After a very arid writing period, I have finally found myself able to focus on my current novel without wanting to throw both it and myself out of the nearest window. I don’t know what changed. All I know is that last weekend I wrote three chapters and I have written several chapters since then. 

Writer’s block is something that affects us all and, when I posted a comment on twitter about my own affliction with it, I was inundated with a flurry of advice; all of it kind, supportive and helpful. For this reason, I have decided to share with you my own experience and some of the advice that other people were kind enough to offer. 

I’m not sure if writer’s block is always the by-product of something else or if it can simply descend out of the blue for no reason at all. In my own case it was triggered by the realisation that I had made a mistake that is basically going to shape my life for at least the next few months. It’s not the first time I have made a mistake and it won’t be the last but it knocked me for six and left me doubting my own thought process. If I could do something as stupid as this then how could any ideas that I might have about writing possibly contain any merit? This combined with the sheer exhaustion of working in a stressful environment meant that any creativity was pretty much snuffed out. 

The strange thing is though, not being able to write opened my eyes to the fact that writing had started to consume my life. I had set myself such ambitious targets, my life was defined by work and writing. Most people advised that, if I couldn’t work on my novel, I should just write anything; keep the channels of creativity open by any means possible. For a while, this is what I did, focusing on regular blog posts until even that felt like too much. Writing was starting to feel like just another pressure. It was like having two jobs. 

It was around this time that Mila A. Ballentine sent me the link to a lovely post about her own writer’s block (check out www.milaballentine.blogspot for lots of useful writing advice). In it, she whimsically writes of her creativity as if it is a long lost lover and she is yearning for his return. Something about that post really struck a nerve and I decided to cut myself some slack and get back to living. 

The first thing I reclaimed was my love of reading. Despite a kindle literally bursting with exciting sounding novels just waiting to be read, I hadn’t been able to find the time. I would read for a little while before going to sleep but, any large periods of time
spent doing anything other than writing had started to make me feel guilty, as if I was letting myself down. Clearing the deck of writing meant that I could devote as much time as I wanted to simply enjoying what other writers had written. In the past few weeks I have read voraciously and loved every minute of it. I have also spent hours watching films, both at the cinema and on DVD, losing myself in stories both familiar and new. As with reading, immersing myself in the stories of others has brought me back to my own. Responding to the creativity of others, it seems, was the jolt that my system needed.

The truth then is clear to see. We don’t live in a bubble and if we start to function as if we do then we become insulated and flat. All of my best ideas have been born out of people watching and yet, when we are tired and stressed, engaging with other people can feel like a chore. The physical aspect of writing tends to be a very personal and individual act but the offering up of what we have written is sharing and inclusive. How then can we hope to connect with readers if we are not part of the world? 

I don’t claim to be some sort of expert on writer’s block but my advice to you, if you are currently in its grip, is to reach out to others. I have read so many blog posts from others suffering the same plight and all of them have been comforting and
reassuring. The wealth of advice that I have received from other writers has been both generously given and gratefully accepted. Reading the works of other writers, both indie and professionally published, has imbued me with the desire to keep trying. For me writing has to be about pleasure and self-fulfilment. The moment it ceased to be enjoyable was when the creative switch turned to ‘off’. 
  
I will leave you then with the advice of Mila A. Ballentine; embrace your life and you will reclaim your writing muse. Maybe if you have a case of writer’s block, like me, you just need to take a break from writing. Before you know it, your story will be clamouring to be heard, eager to please you after being neglected for so long. 

A few incidents have collided this week to get me thinking about confidence and our seeming ambivalence towards it. On the one hand, we are all constantly expounding the need for self belief but, the minute someone actually displays any hint of revelling in their own worth, we become unsettled by it. 

