No "Shoulds" on the Itch -

- but might some "Coulds" be fruitful?

In several posts since we came to Substack I’ve said something like, ‘there are no shoulds on This Itch of Writing’, and I hope it’s true. As both a writer and a teacher, it’s not just that I know I don’t have all the answers, I know that there are no definitive answers in any creative art.

The relationship between idea, action and outcome is just too complex, too unpredictable, too subject to subjective perceptions - not to mention to the day, the weather and the blood-sugar levels - to plan a straight chain of cause-and-effect that leads to a result that succeeds for everyone involved.

Of course, in blog tours, interviews and biogs, and on festival platforms across the land, we all tell retrospective stories of how a piece of our writing got the way it did. But the cause-and-effect chains we create there, and in our own heads, are in an important sense, fiction: we’re selecting and spinning the stuffs of the real world into something simpler and clearer, that can be shown and understood.

And the wise writer in the audience also treats what they hear like fiction and creative non-fiction: it may be illlumating, revealing, entertaining and inspiring, but what the platform person says is not and can never be a fool-proof, fail-safe, let alone mandatory, set of instructions for How To Write A Good Story.

That’s why the Itch’s football chant is ‘There are no rules, there are only tools’.

And if there are no rules then there are no obligations - and if there are no obligations, there are no musts, no oughts and no shoulds. Even if you have granted the person discussing your writing some kind of power over it - a lecturer, an agent, an editor - you still have the power, as well as the right, to decide what if anything to do about it, and with what tools. Grant such people the right to tell you that you should do it a certain way - or read in what they say about your kind of writing as what you ought to do - and you are, as the psychotherapists say, ‘giving away your power’. You are letting someone else’s priorities, ideas and value systems overrule your own. And that never ends well.

But, of course, we want to get a good grade; we want to be published; we want to work collaboratively with agents and editors, we want to be read, get good reviews, and sell lots of copies; I’m certainly not suggesting you don’t take account of others’ reactions to your writing.

And most of us know the feeling of resisting something furiously, only to discover - or finally acknowledge - that the resistance was born of fear or a misapprehension, and it’s exactly what the piece needs. Once you’ve felt the fear and tried it anyway, the piece may blossom and bear fruit in ways you never knew it could. So flat-out resisting an idea solely because it’s expressed in the form of a should, a must or an ought (stubborn? moi?) may well be a mistake too.

So how do we square the circle?

All it takes, I suggest, is slightly different wording, turning obligations into possibilities. It does look like much, but you know - all writers know - that the words we choose to think with can make all the difference. So:

• when someone says you should think I could

• when someone says you must think I might

• when someone says you ought to think I might opt to

or, of course, you might do something else entirely.

Happy Easter!

Image credit: Kora27 at Wikimedia Commons