The need to write

I love reading of people who, often to their own surprise, have found themselves spurred on to write, as though they have at some point in their lives found themselves unexpectedly before an open gate which beckons them out on to a landscape of words.  I have just come across two heartening examples of this.

Katharine Norbury, who is about to publish her first book, The Fish Ladder: a Journey Upstream, writes, “…suddenly I thought “I’ve got something to say!”, so I started saying it.”  “At my age it’s very relaxing to know there’s something out there that has some of my philosophy and thoughts in it…. I’m very happy that I’ve finally said something.”

And in the biography of a rather delightfully odd writer of detective stories, Suzette Hill, I found the following: “At the age of sixty-four and on a whim, she took up a pen and began writing.”

I have written books about acupuncture and continue to write this blog which gives me the chance “on a whim”, as Suzette Hill says, to write about the odd thoughts I have.  But I have never written anything in greater detail about my life, nor have I ever wanted to write anything fictional.  As I said in my blog of 2014 (28 December), apart from blog-writing I seem to be facing a book made up of blank pages, as though they are waiting for me to write words upon them. But I am not yet clear what words these will be.  I would like, though, to be able soon to say that these blank pages are starting to fill up with my writing, and then be able to say with as much glee as Katharine Norbury does, “I’m very happy that I’ve finally said something”, and, in my case it would be truer to say “something else”.