This was demonstrated for me all too clearly yesterday when I met my mother for lunch. As I arrived, she was already engaged in an animated conversation with a glamorous woman of her own age. The two seemed delighted to have happened upon each other, exchanging telephone numbers and doing the whole air kissing thing. The moment the woman, who it turned out was an old school pal, was out of ear shot, however, my mother began hissing vindictively about her. The woman’s crime as it turned out was an over abundance of confidence. According to my mother, she was ‘full of herself’ and always had been. 

This, is seems to me, is the paradox. We all crave more self-confidence but, to actually express any belief in ourselves, invites scorn and ridicule.  Is it this anomaly then that leaves most of us crippled with self-doubt? I can list a whole host of things that I am bad at but struggle to come up with even one that I excel at and I don’t think that I am unique by any means. What’s more, for most of us, if we did have a talent we would be more inclined to keep it to ourselves rather than shout it from the rooftops, for fear of alienating the people around us. As we all learn in our formative years, nobody likes a big head but is there a difference between being confident and being, as my mother likes to say, ‘full of yourself’? 
 
I think there are probably three categories surrounding self-confidence and only one of them falls under the guise of acceptability. At the bottom, we have people with absolutely no self-esteem at all; neurotic people, who drive everyone around them to distraction with their constant need for affirmation. These people are draining and, I would argue, just as self-obsessed as the over confident although their self-obsession is all about what they can’t do rather than what they can. 
 
The other end of the spectrum is the uber-confident and this can take many forms. Some are genuinely talented people, who see no reason to be coy about their accomplishments. Others are somewhat deluded and merely believe themselves to be exceptional individuals and then there are those who are embarking upon an aggressive quest for greatness and, as part of their plan, accentuate their successes like a mantra. Whatever the motivation or form it takes, it’s this category that we seem to be most unsure about. 

The rest of us, you see, fall somewhere in the middle. Whilst not exactly shouting our achievements from the rooftops, most of the time we muddle along until, now and again, something sends us tumbling headlong into the spiral of self-doubt. I have read numerous blog posts this week about crisis of confidence and I’m wondering if there is something in the air because I have had a wobbly couple of weeks myself. The strange thing is though, when self-doubt paralyses us and makes us so miserable, why do we feel so negatively towards shows of confidence from others? 
 
Does society collude to keep us from embracing our greatness? I was certainly brought up to value self-depreciation over self-confidence or ‘showing off’ as it was generally termed by parents and teachers. We are taught to play down our achievements and, those who present themselves as talented or skilled, seem to bring out the desire in others to somehow prove that any self-belief is misguided. It’s as if we somehow fear self-confidence and feel compelled to want to crush it. I recently read in a magazine that we can only fully empathise with people who we see as worse off than ourselves, which maybe explains why we find confident people so hard to like.

The article went on to say that we all secretly prefer to be around people who we perceive to be less attractive and less successful than ourselves, which I don’t necessarily believe. All of my friends are gorgeous and brimming with accomplishments even though they would never dream of acknowledging them. Maybe, if instead of colluding with each other to diminish our triumphs, we rejoiced in our dazzling abilities, those nasty crisis of confidence wouldn’t be so debilitating.

I recently set a task for my first years which afforded us much merriment. They were supposed to produce an autobiography but, given that they are eleven, it seemed a bit of a stretch. We settled upon a compromise whereby they had to describe five different memories and, if they had none of interest, I gave them my blessing to make them up. After all, in my opinion, dreariness is a far worse personal failing than fibbing. In the name of egalitarianism, I completed the task along with them and
offer up my own memories for your entertainment. 

