Acceptability
A thought occurs to me as I earwig on the group of A-Level drama students sat across the way from me, practicing the the plays that they've written that they're going to perform next week.
The thought is this:
When we're young, and especially when we're in education, it's acceptable for us to write plays, stories, monologues. More importantly it's acceptable for us to talk about it. There comes a point, though, when people start to look at you oddly when you do things like this, as though writing anything creative is somehow alien to their notion of what an adult should be doing. What triggers that, I wonder, why does it happen, and why is it so hard to say to the world "this is what I do" once you're all grow up?
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I think there's a confusion between taking responsibility in adult life, and the need to take the world at face value that requires, and shedding the child-like ability to dream that's necessary for creating fiction.
So, I don't discuss my writing with other people because:
a) I'm embarrassingly the opposite of proficient b) I'd be admitting that I spend a part of my life in a fantasy world.
The writing I enjoy most sees significance and connections that don't exist in real life. For a child, that's perfectly okay. If you're a successful writer, that's okay too.
# On February 15, 2008 at 08:40:09 by
Matthew Revell
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