WRITING LIFE

Grief is part of life – and as writers, how do we deal with it in words and use it in our work? Author Penelope Slocombe reflects on the relationship between grief and creativity

My father was a particular type of writer. You know the one, prodigiously talented and brimming with ideas; able, when required, to churn out witty and thought-provoking articles, the odd scripts for local theatre, he even ghost wrote an autobiography.

But when it came to his own great novel, the book that would really launch his writing career, he couldn’t seem to get started. There was always one more piece of research to do, a little more thinking and planning. But still, he talked so much about it, in such depth and for so long, that when he died unexpectedly shortly before my twenty-second birthday, I half expected to find an almost-written novel on his laptop or a detailed plan in his notebooks; something more, at least, than a few mostly empty Word documents and random scribblings. I’d like to say this taught me an important lesson early on: that life is short and if you want to write you need to just sit down and write. My father was mostly absent during my childhood and a talent for creative writing was the thing that bound us together; the gift he gave me. The book he was trying to write when he died was called ‘Penelope’s Guide to Magic’, almost as if it were a baton he was passing onto me: ‘I tried: now it’s your turn. Make me proud.’ No pressure.

And I did write a bit after he died, short pieces, poetry, flash. Trying to make sense of it all. But as the years passed and I still hadn’t started, let alone finished, my own first novel, I began to wonder if I’d also inherited my father’s inability to stick to a longer writing project and see it through. If I wasn’t, in the end, the same type of writer as my father: the writer who seldom actually wrote.