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These are my happiest times - the rare moments of

These are my happiest times - the rare moments of calm in the chaos of family life. The stillness, joy and togetherness that comes from making up stories or drawing pictures or building fairy houses out of twigs or dancing in the kitchen or singing in the car. It always brings us closer, the magic of art, the magic of making things together. 🌟

#creativelifehappylife #artwithkids #familytime #momslife #motherslife #motherhood #creativekids #art #watercolor #creativity #minimacs #momofthree

Book Review: DINOSAURS by @lydia.millet @w.w.norto

Book Review: DINOSAURS by @lydia.millet @w.w.norton 🦕

I spend a great deal of my time reading books about dinosaurs to my kids, especially this little guy, so when I spotted a novel for grown-ups with the title DINOSAURS, I felt I had to get it. 🦕

Of course, the novel handles the subject of dinosaurs rather more metaphorically than the picture books I read to Willoughby. Millet, who is fascinated with the subject of extinction, explores the wonder of how birds, the direct descendants of small, winged theropods, have survived for over 150 million years, because they learned to adapt. She leads us to reflect on what it will take for the natural world - and for humans - to survive our environmental crisis, and if such a thing is even possible. 🦕

Lydia Millet does something gently revolutionary in choosing her protagonist: a wealthy, privileged, white male. Even more revolutionary is how she presents him in an unequivocally positive light. Gil is, clearly, a good man. 🦕

At the beginning of the novel, Gil is heartbroken and so walks from New York to Arizona - one of the only meaningful things he feels he's ever done in his life. Having inherited his wealth, Gil doesn't need to work. He floats around, lonely and somewhat purposeless, volunteering and giving money away where he can. Millet does a great job of exploring how having nothing to work for can be its own kind of hell.🦕

He moves into a house next to the glass-walled home of a family of four, who become his friends and then, in a way, his family. His relationship to the son, Tom, is especially moving. I love stories about how our lives can become so bound to others with whom we have little in common besides an accidental intersecting.🦕

The book is subtle and philosophical. One idea shines through: that it is connection that will save us. Connection to the natural world, and to each other.🦕

A thoughtful, slightly unusual novel. What are you reading? I l'd love to know.🦕

#dinosaurs #bookreview #bookrecommendation #booklove #readwithkids #theropods #birds #readinglife #readingcommunity #tuesday
#ecolit #fiction #extinction #globalwarming #momswhoread #momswhowrite #momslife #bookish #books

My altar: coffee, a good novel, a stack of noteboo

My altar: coffee, a good novel, a stack of notebooks, a full pencil case and some headphones in case I need to listen to something without disturbing my fellow coffee shop dwellers. If I were at home the altar would have a snoozing cat or two and a vase of wild flowers from the garden.

What does your desk setup look like - at home or away? I’d love to know.

Oh, and the @rachelcjoyce is gorgeous. Have you read this one?

#writers #writersofinstagram #writerslife #writerslife #authorslife #authorsofinstagram #notebooks #notebooklover #desksetup #coffeeshopvibes #coffeeshop #coffeeshops #authorssupportingauthors #writingcommunity #amreading @leuchtturm1917 @leuchtturm1917usa

Book Review: THIS COULD BE EVERYTHING by Eva Rice

Book Review: THIS COULD BE EVERYTHING by Eva Rice @simonandschuster

If you grew up in the 90s, this book is a deliciously immersive trip down memory lane: a world when waiting for Sunday evening to find out which song would be No.1 in the charts - by listening to the radio - was a thing; a world of Friends and Just Seventeen and Smash Hits and lip gloss and your girlfriends being scouted by modelling agencies as they walked down the street; a world just before everyone was addicted to phones and technology, which still allowed for a degree of anticipation and romantic suspense.

Beyond it's evocative setting (London, 1990), this is a beautiful and moving coming of age story: 15 year old February Kingdom (such a great name!) has lost her parents and her twin sister and is terrified to leave her room and go back to the real world, which, from where she stands, cannot be trusted. And then a small, yellow canary flies through her window and everything changes.

