When writing drives you mad, you need a mess of help to stand alone - This week's #ReadItTorial

I'm not really sure how it happened, but I know it's now driving me mad.

I'd 'put away' my creative writing efforts recently, after suffering something far worse than writer's block.

Most creative folk are familiar with that weird feeling you get when a blank page / piece of paper / word document is staring you in the face, and you have absolutely nothing in your seemingly 'empty' brain to fill it with.

But what I've had recently isn't writer's block, it's something else. It's writer's Diarrhea for want of a better (less icky) description.

I've said before in previous ReadItTorials that sometimes being creative, or struggling to express your creativity can feel akin to mental illness. You have all this STUFF in your brain, your imagination centre, and you want to use that stuff to produce a piece of (hopefully) finished work - whether it's a drawing, a sculpture (and I'm recently rediscovering the joys of sculpting - more on that in another ReadItTorial) or a piece of writing.

I started back into writing again for two reasons. Someone I was on a creative writing course with wrote to me to tell me that one of the pieces I shared in class had such a profound effect on her, and a good friend of hers, that I should bloody well do something about it.

I tried - of course I tried - but traditional publishing avenues (sending blind submissions to agents and publishers) rammed that piece of work into a solid brick wall. So I let it 'rest'.

Then last week my daughter asked me what the heck I was doing with my writing. Where are all the stories I keep talking about or teasing her with? Where's that science fiction / time travel story I discussed? Why haven't I polished up the other stories I read to her?

The simple answer was that I just couldn't flipping get those stories into any sort of form that seems acceptable to publishing in any form. It might just sound like the moaning wail of someone who gets a polite boilerplate rejection letter after every submission (if you get any form of communication at all) but I seriously do not think anything I write is palatable in the current publishing environment. It doesn't stick to rules, it doesn't have wide-ranging enough appeal perhaps. It can't be serialised, turned into a long-running sequel-after-sequel money making thing. Or, more likely, it's just shit and not commercial enough and that's the end of it.

Creative writing - particularly for children - isn't just about coming up with a great idea, a 'hook' or (hold your breath) something original that's quite unlike anything else out there. It's more about something I've never been any good at. It's selling that idea in a way that it will slot nicely into someone else's mind just as easily as it fits in yours.

This isn't exclusive to me - and hearing that a published / successful author had at least 52 stories run into that same brick wall was weirdly comforting. Probably not the original person's intent, but yes, weirdly comforting to know that someone whose published books rock would also have the same trials.

I think one of the main reasons I've ranted about the industry so much recently is that it feels like the whole thing is geared up for a very tightly defined and very specific set of story criteria that I'm entirely incapable of creating for.

The rules - oh god, the many, many rules are the first huge hurdle.

Then there's the structure the rigid structure of picture books which is, in itself, challenging and tough to crack successfully.

Then there are the considerations around whether your text will work well enough for an illustrator to be able to add to and enhance (with middle grade fiction, it's those  infuriating concepts of 'staying with the story moment' and 'show, don't tell').

As I mentioned on Twitter, if it wasn't for my daughter (and for the mysterious emailer who keeps prodding my pathetic little ego by saying she once liked one of my stories) I'd have chucked it all in ages ago, and just resigned myself to the fact that writing isn't for me. But here I am, still plugging away, still punching the screen, and still with a ton of shapeless ideas that feel like they COULD be good.

If only I was better at sticking to rigid rules...