Use Your Words by Catherine Deveny

Author:Catherine Deveny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

14

WRITING IS A MAGNET

This weird thing happens when you commit to writing.

It works like this.

Say you decide to write about a poodle. Suddenly, every time you walk outside you see people with poodles. You’ve never noticed this before! You’re like, ‘Has everyone always had a poodle? Is this some kind of zeitgeist-y collective unconscious thing?’ Or you decide you’ll write a novel about someone studying saxophone in Paris. You go to your neighbour’s garage sale and the first thing you see is a book titled Studying Saxophone in Paris for Dummies. And next to it is a beret and a saxophone. How do you explain this phenomenon? Coincidence? Synchronicity? The universe? Energy? God? As a frothing-at-the-mouth atheist, I don’t know how to account for it. But it happens, and it’s abundant, freaky and incredibly encouraging. I call it the Writing Magnet.

The Writing Magnet is a bit of magic that is created when you set your mind on what you are going to write.

When you commit to writing about something, you suddenly find things related to it everywhere: overheard conversations, graffiti, lines in movies, products at the supermarket. You sit next to a stranger on a plane and they turn out to be an expert in precisely the field you’re writing about. They know details you wouldn’t be able to find out any other way and here you are chatting to them for a two-hour flight! Stuff jumps out of the woodwork. It’s almost like you’ve put on special goggles programmed to show you exactly what you need.

It’s amazing how this works. When my youngest son started primary school, I wrote a column about it. It was a great piece, perfectly capturing the details for the day and my feelings about finally having all the kids at school. When Charlie finished primary school, I decided I would ride to school with him and write a little companion piece about his last day at primary school. As we rode along, we passed a couch that had been dumped on the footpath and graffittied with the words ‘SOFA. SO GOOD’. I came home and wrote the piece immediately, trying to record all my feelings, details and the vibe of that ride – including the old couch. ‘So far, so good’ ended up becoming the theme of the piece, the thread that tied all the loose ends together.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Don’t ask me how.

You only need to have a scrap of an idea. Even if you feel like your idea is a big one, trust me: by the time you are finished, it will be unrecognisable.

Just commit. The Writing Magnet will be immediately activated.

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