I loved Eva Rice's depiction of how people come into your life and change it forever. But also how the most magical relationships, are shot through with heartbreak and complications. That there's no easy way to be a living, breathing, loving human in the world, especially when you're a teenager who has lost so much.

More than anything, it's a book about hope, though not hope in an easy, saccharine, swoop in and rescue you way. It's about the kind of hope that needs to be searched out and fought for, every day:

'I suppose all I'm saying is don't give up. Pull up a chair for Hope. You never know, you might just find that she slinks up to you one day, when you're least expecting her...she's always hanging around. You just have to know where to look for her. That's all.' (p413)

I loved that it was warm enough to read some of this in my garden, currently filled with buttercups, which have always struck me as such hopeful little flowers.

#siblingrief #loss #grief #thiscouldbeeverything #fiction #bookreview #bookrecommendation #reader #readersofinstagram #books #bookish #booklover #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #booksofig #readerscommunity #authorssupportingauthors #authorslife #writerslife #author

Yodi went missing for three days and came home lat

Yodi went missing for three days and came home late last night (Hugh always manages to find lost creatures, he's Francis of Assisi reincarnated) and she hasn't left my side or stopped sleeping since.

She's an indoor cat - her choice - and yet, every now and then, she sneaks out, gets frightened and hunkers down somewhere and worries us for days at a time. And then comes back and sleeps it off.

So glad my reading-writing-snuggle buddy is back.

#cats #catsofinstagram #writercats #authorcats #cat #catlife #whitecats #catlover #catsofinstagram #catscatscats

I've just finished this wonderful book on creativi

I've just finished this wonderful book on creativity by the glorious and yet gentle @rickrubin. I've read a few chapters each day (the chapters are blissfully short) as a kind of warm-up or pep talk before sitting down to writing. My equivalent of having a Ted Lasso moment in the locker room!

Nothing in this book is groundbreakingly new but in that way that old wisdom, told in a fresh voice, has a way of jolting you awake, Rubin's advice feels wise and alive.

The main message of the book is that being an artist is less about creating an piece of art that will make you successful in worldly terms, and more about living in the world with an artist's heart and soul and spirit. That the way you relate, connect, love, breathe, walk, read, take the world in and observe and translate it, moment by moment, is as much the work of being an artist as putting words on the page or paint on canvas. Rubin guides us, gently, into living in an open, patient, playful, often child-like way as the best foundation for making art.

He guides us away from competition and towards collaboration; away from judgement to openness; away from needing immediate results to patience. He also gives some lovely, practical tips for coming unstuck in a project and takes us through the three phases of creation from planting the seeds, to crafting to completion.

He speaks a great deal, too, about stripping back our work to what is essential so that we see its beating heart. To not being afraid of paradox or chaos or seeming contradictions. To understand that the art we are creating is always greater than us and our egos.

Most helpfully of all, he helps us to get out of our own way, to put aside self-judgement, self-doubt and the unhelpful stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: 'With each story we tell ourselves, we negate possibility. Reality is diminished. Rooms of the self are walled off. Truth collapses to fit a fictional organising principle we've adopted. As artists, we're called to let go of these stories, again and again, and blindly but pour faith in the curious energy drawing us down the path."

#bookrecommendation #creativity #inspiration #writingtips #writing #writer

I've been working in @leuchtturm1917 notebooks for

I've been working in @leuchtturm1917 notebooks for the last ten years (ever since I published my first novel, WHAT MILO SAW), and the process of filling them with ideas for my current work in progress, still brings me immense joy. 📖

I know that artists shouldn't be over-reliant on their tools but the reality is that having a system that works, for you, one that brings you joy, really does help. I love the size, the colour, the layout, the feel of the paper that these notebooks offer. It gives me aesthetic pleasure to work in these and, in my view, pleasure should be gleaned from any source possible - writing is hard! 📖

I tend to fill up two notebooks per novel. They're like a mental filing cabinet of ideas, marked by tabs, with different sections focusing on character, plot, setting, themes etc. 📖

I weave in random pages on future story ideas as a way of reminding myself that the story I'm working on is just one stepping stone in my creative life - there's more to come! I include my free writing exercises - at the moment I'm following a lovely 31 Day Writing and Mediation Course by @nadiacolburn. I also make notes on the novels I'm reading: quotations I love, ideas, writing tips. 📖

