There's a Book in All of Us

For those of you that get to this blog via Facebook (i.e. friends of mine), you will know that yesterday's post was missed because of a game of football. Under normal circumstances I would apologise for missing a post because there will undoubtedly be a bad reason for it but this time around my reason was perfectly justifiable. Football is one of the few things that I will ever put before writing this blog and, even though last night's result wasn't all that good for my team, I will continue to use it as a semi-valid reason for not producing the goods! This of course doesn't introduce this post very well and so I shall move swiftly onto that. I finished a very good book this week in which one of the characters was (eventually) a writer. It got me thinking about the fact that if you can write and think logically, surely you must have the ability to write a book yourself? I believe that we all have a story to tell whether it be about our own lives or lives of others; there is always something that can be written about it - why not a book?

I've trying, along with a lot of peers, to sit down and have a go at writing a book in the past. I've sat down in front of a blank computer screen or with a blank notepad and tried to thrash out the first couple of chapters of a book that I didn't really know what I wanted to be and subsequently I stopped and picked up the real deal and started to read instead. I started to wonder if I was good enough to write a book but I realised that you don't have to be particularly good to be able to write a half-decent book - look at some 'celebrity' authors that have been published for example. I then thought that I'm missing one key component for writing a book - some experiences. The thing is that I've been to some pretty spectacular places and seen some amazing things. On top of that I see some crazy stuff every week of my life and so I have a pretty sizable bank of things to choose from with which to base a book on. So I've got the ability and potentially enough experiences to go with, so what is missing? It's at this point I realised something that might change me forever - I've lost my imagination.

Quite contrary to this problem that I find myself with is the fact that I've got a blog post in the pipe-line for next week regarding what goes on in people's heads - the stories and scenarios that they devise etc. What then is my problem? I'm not that old and I've certainly still got something left in the imagination tank - we all do. And so there's another thing struck off of the list of reasons why I can't write a book. I don't think you can ever lose your imagination; it's just something that you don't use as much as you get older. The 'big, bad world' makes us realise that there is less time for dreaming and more time for action - there's just not enough hours in the day to be imaginative. This, of course, is dependent on your chosen lifestyle. Architects and designers will use there imagination ever day of their lives whereas a lawyer doesn't get many chances to theorise and play with things. Maybe it's my chosen vocation that is minimising my creative streak but then again as a law student I do get the chance to play around with some abstract concepts - it can't be affecting me that much yet. Moral of this story? I still have an imagination just like I did 10 years ago; it's just stuck in the garage with flat tyres at the moment.

I think you are starting to see where I am coming from with this. There really is nothing holding us back from writing a book other than sheer laziness or a lack of dedication to the cause. If you were to take 2 hours every night to write 500-1000 words then you would have a book in no time. By no means would it be a finished book - you would have to take the same amount of time again to play around with it - but think of the initial achievement of having the skeleton of your own book. I suppose that it would take a lot of prior planning as well (depending on what type of book you were writing) but even then it would still be worth it. I tried recently to start a non-fiction book which failed miserably. The basic premise was that I was going to create a guide-book of sorts to my approach to student life. It was destined to be awful and wouldn't have had a chapter on how to deal with waking up in strange stair wells! Maybe one day I'll realise what an achievement it would be to have my own book but that one was just a complete non-starter.

I am constantly confused by how people are so scared of their own writing. We are naturally self-critical beings. Even the people that say they are brilliant have their doubts about everything that they do. However there is no harm in trying and seeing where it takes you. If everyone in the world was to write something down that they had thought about, just think how much more we could learn. There are a lot of unpublished thoughts floating around in people's heads and in discarded notebooks - give the people what they want and release them!

Thanks for reading my writing today. I guess I'll call this a one off 'Thursday Theory' - wait I do like the sound of that actually...

Cheers,

Martin

P.S. I would also quickly like to recommend listening to Adele's new album '21' from start to finish. No, I'm not out of touch because I've not just come across it but until earlier I hadn't listened to it all the way through. Do it and realise what a masterpiece it actually is!