10/06/2021
I’m a writer.
There are lots of definitions about what a writer is. When I started my MA in Creative Writing and Publishing at West Dean College the students and our tutors discussed what being a writer is. There were six of us. We wrote. That was our common denominator. But were we writers? It felt that we needed to do something to prove ourselves. Something that would validate our experience.
I looked up the definition of writer? I googled it.
writer
- n.
One who writes, especially as an occupation. - n.
A person who understands or practises the art of writing; one who is able to write; a penman. - n.
One who does writing as a business; a professional scribe, scrivener, or amanuensis: used specifically in England of clerks to the former East India Company, and of temporary copying clerks in government offices; in Scotland, loosely, of law agents, solicitors, attorneys, etc., and sometimes of their principal clerks.
I think I am most drawn to the second definition. A person who is able to write; a penman.
Have you learnt to play a musical instrument? Do you do embroidery?
Do you draw, sketch, paint watercolours?
I think that’s the easiest way to look at it. If something is a creative endeavour then there are three different sorts of practitioners.
Firstly there is the person who does something for pleasure, without a thought for the product, without worrying about sharing it with anyone else because of the pleasure of the process.
Then there are people who work hard to develop skill. Who see the art as a craft. An endeavour with skills to be learnt where there are teachers and fellow students. A craft to be studied and worked on.
Lastly there are the artists. The professionals. The masters of their craft who might work on their art for pleasure, and have tried hard to become skilled and proficient; often for years. But they are the knowledgeable ones. The ones who are most able to make beautiful. Did you notice a gap in the sentence. Did you think, oh look at Nicki’s syntax. That should read ‘something beautiful’. No. Just beautiful.
I think it is similar in nursing and midwifery. I was a nurse and midwife for over thirty years. I started as a student nurse. Squeaky clean like my starched apron and paper hat. The patients called us ‘nurse’. A lot. It didn’t mean we were one. After a few years, when we had earnt a stripe on our hat and a navy petersham belt we were ‘third years’. Third years were nearly nurses. They were knowledgeable. They could answer questions. They were approaching proficiency. Then we qualified. We swapped paper hats for lace ones, and our navy belts gained a hospital buckle. We looked the part. People coming onto the ward spotted our ‘frillies’ (the lace pork pie on our head with a wing coming out the back) and came straight for us. We were nurses. The real thing. Heaven help us.
It was when we qualified that we really learnt. I learnt that nursing wasn’t for me, rather quickly, and became a midwife. More years learning a craft, developing into what the women needed and who we would become ourselves. Towards the end of my career I remember leaving a delivery room. I had just been explaining to the labouring woman that she couldn’t do something because it wouldn’t be safe – I forgot what it was – and as I left I heard her Mum say, ‘Now that’s what you call a midwife.’ I had apparently arrived.
As midwives there are all sorts of things to learn. Science, skills, knowledge, protocols and policies. But the ‘soft skills’, the human bits, is where the beautiful is. And learning that takes time. (Some people never get it and never learn it. They don’t realise that midwifery is so much more than knowing and doing.)
There are people who are skilled and accomplished, maybe in the film industry for example, whose films are full of bullets and blood, and I am sure some people find beauty in that. It isn’t a conventional ‘beauty’ that I am talking about.
The making of beautiful is when it all comes together. When something lovely turns up. An idea takes root. It is when love of the process is joined with knowledge and skill, and starts to dance in the mind of the artist to produce something that only they can produce.
I would love to be able to do beautiful. I have friends who do beautiful. One of my friends is Mark Peter Howe. He is a poet. When I read his work it makes me feel like my brain has been washed in spring water and the muck of daily life has been washed away. My world feels like a better place. He is an artist. He has studied his craft and loves what he does. He does beautiful.
I aspire to. In the meantime I enjoy my writing. Have fun with my stories and continue to learn.
But I have digressed. What is a writer?
At the beginning of our second year the students stood talking about the first draft of their novels. We asked ourselves the same question. After pouring ourselves into our novels for a year we knew we were writers. It wasn’t a question anymore.
