Circles

The things they can teach us as creatives

Photo by gryffyn m on Unsplash

At a certain point, I started to write about circles. They seemed to be everywhere.

Circles for the way that we come home, whether in our hearts as we become parents and relive our own childhoods, or in the way that, in the middle stage of life, many of us move back to the regional towns that we came from, ditching the cities for small towns with good schools and good food.

Circles, too, for the insanity you feel, as a creative with the urge to get your work out into the world, sending out your work repeatedly to agents who ignore you. I sent Murmuration out to one hundred agents. Am I insane? (Perhaps.) Of those, 59 didn't even respond, and 37 said no. Four wanted to see the full and then either ghosted me or said no. Can you imagine how soul-destroying it is to pour your heart into something for thousands of hours and to be mostly ignored?

Circles come up differently, too, in our creativity, for there is a satisfying closure in rounding the loop, finishing a job, and moving on to the next thing. I think that closure is essential in the life of an artist, and that is in part why I wanted to put out The Ways in Which We Are Like Birds. The poems are from previous chapters of my life, and I wanted to bind up these little parts of me up and release them as a collection. The earliest poems were written in the days before I had children, and the latest were written in 2023. I haven't written poetry in the last couple of years, and that is the way with poetry for me; it comes and goes.

But when we have finished our darling project and sent it out and the response is not what we were hoping for, what then?

Do you wait, hoping that change will come?

Do you pretend that the project wasn't that important, anyway?

Or do you find another way?

At the Kindle Storyteller Award event last November (where Murmuration was shortlisted), I was amazed to find myself standing in a room full of writers, making a living from their writing.

Some had agents, some didn't. It felt like there was a tiny gate, which said 'TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING,' which I'd been queuing up to get through for years, and then there was a whole wide-open field next to it, where people were writing books, making money, having total freedom, enjoying themselves!

So, creative one, are you stuck, waiting for something to change? Are you waiting for industry validation?

Maybe you need to zoom out and approach the problem differently. Being in a new place always helps me to make decisions – even a walk in a new place or a day at the seaside helps me to frame things in a different light.

Perhaps you feel stuck because you need help – could you find an editor or beta reader to give a fresh viewpoint?

Or maybe you need to put your work of art out there and move on to the next thing?

I have felt this with my last two projects, and there is so much frustration that comes with unreleased work.

May Sarton, the novelist, talks of this flow of life regarding her creativity. She wrote that ‘There is only one real deprivation… and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most…The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as if the flow of life were backed up.’ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude.

The art of a writer should be like a stream, our work should flow out of us and into the world around us, not silted up and stagnating like a pond. Sometimes, we need that circle of completion to be able to move on to the next thing. The flow of life literally holds us back from the next project.

Sometimes, it feels we are walking in circles and are getting nowhere. There are two things to say about this. One is that we have the themes of our life, and these will keep coming out over and over again. We will be drawn to certain things (for me, it seems to be birds, static caravans, and long journeys).

Photo by Martin Schmidli on Unsplash

The other is that we can feel like we're treading water, covering the same old ground, not really getting anywhere, but there is a verse that spoke to me a few months ago when I was thinking of all of this. It is from Psalm 23, and it says 'He leads me in paths of righteousness.’ This verse can also be translated as 'circular paths of righteousness,' referring to the sheep paths that circle up a mountain. Living in Shropshire, this makes so much sense to me. Perhaps you are circling your way up a mountain, and it feels like you are walking in circles, but actually, you are making your way and getting steadily closer to the summit; it just doesn’t feel like it!

So be encouraged. Sometimes, it is time to let go of a project. Sometimes it is to write another poem (about whatever your lifelong obsession is), and sometimes, it is just the time to keep walking on that path.

May the wisdom of the circle be yours this week!

Thanks so much for reading Miners :)

Elisabeth xx