Diary of a Writer - Cecilia Poullain: Recent Episodes
Cecilia Poullain
An illuminating podcast for writers and bibliophiles where you’ll be taken behind the scenes to discover how a writer really writes.Cecilia Poullain journeys deep into the creative process, as her writing evolves from first, messy draft to final manuscript. Witty, nourishing and life-affirming listening!
In this episode, I explain why I haven't posted in a while. A lot of the stuff I have been writing is about people in my family, and I don't want to hurt them and I will need to check with them before I include things about them in my book.
I am fascinated in the different influences of my father and grandfathers and my mother and my grandmothers on me. And in the evolution in what it means to be a man over the last century - so clearly illustrated in my family.
I have been working on the structure of the book, and had a great idea this morning. The first part of the book would be about what happened when I followed the masculine, and the second half would be about finding the feminine.
Today, I wrote about the relatively minor, hyper-privileged decision to move out of our holiday flat in Dinard to a house further west along the coast in Saint-Cast, and all that it taught my about making decisions.
I am still trying to work out how to structure the section on death and endings. I have made some headway with the part on death, but I don't yet know how to fit in the part on endings. A very short piece today on the advantages and disadvantages of being alive - and being dead.
I spent a long time this morning trying to work out how to structure this section of the book. I had initially written it as a series of reactions to deaths and leaving places, but that doesn't really work. I'm trying to find the through-line - the central dramatic question - and I think it might be something like: "can I come to peace with death and endings?"
I had a section called " I can, I can't" in which I was looking at why there were some situations in which I persuaded myself something was impossible and others in which I persisted.
But I realised that I needed a central dramatic question with a yes or no answer.
My central dramatic question will probably be: "can I change my limiting beliefs?" which is why I changed the name of the section.
I am seeing how my perfectionism feeds into my limiting beliefs, and how incredibly powerful our beliefs about ourselves are.
A slightly messy text on my happiest memories. I have shifted this section of my book to just before "Dreams and Visions" because I realised that memories are the flip-side of dreams and visions - memories are in the past; dreams and visions are in the future.
I am up to 74 000 words. I have structured my work into themes and I have started rewriting within the themes. I initially wrote three different texts on time - I have now combined them into a single text.
I write about leaving Sydney to come back to Paris. I had no idea that I would still be living in Paris 27 years later. I write about other departures, and what it means to live on the other side of the world from family and friends. I write about just how hard it was to find a job in a foreign country.
How swimming, yoga and singing all focus on breathing and on the position of the pelvis and how they are all building on each other.
I have been reading "A Happy Pocket Full of Money" by David Cameron Gikandi. I'm not quite sure what to make of this book - it is a quantum physics / spiritual guide to becoming wealthy.
The author talks about seeing time in the "hear-and-now" - time doesn't really exist because there is only the "hear-and-now".
This got me thinking again about different ways of imagining time and the effect that has.
I have always seen time as linear. Today, I started musing on what difference it makes if we see time as linear or circular. I would be interested to know what you think.
I thought I was going to be investigating why I sometimes conformed to what other people expected of me - or at least my perceptions of what other people expected of me - and why I sometimes did my own thing. In the end, I wrote about moving from childhood, a time of great freedom, to adolescence when I started to conform, to becoming a lawyer and closing in more and more, until it became unbearable and I started to reverse the process.
This episode is for anyone who is looking for more colour in their life.
Reading back over my writing of the last few months led me to ask the question: "why is it that sometimes, I persist with something, and sometimes, I say "I can't"?" What is going on there? Is there a link between these two things, and if so, what is it? That is what I examine in today's episode - and I will probably go further with this a little later.
The theme of order and creativity came up over and over again yesterday as I tried to pull out some of the themes in my writing. Here are my musings on the relationships between order - also known as structure, technique, habit - and creativity.
