Don’t mind if I do…
Yesterday I had my second go at Twelve – a twelve hour writing lock-in at the SA Writers Centre. That’s it. No tricks. Sit down, write. Go.
Was it good? Yes.
Should you do it? I don’t know.
Let me explain.
It’s good
Damn me, but it’s good. So good it hurts.
It hurts physically. I lost myself so thoroughly that I forgot to move for hours on end.
It also hurts creatively. At hour 11, just to keep pushing, I found myself writing when I had forgotten how to write a proper sentence. How can that be good for me? Because, despite that, I was still writing. The neurons were firing, the bits of my brain that I need to keep limber and elastic were being worked – perhaps overworked – but they were still going. Any other day, I would have stopped writing, but I kept on.
I guess, in a way, I was hacking my own brain. Don’t worry, that’s a good thing.
Is it for everyone?
I truly don’t know. Even if I knew you, if you were a close personal friend, I wouldn’t know if you should do it.
For me, seeing other writers writing whenever I look up is an incentive to keep writing. It’s a tonic.
It isn’t pressure, it’s the opposite. We’re all there by our own hand. We’re typing, scribbling and creating because we want to. It is almost inexplicably good.
For anyone else, I can’t say. The way we write, the act of writing, is personal and individual. All I can say is that I think it might be worth having a go. You might discover something about yourself as a writer that you never knew.
That’s enough from me for now. There’s a great big pile of words I need to go and read. This time, they’re mine.
