Chaos and collage by Keren David

 Well! Months have gone by and I have failed you. I have thought and thought, what can I write -  what can I say -  and then the chance goes whooshing past and this blog is sadly silent on the eighth of the month.

I apologise. Times are hard. I have never known such difficult days, and I am supporting a lot of people through it. It is draining and distressing, 

I am not going to write about the state of the world, because it's all too much. But I did think I'd say something about my new hobby of collage (still LOVING it) and how it fits my philosophy of life. And how that fits with creative writing. 

Here it is: life is chaos. And much of what we do (or what I do anyway) is about bringing order to chaos.

I started out as a news reporter. I was 18 years old. I thought I was discovering the truth, writing the 'first draft of history'. But later I began to think that what we think of as news, or journalism, is just a way of fitting messy life into neat boxes. How much easier is it to deal with the enormity of war or murder or disease if you can issue a brisk instruction '400 words, make it snappy.' I loved being a news editor. Life is less scary if you pack it into columns topped with headlines. 

Writing books was a way of freeing myself -  the joy of fiction, the freedom to make stuff up, breaking free of word counts and headlines and working out 'what's the news line'? But with success came a realisation -  a narrative, a plot, is sort of pretty much like news. It's another way of stirring the pot. It's taking elements and snippets and stitching them together. Making patterns, wrapping things together. Finding a start and a finish. How reassuring to think that life can be contained between the covers of a book. How satisfying to make my very own ordered way from start to finish, from once upon a time, to they lived happily ever after.
 And now, I have found comfort and escape in a more abstract form of art -  but still one which takes bits and pieces and puts them together to make some sort of satisfying whole. Having pictures and shapes and colour and texture to play with offers me something new -  and yet somehow it's not new at all. Somehow it's all about the same thing. Order from chaos. Beauty from mess. 
I guess my hope now is that somehow, somewhere there's order to be found in the chaos of the universe. That the darkest of patterns baked into history can be transformed and healed. 
 And if not, that our little patterns and pictures and stories can bring light to the darkness, pinpricks of stars in the night, a patchwork of meaning from the scraps of existence.