Playing it Safe as a Writer

I'd gone to the Oak Rooms for lunch today, and straightaway I spotted something really nice on the specials board - a halibut dish with a herb mashed potato and a fancy sauce flavoured with capers. It sounded really nice and I nearly ordered it, but then I sat down and looked at the menu and before I knew it, the waitress had come over and I'd plumped for one of my usual favourites - beef lasagne with salad and chips.

The lasagne was very nice and I did enjoy it, but I have had it rather often recently, whereas the fish special was something that might not be on the menu again for weeks. So I ended up kicking myself for missing a chance to liven up my lunch and tickle my tastebuds with something new.

So why didn't I take the chance to try something new? Why did I end up playing safe and going for the 'tried and tested'? Am I just a boring person? Have I no sense of adventure?

I don't think so. I often try out new activities. Only this past few months I've added belly dancing and jewellery making to my schedule. I like to have a go at something I've never done before.

It could be that I've just got into the habit of eating certain dishes, and once you've got a habit established, it takes more effort to deviate from it than it does to stick with it.

I think we writers can get like that with our writing too. We always write horror stories because that's what we like to read. We always write rhyming verse because that's what we were brought up on. We wouldn't think of writing a literary short story because we're used to writing for magazines, and that's what we know.

That was one of the things that I enjoyed most about teaching my class this year. At the start of the year, everyone made a note of what sort of things they wanted to write. It was interesting to see at the end of the year what everyone had actually written and what they had particularly excelled at.

One girl who seemed to only want to write poems and adventure stories for teenagers turned out to be an excellent article writer and also wrote some very moving love stories. Someone who was into poetry and short stories made an excellent first attempt at a television script. And another chap who said he'd come on the course because he never finished anything and needed motivation was turning out high quality work faster than I could mark it! And he won £100 in a writing competition to boot.

Yes, there's a saying which goes, 'If you always do what you've always done, you always get what you've always got.' So if you're feeling a bit stuck with your writing and wondering why you're not managing to finish things or why you seem to keep getting rejections, why not try writing something completely different, something you'd never have thought of writing?

Tell yourself it's just an experiment. Allow yourself to have a go at it without putting any pressure on yourself to be absolutely brilliant at it. Just go along for the ride and see what happens.

You may end up surprising yourself. And if you don't like what you end up with, there's always your regular writing menu to fall back on.

But give the specials board a chance - just this once!

A Change is as Good as a Rest

The Spring Bank Holiday has been and gone and, like many families, we enjoyed simply having a change from our usual routine: the chance to be together at home as a family, without the hectic schedules and demands of work and school, the chance to have meals together, the chance to try out some new recipes instead of sticking to the old favourites.

Over the weekend we tried out two new recipes from one of our lovely vegetarian cook books -Vegetable and Rice Tian and Spaghetti with Courgettes, Lemon and Pistachio Nuts. Not only did we enjoy the food - trying something outwith our normal habits seemed to rejuvenate our spirits as well.

Sunday dinners don't have to consist of roast meat and two veg. They can be anything we fancy, as long as we organise ourselves enough to plan them and buy the necessary ingredients. Even the humble spud took on a new lease of life by being baked in its jacket instead of roasted, steamed or mashed.

Combine that with the fact that for the first time in weeks we actually had a day where none of us had appointments to keep, deadlines to meet, places to be and you can see how life opened up before our very eyes. Three whole days to spend exactly as we wanted, where we wanted, doing whatever we wanted.

For once, the treadmill had stopped long enough for us to step off it, stop and admire the scenery, and ask ourselves whether we really wanted to be on the blessed thing after all.

Fortunately, I think for all of us the answer was 'Yes'. Having a bit of breathing space can help you to realise that your lot in life isn't that bad - in fact, it's pretty damned good, and given the chance, you'd choose to spend your time in the same places, doing the same things, with the same people.

I'd still teach my class creative writing; my husband would still work with maths; my son would carry on playing the saxophone at his world-famous music school. I'd still go for Reiki treatments with my wonderful Reiki master, Chris, still play the clarinet in my quartet, still have lunches at Table 2 in my favourite cafe, the Oak Rooms.

OK, there are some things I would like to change. It would be nice if Huddersfield were on the coast, but I can't see that happening in the near future, not even with global warming. It would be nice if it were nearer Scotland, so I could see more of my friends and family, go to all the plays at Dundee Rep, and listen to Radio Scotland in the bathroom. But I wouldn't want Northumberland and Cumbria to disappear from the face of the earth, so maybe it's best to leave things as they are.

Some things are easy to change though. Like feeling bored. Feeling as if you're stuck in a rut. You don't need to make any grand gestures - chuck your job in, swap your wife for a lapdancer, move to Outer Mongolia. Sometimes little things can make all the difference.

One of the little things that brightened up my holiday weekend was sitting down at my dining room table with three sets of pliars, some bits of metal and a box of lovely shiny beads.

During the past couple of months I'd been to a couple of jewellery-making workshops run by a lovely young lady called Maria Lau. Even though I've never really thought of myself as 'crafty' or 'artistic', it had been really enjoyable to spend an afternoon designing and making a piece of jewellery. OK, I did come close to swearing several times when I had been trying to fasten the same jump ring for fifteen minutes and the darned thing seemed to spend more time on the floor than in my hands. But it was fun.

It was OK making jewellery in the workshop, though. It was a controlled environment. The expert Maria was on hand to check that our pieces weren't going to fall to bits, tidy up messy joints, recommend using a new jump ring when the other one was clearly no longer fit for anything.

But at home.....how would I cope with no one to rescue me if things went wrong?

I'd been down to our local market and bought tools, beads, bits and pieces. They'd been sitting on the table for weeks. Every so often I'd open the box, pick up the beads, admire them, savour the texture in my hands, decide which was my favourite colour. I'd do everything with those beads except make jewellery with them.

On Sunday, everything suddenly changed. I'd just finished my breakfast and I was all set to go for my shower, but I felt the call of the beads, there and then. Before I knew it, the tools were out of their packets, the beads were being assembled on head pins, and I was making earrings. One pair, then another, then another. My thirteen year old son even came and joined in. He turned out to be much better than me at closing jump rings, but my coiled wires were better.....

Suddenly, it was twenty past two, and there was my husband wondering why I was still sitting there in my dressing gown, unwashed. I knew what had happened. I'd got the creative bug.

I may never become a professional jewellery-maker, but I certainly enjoy wearing my creations. I still can't quite believe that the earrings I am wearing used to be just individual beads and bits of metal. To me, it's like magic, alchemy. Take a base substance and turn it into gold.

I suppose as writers that's what we do all the time. Words are nothing special. We're surrounded by them everywhere we turn. They're on take-away menus, TV adverts, cornflake packets. We take them for granted. Taken one by one, they seem insignificant.

But sit down and put them together, play with them, become lost in them and you end up with something special: a story, a book, a drama. You end up with people who didn't exist except as shadowy figures in your mind. Emotions which spring from God knows where.

You have the wherewithal to fascinate, to make people laugh and cry.

'Behold! I make all things new!'

Why don't you make your life fresher this weekend? Go somewhere new, try a new hobby, even shove a potato in the oven instead of peeling the film off a microwave tray? See if life seems different when you give yourself a change, no matter how tiny?

Me? I'm sorted. I've got a necklace to make!