I like to think that when I look back, the notebooks will give me a snapshot of all my thinking and feeling and reading and ideas - of who I am as an artist - at the specific moment in time when I wrote in them. 📖

I believe that everything we create, at any moment in time, is the sum total of who we are then: of the things we are experiencing, reading, thinking, of our relationships, our life events, our way of being in the world. All of this goes into my notebooks. 📖

I'll do a little video on this in the future so you can take a look inside. Watch this space! 📖

I'd love to hear about your creative process and whether you use notebooks - or any other way of keeping track of your creative self. 📖

#notebooks #notebooksofinstagram @leuchtturm1917usa #notebooklove #creativeprocess #writingprocess #writingtips #authorslife #writerslife #authorssupportingauthors #writerssupportingwriters #authorscommunity #writerscommunity #authorsofinstagram #writersofinstagram

Book Review: ALL THE LITTLE BIRD HEARTS by Viktori

Book Review: ALL THE LITTLE BIRD HEARTS by Viktoria Lloyd Barlow @tinder_press

I chose this book at @blackwelloxford simply from browsing. I love finding books this way, to read them without having had my judgement affected by reviews or marketing. It was a wonderful and surprising read.

We follow Sunday, a single mother, over the summer of 1988 as she befriends the childless glamorous couple next door, only to find that they are using her to get to her impressionable and vulnerable sixteen-year-old daughter.

Sunday is autistic and struggles to make sense of social relationships and interactions. She's forever observing, trying to educate herself, attempting to bridge the gap: the novel gives us a beautiful, touching, often funny evocation of the immense effort it takes to translate and participate in a world when we don't instinctively understand the rules. Autism also acts as a metaphor for the struggles we all have to relate to others, whether it be to our daughters or extended family or to strangers.

One of the great strengths of this novel is how beautifully Sunday is drawn as a character: I really came to love her and felt devastated as I understood what was happening to her, what was being stolen from right under her nose.

The book is beautifully written, lyrical and insightful and with a real understanding of human psychology too. There are moments of great social satire, afforded by Sunday's outsider's perspective. We read about how shallow relationships can be; about how deep and complex too - and how abusive, how damaging. She exposes how easily won over we all are by the shiny, sparkly people of this world. And she writes about how devastating it is to lose someone we love - and how little control we have over that happening.

A real gem of a novel with a wonderfully drawn protagonist whose voice will stay with me for a long time.

#bookreview #bookrecommendation #fiction #bookreviewer #reader #readerslife #readersofinstagram #readingcommunity #booksandcats #authorslife #authorssupportingauthors #autism #neurodiversity #fiction #writerslife #writingcommunity #neurodivergent

I've been reading a few chapters of @rickrubin's T

I've been reading a few chapters of @rickrubin's THE CREATIVE ACT before sitting down to write every day. I equate it to having a pep talk from a great coach before the game. His short, thoughtful, encouraging chapters are perfect for this.

I loved the chapter called 'Non-Competition.' Feeling envious of other people's success is, I've found, one of the biggest blocks to creativity and motivation. I shy away from competition. When I see anyone excelling, especially in a field I admire, I tend to pull my head back into my shell as my critical voice tells me there's no point even taking part: I'm clearly not up to the race.

Of course, this is a scarcity mentality (there's only so much success to go around) and is deeply unhelpful to the creative spirit.

As a writer, this is particularly tough when I spend most of my time reading amazing novels! Rubin helps us shift the lens from competition to collaboration. First, he reminds us that all art is about expressing our essential selves and so competition is absurd: 'You are creating the work that best represents you. Another artist is making the work that best represents them. The two cannot be measured against one another.' And then he goes on to show how finding deep joy in the brilliance and success and achievements of others, rather than killing our creative motivation, should inspire us. We should think to ourselves, 'Wow! Look at what this artist is capable of - I wonder where I could take my work?' He urges us to move from competing with others to competing with ourselves 'as a quest for evolution.' We are running our own race, we are always trying to find our own, truest expression, which, by its nature, will never been like anyone else's. In another chapter on success he also talks about how little control we have on the outcome and reception of our work, how our only duty is to evolve ourselves and our work.

