Reading your words. Seeing yourself.
On the particular strangeness of proofing your own book
I’m not sure which changed me more—the grief, or writing about the grief. Perhaps I’ll never know. But I am forever changed, for sure.
In a small town called Onomichi, overlooking the Seto Inland Sea in Japan, there is a spa hotel with an extraordinary wedding venue in its grounds. Designed by Hiroshi Nakamura, the Ribbon Chapel is formed of two giant interwoven spiral staircases rising up through the trees like a wooden homage to the double helix. But, unlike in DNA, in the case of the chapel the spirals join at the top. This building is what I think of when I think about the writing life.
We schedule our days as if life is linear, and we celebrate first books as the culmination of all our hard work, that culmination being an end point many debut authors cannot see beyond. But signing off my sixth book in six years I can tell you this: the writing life is more like a double helix than a straight line. One spiral represents our growth as a writer, and the other our growth as a human being. I imagine a thread running up through the centre of the double helix, representing the theme of our life. It’s the thing we keep being drawn back to whatever we write. For me this thread is about making the most of this precious life. I wonder what your theme is?
Every book we write takes us a little further up the writer spiral, and the living, healing and growing we have to do to get it written takes us a little further up the human spiral. There is a sculptural relationship between how we live and how we write. We see the central thread from all directions each time we travel around it. Getting that first book, poetry collection, screenplay or Substack essay out in the world is a fantastic achievement, but it is not the end, neither is it the only thing that matters. It is simply one loop of this beautiful, miraculous helix that intertwines writing and life in a constant dance.
In time we see how stories, ideas and inspiration live in everything around us, and how our lives are intimately intertwined with everything we ever write. Perhaps the longer we live the writing life, the closer the spirals get, merging like the staircases at the top of the Ribbon Chapel so that life is writing and writing is life.
I have thought about this for a long time, but it has never been clearer to me than earlier this week, when