Looking back…

Since creating my blog in March of this year, I have discovered that writing has given a new sense of purpose and direction to my life; at times, it has also been like a welcome balm for a troubled spirit. When things have been difficult in my personal or professional life, writing has given me a platform for self-expression and a means of connecting with the outside world.  It does not matter that those who read these words are mostly unknown to me; just knowing that you are there - reading these posts - gives me a sense of connectedness to you.  For me, the joy of writing is that it has allowed me to create something greater than myself – to step outside my own small, confined world and share my thoughts, ideas and experiences.

My writing has evolved over the course of the last few months to convey a vision of the world that is gradually becoming less personalised and localised and more expansive and inclusive; this feels to me like quite a natural progression. Although the themes of my recent posts are still determined by my unique experiences and reflect a subjective perception of the world, I have become increasingly interested in exploring the intersection between my world and the world, between the personal and the universal. Consequently, when I write about my experiences as a 41 year old woman living on the south west coast of England, what increasingly fires my imagination is how my little corner of the universe forms part of a greater whole; and, how I can use the written word as a bridge - connecting the personal with the universal and the local with the global. There is no doubt that we are all moulded by the society, culture, and family in which we grew up and that we all filter reality through eyes that have been conditioned by our earliest experiences. Yet, despite the huge differences between people, what unites us far outweighs any divisions of class, gender or nationality. After all, we all have to grow up and find our way in the world; we will all experience heartache at some time or another; and, if we live long enough, we will all grow old and come face to face with our own mortality.

I have frequently observed that the most gifted writers are those who have a talent for vividly recreating a picture of a world they know and situating it within a wider framework that reflects the commonality of human experience. In this way, The God of Small Things transcends the local reality of Kerala, India with its rigidly hierarchical cast system and speaks of greater universal truths about division and exclusion. Similarly, on one level, One Hundred Years of Solitude recounts the tale of the lives of successive generations of the same family in a remote part of Colombia; yet the novel also contains a metanarrative that speaks of the nature of time and memory and Man’s struggle to break free from the shackles of the past. In this way, Garcia Marquez’s prize winning bestseller transcends a localised sense of time and place to touch on universal truths that extend beyond Colombian borders.

I would like to think that I have achieved something similar in my own writing - albeit on a much smaller scale than these great authors; and that, in the process, I have reached beyond the confines of my own finite existence in time and space to create something of universal relevance and enduring value. I also hope that anyone that reads these blog posts can relate on some level to their content - no matter what corner of the world they inhabit and no matter how dissimilar their life experiences have been from my own. It would be gratifying to know that my readers in Russia gain as much from my blog posts as those in Dorset!