So, here's to collaboration rather than competition and to finding joy in the success of others!

#fridaythoughts #writingtips #inspiration #motivation #rickrubin #creativity #writerscommunity #quote #quotes #quotesofinstagram #quotestagram #quotesdaily #quotesoftheday #writerslife

Book Review: SHY by Max Porter @faberbooks This

Book Review: SHY by Max Porter @faberbooks

This was a quick but intense read, the style like a modern day Virginia Wolf or James Joyce: a stream of consciousness over the course of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

In the way that ideas tend to cluster, I've been thinking, writing and reading quite a bit about children who struggle to fit in and how hard life is for them when all they feel from the world, over and over again, is rejection.

I remember reading a book on emotional intelligence where the psychologist said that the tragedy of kids who are struggling is what they need most is more love, more kindness, more attention, more patience - when their behaviour does nothing but make people push them away.

We're drawn to the kind, polite, warm, lovely kids, we feed them our love and affirmation, when usually, they don't need it all that much - they're pretty content already.

So, we find ourselves in a vicious circle, in which the children who need love most receive it least. Then they lock themselves into the role of becoming unloveable and it becomes their identity. And so the downward spiral continues.

This is certainly the case for Shy, the boy whose head we're in. As he wanders into the night carrying a backpack full of rocks outside the Last Chance home 'for very disturbed young men,' his head is filled with voices: his teachers, his parents, his friends, those he's let down, his own voice. One of the most haunting lines in the book is: 'The night is huge and it hurts.' It so brilliantly encapsulates Shy's internal and external landscape.

It's not a comfortable read. There's violence and sex and drugs and references to self-harm. Shy's voice is raw and rebellious, sometimes funny and, towards the end, as he connects with the dark night, there's the possibility of hope, but that hope is fragile and uncertain.

A strange, poetic, honest, urgent read.

#bookreview #bookreviewer #book #bookstagram #books #bookcommunity #readerslife #readersofinstagram #readersofinsta #readinglife #catsandbooks #cats #catsofinstagram #catstagram #catsofig #whitecats #readingwithcats #authorssupportingauthors #authorslife #maxporter #shy

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These are my happiest times - the rare moments of

These are my happiest times - the rare moments of calm in the chaos of family life. The stillness, joy and togetherness that comes from making up stories or drawing pictures or building fairy houses out of twigs or dancing in the kitchen or singing in the car. It always brings us closer, the magic of art, the magic of making things together. 🌟

#creativelifehappylife #artwithkids #familytime #momslife #motherslife #motherhood #creativekids #art #watercolor #creativity #minimacs #momofthree

Book Review: DINOSAURS by @lydia.millet @w.w.norto

Book Review: DINOSAURS by @lydia.millet @w.w.norton 🦕

I spend a great deal of my time reading books about dinosaurs to my kids, especially this little guy, so when I spotted a novel for grown-ups with the title DINOSAURS, I felt I had to get it. 🦕

Of course, the novel handles the subject of dinosaurs rather more metaphorically than the picture books I read to Willoughby. Millet, who is fascinated with the subject of extinction, explores the wonder of how birds, the direct descendants of small, winged theropods, have survived for over 150 million years, because they learned to adapt. She leads us to reflect on what it will take for the natural world - and for humans - to survive our environmental crisis, and if such a thing is even possible. 🦕

Lydia Millet does something gently revolutionary in choosing her protagonist: a wealthy, privileged, white male. Even more revolutionary is how she presents him in an unequivocally positive light. Gil is, clearly, a good man. 🦕

At the beginning of the novel, Gil is heartbroken and so walks from New York to Arizona - one of the only meaningful things he feels he's ever done in his life. Having inherited his wealth, Gil doesn't need to work. He floats around, lonely and somewhat purposeless, volunteering and giving money away where he can. Millet does a great job of exploring how having nothing to work for can be its own kind of hell.🦕

He moves into a house next to the glass-walled home of a family of four, who become his friends and then, in a way, his family. His relationship to the son, Tom, is especially moving. I love stories about how our lives can become so bound to others with whom we have little in common besides an accidental intersecting.🦕

