I work for a government department in what we can broadly call recruitment and one of my key tasks is to help people find paid employment. 

When I first meet a client I try in the first instance, to ascertain what they’d like to do and then what they can do.

Last year I met a bright young graduate who told me they want to be a writer.

‘Fantastic!’ I said,

thinking I had found a kindred spirit, ‘What sort of stuff do you write’?

I was expecting them to say social media copy, TV or film scripts, legal documents, instructions for evacuating aeroplanes when they hit the water or even poetry. They replied ‘Nothing yet’.

At this point, my heart dropped. I was sitting with a writer who hadn’t written anything.

A conceptual columnist, a pipeline poet, a wordsmith in the wings.

Here was somebody who was certainly bright, gregarious and good at expressing themselves but had somehow managed to go through 4 years of higher education (they had an MA too) without producing anything in writing other than the mandatory set of essays, dissertations and exams.

This was challenging because all writers, no matter how good we are, produce output. We own notebooks and diaries (nowadays called journals), old school ‘rough’ books and backs of envelopes going back to the year dot covered in scribbles and definitive pearls of wisdom emphasised by asterisks, exclamation marks and faded highlighter trails.

Don’t we?

The fact that this person was a self-designated writer with zero product made me ask if it’s possible to be a writer-in-waiting. I asked myself; Can you keep your talent latent and untested until a commission comes along?

My gut reaction, and probably most other people’s too was a resounding ‘no’!

Be patient.

However, if I have learned one thing in recent years it is that we should consider all options and where possible, give the benefit of the doubt. So, in this spirit, we can say that if someone tells stories they are in effect delivering the same as what a story writer delivers; a narrative.

After all, the oral tradition dates back to the beginnings of human communications and pre-dates writing and reading. Although storytelling is not written fiction per se, it does the same thing. Intrigue, adventure, suspense and resolution can all be encountered as powerfully in a spoken tale as in writing. This probably contributes to the upsurge in popularity of audiobooks. 

So, if we agree that spoken storytelling on some levels equates with writing, having nothing down on paper but out in the World anyway suggests it should be counted as a kind of writing.

Consider disabilities

I say this because although the paper thing feels important, we need to consider how the many thousands of people with hidden disabilities like dyslexia can successfully share accounts and anecdotes and should not be discouraged from flexing their creative and communication talents. 

The same applies to people with other learning challenges such as poor literacy. Even with impairments to functional, communication and cognitive skills, human imagination can be vibrant and inspiring and just needs a channel to make an impact. 

Mental Health

People refer to having a mental block. It is sometimes discounted as trivial or somehow silly and we joke ‘Oh, I’ve got brain fog today’ or ‘The lights are on but nobody’s at home’. 

This can happen to anyone and the causes can range from something temporary such as fatigue to something more serious like dementia. 

Writer’s block in my experience is when you cannot come up with ideas or the notions you do have fail to work when written down. This can be connected to depression and a challenge here is the chicken-and-egg nature of it because sometimes the block causes depression and other times it’s caused by it. 

Either way, a writer can be stymied by their mental health yet they remain a writer because of what they’ve written before or what they have positively planned for the future. It’s a matter of self-perception.

I have only scratched the surface of the issue in this piece and may return to it in the future.

If in the meantime you, the reader have any thoughts on it don’t hesitate to write them down. Or not.