Today, I drew out themes from what I had been writing in order to find where the gaps are that need to be filled in. An extremely exercise which helped me to realise some of the dichotomies in my life and how my whole life I have been struggling to become my own person.
I write about how important creating community is to me, and in particular creating community around our house in Brittany.
In this episode, I write about the performance I put on last Sunday in my flat in Paris. I talk about what it is like to be in front of an audience and how I am coming to see that each performance is part of the learning process rather than an absolute.
This is a piece I have rewritten about my grandfather and what he transmitted - or didn't transmit - to me.
A mixed bag of writing today. I am having to dig deep into my memories now, and I think the time is coming when I will have to start structuring my work. I am up to almost 60,000 words.
Not easy writing this morning. I am noticing a pattern. When I haven't been writing consistently, I have less ideas.
But I did manage a paragraph about weighing myself.
It's all about just sticking with it, even when it is difficult. Writing every day is what makes me a writer.
Finding joy by being in the present and aware of all my senses. Mindfulness in practice.
Today, I wrote down the four major emotions - anger, fear, sadness and joy - then mindmapped what came up around them. Interestingly, the first piece I wrote was about how important emotions are to me. And the second piece was about my day yesterday, which I had been wanting to write about since it happened it was so perfect.
Three scenes from our Gestalt therapy sessions about leadership and daring to bring all that is on the inside to share on the outside.
Today, I wanted to feel into whatever it felt right to write about without being too organised about it. I wrote a couple of prompts down: "My voice is" and "Times when I wrote" and immediately, the ideas came.
I am feeling a very strong pull to write fiction again.
I am becoming aware that I need to vary my sentence structure when I get to the second draft. I tend to write three-sentence paragraphs - a short sentence, a longer sentence then a very long sentence.
I write about how boring it can be when there is nothing to do at work and indications that I was in the wrong job.
This is what it felt when the day I discovered I was a writer.
Do you think you might be? Would you like to try?
The writing process is teaching me how to live. By getting some perspective on my life, I am learning to recognise my destructive patterns and to work through them.
If you have ever told yourself that something is impossible, this episode is for you.
I talk about how throughout my life, I have sometimes felt as though things are impossible. By writing about it, I have learnt that they are not impossible - it is just a matter of coaching myself through it and to find out what the next tiny micro-step is.
Writing is getting easier and easier as I just "do it". I am up to Day 65 and a few words shy of 50 000 words. I am still "just writing junk" and need to decide when I will start structuring and editing.
I wrote about the walk I did this morning, about my decision-making process and about appreciating the little things.
An easy writing day today. This episode is about how I got the idea for writing my first one-woman show - using songs as my starting point.
It's always a bit terrifying putting my unedited work out there, especially when I am writing about incidents where I felt so foolish. But I also think that by being vulnerable, this will somehow connect with my audience.
These are three terribly embarrassing stories about work, when I was a young lawyer, and a story from my thirties when I started to feel as though I knew what I was doing.
When I haven't been writing for a few days, I really pay for it when I do get back to my desk. My first writing day is always more difficult, and that was the case today.
I wrote three short texts about my last job. It was a place where I worked with wonderful people and found real satisfaction - but that wasn't enough in the end.
In this episode, I talk about feeling into what I want to write and how trying different styles of writing can help us become a better writer.
I read about how I started to sing and my inappropriate behaviour in one of the top London law firms.
In this episode, I talk about how many of the things that we might believe to be the opposites of creativity can be used in the creative process.
Each piece of writing needs a Central Dramatic Question which has a yes or no answer. For part of my book - and my life - the Central Dramatic Question is: "Will I find a career that is personally and financially rewarding?"
There needs to be an overarching Central Dramatic Question for the book and a Central Dramatic Question for each scene. I started to write a series of scenes that went to the overall theme of the book and to think about each individual Central Dramatic Question.
Because I was only structuring today and didn't produce any new work, I read a text about how I coach and why I love my coaching clients.
