I'm As I write this, I'm well aware that I should really be writing some of the 15,000 words I have due by 10th December. I am a chronic procrastinator, not a good trait for a writer, though, I understand, a very common one.
I'm sure you've gathered by now that I generally like writing about city life. However, I recently finished James Rebanks's acclaimed bestseller The Shepherd's Life. I borrowed it from my favourite old farmer friend who described it as 'bleak' and 'depressing', yet I devoured the whole volume in a couple of days and thoroughly enjoyed the way it conveyed the history and purpose of farming in the Lake District and beyond. Its pages were filled with honest people who had no desire for fame, fortune or recognition (except maybe for their prize-winning tups), but who, instead, were part of a tradition and who would live on in a landscape and a flock, rather than in any grand or narcissitic legacy.
So, I find myself mulling over ideas for a paper and creative piece on representations of rural life in the north of England - a topic on which I'm sure I am reasonably qualified to write about. Yet, it's gotten me to thinking about why I don't normally write about the rural life, despite spending so much time at one farm or another. My thoughts so far are this:
As writers, often we imagine a world we want to be a part of and people we want to spend time with. It's really quite a selfish pursuit. We create characters who are a little (or very) flamboyant, narcissistic and out-of-reach. We write beautiful days and idealist settings which we can never seem to grasp in real life, or which are so fleeting it becomes necessary to write them into a book to try and pin them down and relive them.
The countryside is not like that, or at least not to me. The charm of farm life is its honesty. The people in it are straightforward and hardworking. Eccentricity comes in a different form in the countryside, and even then isn't well tolerated. I have no desire to write about country life and to change it in any way. It changes ever day on its own, but remains the same year on year. The long, late-summer days aren't so fleeting, you can sit in them and take them in. Perhaps, I love country life so much as it is, and I can be so immersed in it, that I don't every feel the need to capture it and pin it down, or to change and elaborate on it. You can really -be- there, in a time and place, (perhaps due to the blissful lack of 4G), and therefore the need to expand on a moment in the way I talked about in an earlier blog post is generally absent, and so the drive to write about it creatively is also absent.
I think the challenge I will have in writing this piece and the corresponding research question is thinking about it in a way which is different to my usual process, and in a way which will endear it to readers. Perhaps I'll discover I love writing about it. Perhaps I'll abandon it and go back to writing about pyscopathic stalkers... Let's see.
I'm sure you've gathered by now that I generally like writing about city life. However, I recently finished James Rebanks's acclaimed bestseller The Shepherd's Life. I borrowed it from my favourite old farmer friend who described it as 'bleak' and 'depressing', yet I devoured the whole volume in a couple of days and thoroughly enjoyed the way it conveyed the history and purpose of farming in the Lake District and beyond. Its pages were filled with honest people who had no desire for fame, fortune or recognition (except maybe for their prize-winning tups), but who, instead, were part of a tradition and who would live on in a landscape and a flock, rather than in any grand or narcissitic legacy.So, I find myself mulling over ideas for a paper and creative piece on representations of rural life in the north of England - a topic on which I'm sure I am reasonably qualified to write about. Yet, it's gotten me to thinking about why I don't normally write about the rural life, despite spending so much time at one farm or another. My thoughts so far are this:
As writers, often we imagine a world we want to be a part of and people we want to spend time with. It's really quite a selfish pursuit. We create characters who are a little (or very) flamboyant, narcissistic and out-of-reach. We write beautiful days and idealist settings which we can never seem to grasp in real life, or which are so fleeting it becomes necessary to write them into a book to try and pin them down and relive them.
The countryside is not like that, or at least not to me. The charm of farm life is its honesty. The people in it are straightforward and hardworking. Eccentricity comes in a different form in the countryside, and even then isn't well tolerated. I have no desire to write about country life and to change it in any way. It changes ever day on its own, but remains the same year on year. The long, late-summer days aren't so fleeting, you can sit in them and take them in. Perhaps, I love country life so much as it is, and I can be so immersed in it, that I don't every feel the need to capture it and pin it down, or to change and elaborate on it. You can really -be- there, in a time and place, (perhaps due to the blissful lack of 4G), and therefore the need to expand on a moment in the way I talked about in an earlier blog post is generally absent, and so the drive to write about it creatively is also absent.
I think the challenge I will have in writing this piece and the corresponding research question is thinking about it in a way which is different to my usual process, and in a way which will endear it to readers. Perhaps I'll discover I love writing about it. Perhaps I'll abandon it and go back to writing about pyscopathic stalkers... Let's see.
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