselves.  Often an allusion to violence, or sex, or extreme emotion can be as powerful as a visceral description of it because it demands more from the reader.  This should never be a substitute for a full exposition of the dramatic moment, but it can sometimes be an alternative, or a supplement, and can introduce different shades and inflections into your work.

In my experience, it's often in the spaces that the interesting stuff happens.  They provide an environment that is ambiguous, unsettling and curious.  By very definition, because nothing is there, the  potential for creativity is huge.  They are the means by which a writer can offer an open invitation to his reader.  Like doors, they beckon you in....