Earliest Memory
In truth, I have no real idea whether I actually remember this incident or, merely remember my mother reminding me of it, whenever I chose to disobey her. It became something of a fable to show what might happen to disobedient children. Anyway, on with the memory, I spent my early years in terraced housing before central heating was the norm. Consequently, everybody had coal fires and cellar grates, which opened up to allow the coal men to drop coal directly into the cellars. As a small child, it was my want to jump on these cellar grates, seemingly for no other reason than my mother told me not to. I’m sure you can see where this is going and yes, predictably, someone had not secured their grate. One minute I was jumping and the next I was laying on my back, atop a rather fortuitous pile of coal, staring up into my mother’s horrified face. I suspect the worst part of the whole ordeal, as far as my mother was concerned, was not the possibility that I might have broken my back, but the fact that she had to knock on the door and ask the householders to go down into their cellar and rescue me. I am sure her shame at the sight of me being led through a stranger’s house coated in coal dust like a Dickensian chimney sweep must have been complete. 

Scariest Memory
This one is very easy, as I believe it is the closest I have come to losing my life. It happened whilst holidaying in Greece with a friend. We were based in an extremely picturesque but tiny village and, beautiful as our surroundings were, after a couple of days my friend and I were desperate to visit somewhere more suited to shallow people. To this end, we hired a local man with a small boat to take us to the nearest town, which turned out to be not very near at all. We had only been there for a couple of hours, when the weather deteriorated, and the man with the boat said we had to go back quickly as a storm was coming. Unfortunately, the storm struck as we were in the middle of the sea with no sign of land and we spent the next hour at the mercy of the elements. My sea sickness was such that I would have welcomed death but I can remember my friend weeping and the boat owner praying. Obviously we survived, but the boat owner said it was the worst storm he had ever been out in and he had genuinely feared we wouldn’t make it. I just remember staggering from the boat and collapsing to my knees, not from the relief of being safe but from feeling more nauseous than I had ever felt in my entire life. To this day I can’t even look at an olive without having a flashback to that whole hideous episode.  

Most Embarrassing Memory
Sadly, this category is bursting at the seams and not all of them are fit for public exposure. There are the ones that make me flush with skin crawling mortification just thinking about them and the ones that have grown with the telling, which I’m still dining out on years after they actually happened. Possibly one of the most embarrassing was the time my friend and I out-freaked a religious cult so completely they abandoned us and basically fled for their lives. It all happened when we were at University in
Texas and my friend dated a rather dubious character, who was a guard at a correctional facility. I think it was the appeal of his car plus he did have a passing resemblance to Kid Curry from Alias Smith and Jones. Anyway, one Saturday night, he drove us to a sleazy nightclub in the middle of nowhere and then, rather inconsiderately, left with a buxom blonde. My friend and I, not really thinking straight after several pitchers of Margarita, set about trying to hitch a ride back to the campus. We were picked up by a minibus, full of people who were heading off to a nearby commune. Initially, they were keen for us to join them for the weekend and, in our drunken enthusiasm, we saw it as one big adventure. It all went downhill however, when I decided to share my views on Communism, for no reason I can think of other than I think I confused the idea of commune with Communism. To be fair, the views I expressed were probably more Billy Bragg’s than mine but, let’s face it, they were never going to go down well in Texas in the early 1980s. Before we knew it, we were being asked to leave the minibus and abandoned by the side of the road. I can only assume that we inadvertently escaped from the clutches of some right wing isolationist group, who couldn’t be bothered to even try and brainwash us. 

Saddest Memory
Again, this one is easy, as the saddest time of my life overshadows anything that happened before or since. It is six years ago since my dad died but, as anybody who has lost a loved one will know, time doesn’t really matter. The wound never heals, a layer of skin just grows over it but it’s papery thin and the slightest thing can rip the wound open again. The grief was compounded by the shock that can still reverberate through me when I dwell on it; my dad was only 63 and fit and strong. If anything positive can come from the whole experience, it’s the surety that we have to grab whatever life offers to us with both hands because we never know when it might be snatched away. 

Proudest Memory
I can’t say that there is any one achievement of which I am particularly proud. Ultimately, I’m not sure that achievements are all that important in the grand scheme of things. Thinking about the principle of no one being on their deathbed and wishing they had worked harder, I don’t suppose anybody lays on their deathbed listing their achievements either. When I’m on my deathbed though, I hope that I can look back and say I was a good sister, daughter and friend. That I did my best to lighten the load of others and make their journey through life a little bit easier. I might not always get it right but I hope that I never stop trying. 

