The nights are dark and the house is silent and I am grateful to be absorbed in exercises. I forget the silence as I read some marvellous writers who astound me with their use of words and then I am invited to write!

What?! You must be joking

I am filled with insecurity.

Just take me back to my cosy blog where I just write and it feels a pleasure. Why am I putting myself through this pain?

But I persist, I am drawn into the structure of writing whilst at the same time I am told that words and themes come from our subconscious.

Can’t you just let my subconscious do the work? Why do I have to learn this stuff? I protest.

But I need the darkness to be filled and I continue.

I am in awe of the ingenuity of the human mind as I carry on reading and how some writers can make the ordinary extraordinary. How do they do it?

I plough on, writing up to a thousand words a day and trying my hand at haiku. Waves of inadequacy sweeping over me.

I had no idea how many voices one could use. My brain became scrambled with first, second- and third-person narration, whether to use the present or past tense. I realised that there were surprising differences and effects that one could achieve by just changing to the present, but this confused me further as I realised that I normally wrote in the third person and past tense, now I have gone into a mish mash of mixing tenses.

It has all gone horribly wrong

How to choose what voice to write in and stick to it? Should I write in the omniscient present?

There is more to this writing thing than I thought.

Added to this, is the question of whether one is showing or telling. Too much telling can make the reader bored and what about dramatic time, habitual time and foreshadowing?

It’s a bit like illnesses, many were what was considered part of the normal range of human behaviour until they were given a label. We use all of these techniques in our writing but have not used the labels and just like labels used in medicine, this can aid understanding, but it also makes us more self-conscious

I have become a self-conscious writer

It is my belief that all learning is valid so I will have to get over my self-consciousness and try to make my feelings of inadequacy work in a creative fashion.

Oh, to go back to my former complacency