An episode about anxiety - the anxiety of getting back to writing after a three week break, and the anxiety I feel every time I wake up
Boy it was hard to write today. I looked at my list of subjects to write about, and ended up writing about two things: my annoying habit of speaking up at the very end of a meeting and why my friend stole my German textbook.
I think it is getting hard because I need to write about things that I am not proud of. I could and probably should be writing about my catastrophic relationships with boys, but I skirted the issue...
Will I have the courage to get into the nitty-gritty tomorrow?
Today was a difficult day to get things done. I had wanted to spend all afternoon writing, but it didn't work out like that.
I ended up writing about a terrifying incident in Tibooburra, a tiny town in far-western New South Wales in Australia, and about how proud I am to belong to a swimming club.
I had lots of fears and doubts today about what I am writing. This is a very short episode because I spent time looking back through my notes to find ideas and things I wanted to write about.
In the end, I decided to write something easy and agreeable - about why I love coaching so much.
As I was writing the story about how my boss talked about my files in our team meeting - and I let him - I remembered another story about how another boss presented my work, fifteen years later. I realized that between the two, I had gained the courage to say it wasn't OK for me.
And a tiny little story about the freedom I felt to dance when I was a child.
I met an English writer last night. We were talking about how to "just write junk".
Interestingly, this led me to write this morning about a time in my life when I was trying so hard to write well that I couldn't write at all.
This then led me to remember lots of tiny details about events that happened in the house I grew up in, in Bettowynd Road in Sydney.
Writing was easy for me today - I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.
I had an awful singing lesson yesterday, which led me to these reflections on creating one's life as a masterpiece with time for both the yin and the yang.
Sometimes, I come to my desk with an idea that is fully formed and it is just a matter of setting it down on paper.
Sometimes, like today, I have no ideas. I made a long list of different things I might want to write about, then wrote about something completely different.
I wrote about how breaking a large task, like cycling up a very long hill, into a series of tiny tasks can make the task so much easier.
Also about how aware I become of time when I am doing something difficult and how that awareness disappears when the difficult thing is done.
In this episode, I talk about our relationship with death and how, at least in the West, we are so removed from it and so polite around it.
I've had an idea for an article buzzing around in my head all weekend, so I used my writing time this morning to write the article instead of writing my book (and doing all the other stuff I had planned to do...).
It's about why it is so hard for people to be innovative in workplaces where fear and judgement are baked into the way our workplaces are, and what we need to do to make space for people to access their creative mind. A subject dear to my heart...
Today, I was pulling together diverse texts and putting them in some sort of rough order, so I didn't do any writing. I am finding that I need more time for this project, but I have no choice but to do it in the time I have.
Because I didn't write anything new today, I read my text about my beautiful garden.
I felt like writing today and had a memory of a magpie singing in the Blue Mountains in Australia. That's where I started writing.
Then I wrote about waking my mother up at 4 o'clock in the morning to tell her that we were adopting our first child. I wrote the texts about meeting our children for the first time some time ago.
Today, I thought about writing a letter from myself in November 2023 to myself in November 2022, but it started getting too boring for words.
But I do talk about visioning and the power of visioning - when I have done this exercise before, often what I have envisioned comes to pass.
I read my story about the importance of me having a vision for my one-woman show which I put on in February 2019, and how the vision guided me even though the reality was so different.
I am starting to write in the same tone and feel as though I need to shake it up a little. Each text is starting to have a sameness to it.
I read three texts, two on deaths of people very close to me and the third on leaving and how decisions often involve a grieving process.
I talk about closure and how difficult we can find closure to be. Probably what I will write about tomorrow.
I read a story about a stressful experience I had with my sister recently, and two stories about rejecting perfectionism and trusting my dreams.
I talk about how my writing process is shifting from just producing content, whatever that may be, to pulling what I have written out of older, messy drafts and putting them into a cohesive format.
I read two texts about the importance of my relationship with place.