The book is subtle and philosophical. One idea shines through: that it is connection that will save us. Connection to the natural world, and to each other.🦕

A thoughtful, slightly unusual novel. What are you reading? I l'd love to know.🦕

#dinosaurs #bookreview #bookrecommendation #booklove #readwithkids #theropods #birds #readinglife #readingcommunity #tuesday
#ecolit #fiction #extinction #globalwarming #momswhoread #momswhowrite #momslife #bookish #books

My altar: coffee, a good novel, a stack of noteboo

My altar: coffee, a good novel, a stack of notebooks, a full pencil case and some headphones in case I need to listen to something without disturbing my fellow coffee shop dwellers. If I were at home the altar would have a snoozing cat or two and a vase of wild flowers from the garden.

What does your desk setup look like - at home or away? I’d love to know.

Oh, and the @rachelcjoyce is gorgeous. Have you read this one?

#writers #writersofinstagram #writerslife #writerslife #authorslife #authorsofinstagram #notebooks #notebooklover #desksetup #coffeeshopvibes #coffeeshop #coffeeshops #authorssupportingauthors #writingcommunity #amreading @leuchtturm1917 @leuchtturm1917usa

Book Review: THIS COULD BE EVERYTHING by Eva Rice

Book Review: THIS COULD BE EVERYTHING by Eva Rice @simonandschuster

If you grew up in the 90s, this book is a deliciously immersive trip down memory lane: a world when waiting for Sunday evening to find out which song would be No.1 in the charts - by listening to the radio - was a thing; a world of Friends and Just Seventeen and Smash Hits and lip gloss and your girlfriends being scouted by modelling agencies as they walked down the street; a world just before everyone was addicted to phones and technology, which still allowed for a degree of anticipation and romantic suspense.

Beyond it's evocative setting (London, 1990), this is a beautiful and moving coming of age story: 15 year old February Kingdom (such a great name!) has lost her parents and her twin sister and is terrified to leave her room and go back to the real world, which, from where she stands, cannot be trusted. And then a small, yellow canary flies through her window and everything changes.

I loved Eva Rice's depiction of how people come into your life and change it forever. But also how the most magical relationships, are shot through with heartbreak and complications. That there's no easy way to be a living, breathing, loving human in the world, especially when you're a teenager who has lost so much.

More than anything, it's a book about hope, though not hope in an easy, saccharine, swoop in and rescue you way. It's about the kind of hope that needs to be searched out and fought for, every day:

'I suppose all I'm saying is don't give up. Pull up a chair for Hope. You never know, you might just find that she slinks up to you one day, when you're least expecting her...she's always hanging around. You just have to know where to look for her. That's all.' (p413)

I loved that it was warm enough to read some of this in my garden, currently filled with buttercups, which have always struck me as such hopeful little flowers.

#siblingrief #loss #grief #thiscouldbeeverything #fiction #bookreview #bookrecommendation #reader #readersofinstagram #books #bookish #booklover #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #booksofig #readerscommunity #authorssupportingauthors #authorslife #writerslife #author

Yodi went missing for three days and came home lat

Yodi went missing for three days and came home late last night (Hugh always manages to find lost creatures, he's Francis of Assisi reincarnated) and she hasn't left my side or stopped sleeping since.

She's an indoor cat - her choice - and yet, every now and then, she sneaks out, gets frightened and hunkers down somewhere and worries us for days at a time. And then comes back and sleeps it off.

So glad my reading-writing-snuggle buddy is back.

#cats #catsofinstagram #writercats #authorcats #cat #catlife #whitecats #catlover #catsofinstagram #catscatscats

I've just finished this wonderful book on creativi

I've just finished this wonderful book on creativity by the glorious and yet gentle @rickrubin. I've read a few chapters each day (the chapters are blissfully short) as a kind of warm-up or pep talk before sitting down to writing. My equivalent of having a Ted Lasso moment in the locker room!

Nothing in this book is groundbreakingly new but in that way that old wisdom, told in a fresh voice, has a way of jolting you awake, Rubin's advice feels wise and alive.

