I write because I am a horrible person when I don't. It's a bit like sex in a way; it reaches the parts other activities can't. Creativity without the mess...

Creativity without the mess...

Oh, you should see my desk!!!

AWriter,

You’ve had quite a few replies now, over nearly three weeks. It would be nice if you responded…

Dee

Dee,

Thank you for your messages.

I am very pleased with the response from my request.

I think I need to know more if your compulsion to write is strong who do you write for? yourself? others? Have you ever been published? or sent out drafts?

How does writing make you feel?

Thank you again for your comments.

AWriter

Colin,

Thank you very much for your reply.

Have you ever submitted any work for publication? do yous how others your work?

How does writing make you feel?

Thanks again for your reply.

AWriter

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

Do you write for yourself or others? Is it your way of making sense of the world if you find writing therapeutic?

Thanks again
AWriter

Hello Emma,

Thank you for your reply.

As you are under contract to write how is that different? Do you feel a pressure to be creative? Which genre, if any would you say applies to you?

Thanks again.

AWriter

Hello Eve,

Thank you for your reply.

Your reply is very interesting have you ever been published?

Thank you for making me welcome to the site.

AWriter

Hello,

Thank you for your interesting reply.

Could you possibly tell me a bit more? Have you ever been published?

Thanks again for your reply.

AWriter

Hello,

Thank you for the reply and the link.

I think as opposed to writing a novel I am more interested in generally in people who write in wahatever form, short stories, poetry etc.

I want to know how people feel and what writing does for them as an individual? What is the motivation? WHat do they want to achieve?

Thank you again for your reply.

Yes, it is different - being under contract you feel as if you have someone looking over your shoulder. And the better the reviews of number one, the more daunting it is to feel that number two has got to be as good. The difficulty is not in being creative to order, which any properly disciplined writer is, but in feeling that it's to someone else's order, and with anyone in the world feeling free to pass judgement on the results..

I write novels which happen to involve history and are accessibly literary. The book trade thinks I write literary-commercial and historical mens-women's crossover.

Emma

If you still want more answers to your question, here's my penn'orth.

I began writing because I was inspired by a television drama (Sandy Welsh's 2005 adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's 'North and South' . The last episode ended, and I desperately didn't want it to, so I imagined the 'what happened next', and in the end it became so involved that I had to write it down. Two months later it was the length of a novel (85,000 words)!

Then I found I had the bug - I had to carry on writing, and am still doing so, two years later with one published novel, another accepted for publication this autumn and a third one a quarter written.

It is weird where it has come from. I am in my mid-forties and had never written a word of fiction before (though I do legal writing for my job.) But I read - an average of two books a week for the previous 30 years. And when I was reading a good book, I have come to realise, it lived with me (you know the way books do), and I used to be imagining (though without ever focussing on the fact I was doing it) little scenarios between the characters, what might happen, even snippets of dialogue. It was always going on in my head, but with other people's characters and not written down. Now it's the same except the stories are my own. When I am in the bath, driving to work, cooking the kids' tea, the story is telling itself, the characters are chatting... (Does this make me sound like a crazed loon?)

The only downside - and for me it is a major one! - is that I have lost my ability to read. In the two years since I began to write fiction I think I have managed to read only two complete books (one of which was EmmaD's The Mathematics of Love, in fact!). It's partly time - I have a full time job and two young daughters, and what were my stolen moments of reading time are now my writing time. But also - unless a book is outstandingly gripping, I find it just doesn't displace my own current story in my head, however hard I try. (As if you are half way through a book you are finding utterly absorbing and then you try to start a different one... a thing I have never been able to do.) My to-be-read pile, which has always been by the bed, has now reached levels where it is a health & safety hazard - and I also feel bereft about losing my ability to read, when it was so much part of my life. I'm hoping it will come back when this writing bug wears off a bit...

Rosy.