Reflections on a year of writing

My Arts Council England-funded time working on CYMA is coming to an end. It has been the most amazing year of writing and creative development. Here I look back on what DYCP funding has helped me to achieve, and what’s next for my project and practice.

Writing as work

I went into this project at a strange and scary time in my career. I took my writing seriously and had had some success, but I had been struggling to fit it around a demanding day job in which I spent my week, my evenings, my weekends supporting other writers. I loved doing this work, but my own writing suffered. I realised it was time to rebalance my efforts and to put my own writing higher up on my to-do list. 

Over the last few months I have worked consistently on the project and manuscript, which has been the first time in my life, apart from one month of furlow in 2020, that I have been able to dedicate time to my writing on a regular and generous basis.

Five notebooks of different sizes and shapes are arranged on a wooden desk next to a black computer keyboard.
A year’s notebooks

The thing I’m most proud of having accomplished during this project is sitting at my desk every Monday morning and writing. It sounds small, but it’s a luxury not everyone can always afford. I couldn’t until this year. It has allowed me to consider my creative development as work, and to rebalance my working life to better honour my writing.

Unexpected outputs

I have to admit that I have not finished writing and editing CYMA, although I am pleased with the partial draft so far. The beauty of DYCP is that I don’t necessarily have to have finished, as long as I have developed my creative practice in the ways I planned to, and that I have most definitely done. 

That’s not to say the project has been straightforward. I’ve had setbacks, including a nasty bout of covid. The creative process has taken me in unexpected directions, meaning that I haven’t always written exactly what I thought I’d be writing. I’ve had to follow the momentum and see where it takes me.

Flo is a white person with a long brown ponytail and wearing a green coat. They are holding a notebook filled with handwriting and are looking out over the coastal salt marshes of north Norfolk.
Writing in situ on the Norfolk coastal path

This has included finishing two abandoned projects alongside my work on CYMA. One of these I had been working on for twelve years (no exaggeration – I started it in October 2011). I woke up one morning, and knew exactly what I needed to do to finish it, and now it’s on submission. I hadn’t seen that one coming. 

One of the biggest learning points for me has been to keep writing – even when it’s hard, even if another idea is beckoning, the most important thing is to just write something. Who knows what it will become in the future… though, hopefully next time it won’t take twelve years to complete. 

New perspectives, new possibilities

The project has also afforded me opportunities to learn from some amazing teachers, for the first time on a one-to-one basis. The individual deep dives that my mentor Sascha A. Akhtar and performance coach Lewis Buxton undertook on my behalf gave me exactly the ‘step change’ I was hoping to gain from this project. 

Sascha instantly saw through to the heart of a creative block that I’ve been struggling with for a long time, and wouldn’t even have identified without her mentorship. Lewis crafted a thoughtful bespoke package that got me further towards being able to perform my work again than I thought was possible. As a result, my sense of how this project could be shared in future has completely changed, and this in turn has changed and improved the writing.  

Flo is a white person with long brown hair, wearing a white shirt and a pair of handmade hare's ears on a headband. They are kneeling next to a rusted metal pole and are seen through the stems of summer wildflowers.
In situ performance/embodied research, September 2023

So what next? I’m going to take my new regular writing habit with me as best I can, and hope to finish writing CYMA in 2024. It won’t be the book I envisaged at the start of this process. But it is the thing I have to write, not the thing I think I should write. I can’t wait to finish it and (gulp) perhaps even perform it in the future. And I have more of an idea of where my writing will go next. A game plan, if you will. 

DYCP is… well, ace

If someone were to ask me whether they should apply for DYCP, my answer would be, if you have a project that you need to do, and you need support to do it, then don’t hesitate. Even just writing the application is helpful in plotting your course and testing an idea. 

And if you’re successful… Well, in my experience it will surprise you, it will challenge you, it will hurt in a growing pains sort of a way, and it will be brilliant. You’ll reach the end and never want it to end. 

Whether it ends is then up to you. Once you’ve finished, you realise that you haven’t finished at all, and a whole new level of possibilities is suddenly stretched out before you, inviting you to come and explore, if you can only bring yourself to commit to it, if you dare. And best of all, you now have the experience and support to survive out there.

So what are you waiting for?