The main message of the book is that being an artist is less about creating an piece of art that will make you successful in worldly terms, and more about living in the world with an artist's heart and soul and spirit. That the way you relate, connect, love, breathe, walk, read, take the world in and observe and translate it, moment by moment, is as much the work of being an artist as putting words on the page or paint on canvas. Rubin guides us, gently, into living in an open, patient, playful, often child-like way as the best foundation for making art.

He guides us away from competition and towards collaboration; away from judgement to openness; away from needing immediate results to patience. He also gives some lovely, practical tips for coming unstuck in a project and takes us through the three phases of creation from planting the seeds, to crafting to completion.

He speaks a great deal, too, about stripping back our work to what is essential so that we see its beating heart. To not being afraid of paradox or chaos or seeming contradictions. To understand that the art we are creating is always greater than us and our egos.

Most helpfully of all, he helps us to get out of our own way, to put aside self-judgement, self-doubt and the unhelpful stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: 'With each story we tell ourselves, we negate possibility. Reality is diminished. Rooms of the self are walled off. Truth collapses to fit a fictional organising principle we've adopted. As artists, we're called to let go of these stories, again and again, and blindly but pour faith in the curious energy drawing us down the path."

#bookrecommendation #creativity #inspiration #writingtips #writing #writer

I've been working in @leuchtturm1917 notebooks for

I've been working in @leuchtturm1917 notebooks for the last ten years (ever since I published my first novel, WHAT MILO SAW), and the process of filling them with ideas for my current work in progress, still brings me immense joy. 📖

I know that artists shouldn't be over-reliant on their tools but the reality is that having a system that works, for you, one that brings you joy, really does help. I love the size, the colour, the layout, the feel of the paper that these notebooks offer. It gives me aesthetic pleasure to work in these and, in my view, pleasure should be gleaned from any source possible - writing is hard! 📖

I tend to fill up two notebooks per novel. They're like a mental filing cabinet of ideas, marked by tabs, with different sections focusing on character, plot, setting, themes etc. 📖

I weave in random pages on future story ideas as a way of reminding myself that the story I'm working on is just one stepping stone in my creative life - there's more to come! I include my free writing exercises - at the moment I'm following a lovely 31 Day Writing and Mediation Course by @nadiacolburn. I also make notes on the novels I'm reading: quotations I love, ideas, writing tips. 📖

I like to think that when I look back, the notebooks will give me a snapshot of all my thinking and feeling and reading and ideas - of who I am as an artist - at the specific moment in time when I wrote in them. 📖

I believe that everything we create, at any moment in time, is the sum total of who we are then: of the things we are experiencing, reading, thinking, of our relationships, our life events, our way of being in the world. All of this goes into my notebooks. 📖

I'll do a little video on this in the future so you can take a look inside. Watch this space! 📖

I'd love to hear about your creative process and whether you use notebooks - or any other way of keeping track of your creative self. 📖

#notebooks #notebooksofinstagram @leuchtturm1917usa #notebooklove #creativeprocess #writingprocess #writingtips #authorslife #writerslife #authorssupportingauthors #writerssupportingwriters #authorscommunity #writerscommunity #authorsofinstagram #writersofinstagram

Book Review: ALL THE LITTLE BIRD HEARTS by Viktori

Book Review: ALL THE LITTLE BIRD HEARTS by Viktoria Lloyd Barlow @tinder_press

I chose this book at @blackwelloxford simply from browsing. I love finding books this way, to read them without having had my judgement affected by reviews or marketing. It was a wonderful and surprising read.

We follow Sunday, a single mother, over the summer of 1988 as she befriends the childless glamorous couple next door, only to find that they are using her to get to her impressionable and vulnerable sixteen-year-old daughter.

Sunday is autistic and struggles to make sense of social relationships and interactions. She's forever observing, trying to educate herself, attempting to bridge the gap: the novel gives us a beautiful, touching, often funny evocation of the immense effort it takes to translate and participate in a world when we don't instinctively understand the rules. Autism also acts as a metaphor for the struggles we all have to relate to others, whether it be to our daughters or extended family or to strangers.

