Where to find our youthful genius selves, even when we feel old and stale

Ono No Kamachi was a poet and courtesan at the Imperial Court of Japan sometime in the 9th century. She wrote particularly poignantly about the passing of youthful bloom.

Have you ever admired work you did years ago and been afraid you’ll never be that good again?

There’s an explanation for that early flare of brilliance, and there’s also a way to rediscover it.

Create dangerously - Albert Camus

I probably listen too much to pundits who quote statistics about great innovators who flared brightly in their 20s and then never matched their early genius.

I fear this syndrome might also afflict lesser mortals, especially me.

My youthful creative flare

I wrote lots of stories in my childhood and youth. Most of them were try-hard emulations of the current favourite pony-story, romantic girl-on-holiday-on-a-farm story, or weird Alan Garner story. Usually just the first chapter, after which it unravelled and was abandoned.

My first short story that saw light of day in print was I Am Stone, which I wrote when I was 16 and in a moment of existential despair and philosophical contortion.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself – JK Rowling

I wrote it for myself alone. I dived deep into my own unwieldly and geeky self and wrote from the place I found there.

It worked. And the piece was published.

But for years and years afterwards, nothing worked.

Why, why, why?

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either - Meg Cabot

Digging through folders of old typed drafts of a novel I started in my late 20s (and still haven’t finished a million years later), I came across something else I fear I’ll never be able to match.

At the time that I wrote it, I lived in a one-room house on the edge of a forest in a valley outside the hippie town of Nimbin, New South Wales.

We lived on a community, and as we were all young and breeding, there was a gang of nine pre-school children who roamed the community and drifted in and out of various dwellings foraging for snacks and toys and attention, all day long.

This particular day, when I thought they (including my two) would all be in someone else’s house and I’d have time to write, they descended en masse.

There were five two-year olds in my tiny one-room, open-plan cottage, they were all hungry and keen to play, and I had the opening paragraphs of a novel bursting to get out of my head.

So I wrote it, on my old second-hand typewriter, a single snatched sentence at a time, between mixing play-dough, cutting apples into apple-bunnies (remember those?), wiping noses and behinds, disengaging altercations, preventing accidents, emptying potties, changing nappies.

I seemed to lift into a strange detached state where I could hold a sentence in my head until a moment presented itself, then quickly hammer it out before lurching off to attend to another toddler issue.

This intense state lasted for about an hour and a half.

Somehow it worked. The children enjoyed themselves and eventually swarmed off to someone else’s house, and I had written two pages of flowing prose.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow - Margaret Atwood

When I reread this piece of writing now (with its rusty paperclip, and its wrinkled paper, yellowed and lightly foxed), I wonder if I can ever do it again.

The secret of unselfconsciousness

I seem to do my best (IMHO) work when I’m not ‘trying to do my best work’.

In fact, when I’m trying to do something other than my best work.

Attending to toddlers, for example. Or compressing an inner anguish – often some kind of rage at ‘the way of the world’, to be honest – into a verbal bouillon. Or simply writing for that singular audience of one: Me.

It means I’m not writing with an eye on potential future editors, publishers, readers, riches or awards.

I’m not being self-conscious.

I’m being my true creative self.

Which means that, somehow, I need to retrieve or replicate the situations, moods, circumstances under which I was formerly unselfconscious, and become unselfconscious again.

Perhaps being unselfconscious is the true Zen of being an artist, a writer, a creator, an inventor.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway — in secret - Louise Erdrich

It is where we ‘get out of our own way’.

And that is the thing that takes practice, diligence, discipline.

Not the actual hammering out of words.

Not the hammering out of sentences, paragraphs, chapters.

It isn’t the discipline of doing, it’s the discipline of being.

Of sinking into our unselfconscious selves. Our shoot-from-the-hip selves who don’t care if no one reads us, views us, listens to us.

Of becoming our best genius selves.