I read a tweet earlier today which said that we never know how brave we are until we are put to the test in a crisis situation. Obviously, with its 140 characteristics, it was stated much more pithily than that but I’m not sure I agree. I would argue that we never know how we are going to react in any given situation full stop. And consequently there is no way of determining how brave anybody really is. I suspect we may all be a strange hybrid of heroic and cowardly. 

I confess, I’m only basing this conjecture on my own experiences and given that I am hardly a balanced, voice of authority on, well – anything really, it could all be total twaddle. Not one to be deterred, I am going to share my findings with you regardless. You see, I have found myself reacting in a whole host of ways to crisis situations and very rarely in the same way twice. 

There have been occasions when I have disgraced myself with my cowardly antics, not unlike the characters who pop up in every disaster movie; the ones who will happily push women and children to their deaths to save themselves. My most memorable one was when I lived in a squalid shared house in Southampton during my early teaching days. My sister was
visiting and, as we relaxed on my bed chatting, a large brown mouse suddenly scurried across the room. We are both terrified of mice and predictably leapt into blind shrieking panic. I went one step further, however. Having reached the door first, I pushed my sister back into the room and locked her in with the mouse. I was totally unmoved by her screams of terror as I bounded down the stairs, two at a time, to rodent free safety. It took a housemate to let her out and she has never forgiven me, regularly throwing the whole unseemly episode into my face. Except in her version, the mouse has transmuted into a large rat and she was locked in the room for almost an hour rather than the actual few minutes. 

You would be forgiven then for thinking that, were I on board the Titanic, I would be the coward kicking people overboard to get to the lifeboats. This is quite possibly true but it is not a sure bet. You see I could also have been the person who, paralysed by fear, decided to stick with the mini bar and go down with the ship. This seems to be the approach I adopt every time I board a plane. Such is my fear; I face death on every flight and ultimately take the decision to drown my sorrows in gin, buckled tightly into my seat as we plummet to the ground before bursting into a ball of flames. Arriving at my destination is always a bonus. 
 
There have also been instances when I have risen to the occasion. Usually, it has to be said, when I have had children in my charge. School trips are always fraught with crisis and my worst one was when a girl collapsed to the ground, in the middle of London, with abdominal pains. It turned out she was as nutty as a fruitcake and had some sort of Munchausen disorder but all that’s irrelevant. My heroic efforts to save her and call for an ambulance, all whilst arranging for someone else to take charge
of the children as I accompanied her to hospital, were nothing short of impressive even if I do say so myself. 

My most notable act of bravery, however, was when I snapped into action as an unofficial and unstoppable fire marshal. It all unfolded whilst staying in a hotel with friends when, in the middle of the night, there was a fire. We were woken by the sounds of the alarm and, as we prepared to make our way downstairs, people began flocking towards the lifts. Having sat through God only knows how many fire safety classes with children; I knew that this was an unqualified fire safety aberration. I launched
into action, directing people away from the lifts and ushering them down the stairs to safety. If only I had been in possession of a megaphone and some sort of uniform instead of pyjamas, my moment of glory would have been complete. 
 
I suspect a lot of how we react in a crisis depends upon who we are with. Ideally, I’m happy to leave the heroics to others and the only time I’m likely to step up to the plate is if there is nobody else to take charge and to look the other way could lead to disaster. I’m not a natural leader of men and probably veer between cowardly and apathetic most of the time. My favourite stories are the ones where ordinary, everyday people in the right circumstances find that they have the potential to be super
heroes. The types of people who inspire films to made about them. Every disaster and war zone seems to produce examples and once the crisis is over they always say that they acted upon instinct and are nothing special. I’m not so sure.