Does it have to count? by Sheena Wilkinson

I looked at my sports watch with disbelief. I had just run over three miles, and walked a further mile and a half. My calf muscle was screaming, something seemed to have gone ‘pop’ in a part of my leg I had only recently known existed, and now, to add insult to injury, my trusty watch was telling me I had gone 0 steps today. Zero. Percentage of total step goal: zero percent.

It was as if those miles had gone up in smoke, as if every painful step – and the thousands of quite joyful steps in the first three miles – counted for nothing. If they weren’t showing up, I might as well not have done them. I might as well have stayed in bed, since that’s what it looked as though I’d done.  

Of course I was being ridiculous. Letting some technical glitch negate what I knew I had done. (I turned it off and on again, and it seems to be fine.)  But as I fretted and limped my way home it occurred to me that it’s a bit like writing. 

I write, these days, for the last ten years now, for publication. I don’t want to waste time on words that don’t count. I no longer keep a diary, and I’ve temporarily abandoned the memoir piece I was writing because the deadline for the competition I’d intended it for had passed. No doubt I’ll go back to it when next year’s deadline looms, but to commit to it now just for the joy – or the catharsis – of writing it? Well, how could I justify that when I have real deadlines, and real books to write? Now that I am so professional?

me being professional at the launch of Hope against Hope last week

Last night I found an old notebook from pre-published days. It contained the notes from a writing group I used to attend. It was full of fragments and scraps, some of which I could identify as explorations of characters in my first published novel, but most of which were simply ephemera. I had no recollection of writing them. Some of them made me smile. Some of them made me realise how much my writing has improved since then. But mostly they reminded me of someone who wrote for the joy of it. Yes, the me of 2007 hoped for publication, was full of ambition, hope and drive, but she was also someone in love with writing for its own sake. Even if the words didn’t ‘count’. 

She had more in common perhaps with the nine-year-old me who filled notebooks with stories for the sheer love of it than the professional me of 2020. 

nine-year-old me

  I could learn from her.