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Years ago I read a short story by the German writer Heinrich Böll about a character who worked in a radio station. He got so fed up with recording voices and hearing them played back that, at home, he got his girlfriend to record silences. He relaxed by playing them back.
Is it the same for writers? When I worked on magazines, I was lucky enough to have a mixture of the unutterably boring to really very interesting subjects to write about. Even so, it was difficult to get properly motivated to write strictly for pleasure after writing all day. If you do something daily, albeit something you love, do you just want some variety when you relax?
When we moved to France, I thought it would be different. I could forget the duty writing and concentrate on writing for pleasure. I would have more time, more inspiration. To a certain extent that has been true. I’ve really enjoyed writing about life in France and making forays into other genres. But now I’m beginning to worry that duty writing is once again taking precedence. I produce a monthly magazine for a women’s association, run a creative writing group, am editing two books — one on genealogy and another on the French Resistance — am ghost writing a blog for a poodle and doing some occasional proofreading.
The answer, I decided, was to find something else, preferably in the creative vein, to do so that I would appreciate writing all the more when I actually had time to do it. This means that I’ve done a lot of things in France that I would never have done in the UK. The list includes singing in public (suffice it to say that in one school report the comment was ‘Doreen is an enthusiastic, though not very musical pupil’). But apparently singing is good for the heart, soul and general well-being (thank you Gareth Malone), so in our little group we belt out such classics as Fernando and When I’m Sixty-four, have a cup of tea and a piece of cake, and go home with a new lease of life.
I also tried watercolour painting, thinking it would be relaxing. I went to a ‘taster’ class where we spent two hours painting a picture of a green pepper. I took the masterpiece home and asked my husband what he thought it was. ‘Is it a frog?’ he asked, somewhat hesitantly. Cross that off the list, then.
Then there’s cooking. I’m better at it than singing and painting, but that’s not saying very much. In recent months, I’ve been to demonstrations on how to make pasta, cupcakes and various types of bread. Good fun, but if life’s too short to stuff a mushroom, as Shirley Conran maintained, then is there any point in making my own bread when I live in the land of the fresh baguette?
So where does all this fit into the Writers’ Abroad blog? Simply that five members of my Creative Writing Group had our contributions accepted for the Foreign Encounters anthology. Now that’s what I call a success.
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