“Write at the edges of the day” Toni Morrison
Once I had hauled my dry bag full of freeze-dried meals into a tree out of reach of bears, I looked across at a sun that hadn’t yet set. Nothing else left to do, I crawled into my coffin-sized tent and lay staring up at the nylon ceiling. My feet and shoulders, as if in competition for attention, both throbbed with pain from a day of hiking with a bag the size of a seven-year-old child and twice the weight. Distraction from the discomfort came only when I heard a noise, of which there were many on a wooded mountainside teeming with life. With every rustle, my heart pounded and my eyes widened. I was so wired that sleep had never felt so elusive. Eventually, I got out my phone, opened the notes app and began to write.
At first, I wrote about the day I had just had, processing the events by pressing replay. Then I started to write about how I had come to be in the woods, alone and a million miles from home. ‘So this what it feels like to have an adventure… why does no one tell you this. They do, of course, you just don’t hear it over the noise of your soul shouting about being one with nature and the opportunity to really find yourself.’
And thus, my very first blog post was written. By the end of my trip, I had a blog with 24 posts and over 1000 hits. Having never kept a diary or even sent a tweet this was pretty revolutionary for me. Of course, this is not quite what Toni meant when she was encouraging others to fit in writing around life’s numerous competing priorities but writing when too wired to do anything else worked for me.
Writing was my therapy; it is now my passion and one day, maybe, it will be my meal ticket. But if I was to have any shot at my writing becoming anything more than a blog liked best by my mother, I needed some advice from a professional. At first, I looked at writing groups close to where I live in London, then I found the Adventure Writing Course on Explorers Connect. The course was the perfect opportunity to spend a weekend focused solely on adventure writing. As well as being a fantastic introduction to the many ways you can get your story out there, it gave me valuable practical lessons in improving my writing. What I loved most was getting to meet a bunch of people with passions similar to my own and hearing about the unique literary projects they were working on.
Since the course, I had gone on to have an article about lockdown cycling published in the online magazine – Adventure She. Most excitingly, I have finished writing a narrative memoir – ‘Take a Hike’. An un-sugar-coated account of running away from a failed career in high-end fashion and soul-crushing anxiety to seek a new identity. I swapped model-filled catwalks for bear-inhabited mountain trails and wild camping, before stumbling my way through basic training to become part of an infantry unit in the Army Reserves.
In other words, the Eat, Pray, Love for those who can’t sit still long enough to meditate.
I am currently pitching my story to agents specialising in memoirs and using a lot of the skills, learnt from the instructor Bell, on how to hone my pitch so that hopefully I will go on to publish next year
By
Grace Bovis