Desperately Seeking my Creative

Before I start, this is a self-indulgent piece. I make no apologies for this as I'm writing it for me - to help me. This isn't a fishing trip, I'm not particularly looking for comments or feedback. To be honest I don't expect anyone to read much further than this. But I need to write it down as these thoughts have been buzzing round in my head for weeks now and I need to purge myself so that I can move forward. So, why pick a public domain? Well, I tried to write it just for me and it hasn't helped so I'm hoping that this will work.

The truth is I have a massive desire to be creative. I want to write; to draw; to make jewellery, to produce something - anything. But it seems that I am not destined to be a visual person. During art classes at high school my still-life drawing of a tomato looked more like a pool of blood on the page. In woodwork my dolphin ended up without a tail-fin following a slip with a wayward chisel. My pottery was...err...original. Working with 'slip' had a whole new definition where I was concerned. Then there was writing. Yeah, I loved that. I could always write reasonably well and in those days I could tell stories too.

There was the adventure novel that I wrote (well part-wrote if the truth be told) when I was about nine. It was set in Wales where I was enjoying a caravan holiday with my family. It was very Enid Byltonesque but I was dedicated to my work. I even bought a Welsh language translation book so that I could include authentic dialogue. Then there were the sub-aqua heroes in my underwater treasure hunt that my primary school teacher loved. I wrote a poem about a robin in the style of Pam Eyres (before I'd ever heard of this particular poet - or any other for that matter). I remember the pride I felt when it made it to the classroom hall of fame (it may still be on the wall but I can't be sure of this forty plus years later). I received praise for another story ( I can't remember what it was about) with the comment "Good use of vocabulary" written in teacher sprawl at the end of it. Actually, this one was slightly embarrassing as I had no idea what vocabulary meant and had to ask my parents. I knew it was a good thing though.

My writing prowess, I think, dwindled at High School, everything got a little too serious. But I did manage to write one memorable piece (for me anyway) about how an adolescent loses the magic of Christmas. To coin the title of a Channel 4 television programme, there was no room for the in-betweeners.

Later - much later (I went to University in my mid-thirties - I always was a late developer) while studying for a Creative and Professional Writing degree I was given an opportunity to experiment with writing in a variety of genre and enjoyed a freedom to create that I had never experienced before. And for the most part my writing was well received by my tutors. But having left University for some time and having not played with my creative since then (I got side-tracked as I had a brief foray into teaching academic skills) I seem to have lost the knack of story-telling.

I guess the point of this self-indulgence is that my creative seems to have abandoned me. Yes, I can string words together to make sentences; yes, I can string sentences together to make paragraphs; yes, I can string paragraphs together to make a coherent whole. In short, I can write but what I can't do anymore is tell stories.

I've always been a try-hard. My University mentor used to call me a grade-grubber - and she was right. But perhaps in writing this I may be able to find my lost creative. Maybe Prose is the place to help me. After all, I wrote this didn't I?