One of the great strengths of this novel is how beautifully Sunday is drawn as a character: I really came to love her and felt devastated as I understood what was happening to her, what was being stolen from right under her nose.

The book is beautifully written, lyrical and insightful and with a real understanding of human psychology too. There are moments of great social satire, afforded by Sunday's outsider's perspective. We read about how shallow relationships can be; about how deep and complex too - and how abusive, how damaging. She exposes how easily won over we all are by the shiny, sparkly people of this world. And she writes about how devastating it is to lose someone we love - and how little control we have over that happening.

A real gem of a novel with a wonderfully drawn protagonist whose voice will stay with me for a long time.

#bookreview #bookrecommendation #fiction #bookreviewer #reader #readerslife #readersofinstagram #readingcommunity #booksandcats #authorslife #authorssupportingauthors #autism #neurodiversity #fiction #writerslife #writingcommunity #neurodivergent

I've been reading a few chapters of @rickrubin's T

I've been reading a few chapters of @rickrubin's THE CREATIVE ACT before sitting down to write every day. I equate it to having a pep talk from a great coach before the game. His short, thoughtful, encouraging chapters are perfect for this.

I loved the chapter called 'Non-Competition.' Feeling envious of other people's success is, I've found, one of the biggest blocks to creativity and motivation. I shy away from competition. When I see anyone excelling, especially in a field I admire, I tend to pull my head back into my shell as my critical voice tells me there's no point even taking part: I'm clearly not up to the race.

Of course, this is a scarcity mentality (there's only so much success to go around) and is deeply unhelpful to the creative spirit.

As a writer, this is particularly tough when I spend most of my time reading amazing novels! Rubin helps us shift the lens from competition to collaboration. First, he reminds us that all art is about expressing our essential selves and so competition is absurd: 'You are creating the work that best represents you. Another artist is making the work that best represents them. The two cannot be measured against one another.' And then he goes on to show how finding deep joy in the brilliance and success and achievements of others, rather than killing our creative motivation, should inspire us. We should think to ourselves, 'Wow! Look at what this artist is capable of - I wonder where I could take my work?' He urges us to move from competing with others to competing with ourselves 'as a quest for evolution.' We are running our own race, we are always trying to find our own, truest expression, which, by its nature, will never been like anyone else's. In another chapter on success he also talks about how little control we have on the outcome and reception of our work, how our only duty is to evolve ourselves and our work.

So, here's to collaboration rather than competition and to finding joy in the success of others!

#fridaythoughts #writingtips #inspiration #motivation #rickrubin #creativity #writerscommunity #quote #quotes #quotesofinstagram #quotestagram #quotesdaily #quotesoftheday #writerslife

Book Review: SHY by Max Porter @faberbooks This

Book Review: SHY by Max Porter @faberbooks

This was a quick but intense read, the style like a modern day Virginia Wolf or James Joyce: a stream of consciousness over the course of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

In the way that ideas tend to cluster, I've been thinking, writing and reading quite a bit about children who struggle to fit in and how hard life is for them when all they feel from the world, over and over again, is rejection.

I remember reading a book on emotional intelligence where the psychologist said that the tragedy of kids who are struggling is what they need most is more love, more kindness, more attention, more patience - when their behaviour does nothing but make people push them away.

We're drawn to the kind, polite, warm, lovely kids, we feed them our love and affirmation, when usually, they don't need it all that much - they're pretty content already.

So, we find ourselves in a vicious circle, in which the children who need love most receive it least. Then they lock themselves into the role of becoming unloveable and it becomes their identity. And so the downward spiral continues.

This is certainly the case for Shy, the boy whose head we're in. As he wanders into the night carrying a backpack full of rocks outside the Last Chance home 'for very disturbed young men,' his head is filled with voices: his teachers, his parents, his friends, those he's let down, his own voice. One of the most haunting lines in the book is: 'The night is huge and it hurts.' It so brilliantly encapsulates Shy's internal and external landscape.

It's not a comfortable read. There's violence and sex and drugs and references to self-harm. Shy's voice is raw and rebellious, sometimes funny and, towards the end, as he connects with the dark night, there's the possibility of hope, but that hope is fragile and uncertain.

A strange, poetic, honest, urgent read.

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