Pearl Amongst Swine: Sally at the Writing Group

Sally was deeply troubled. No, she didn’t like that as a beginning or a phrase. She could do better. She hated pieces which began with a name, rather like the last one about her: 'Living the High Life on a Low Budget'.

She crossed it out and thought of the irony and fittingness of this self reflexivity on the act of writing. Even better - that writing was the reason for her deep troubles.

It wasn't the act of writing but that she was about to do it in front of a class of strangers. In Sally's mind, writing as an issue swapped behind the aspect of her evening which really frightened her. As well as believing that she had natural skill, Sally was a writer as it allowed her to remain a recluse. She could live inside her head, imagining and meditating on all manner of things. What might seem crazy or melodramatic in every day life made great writing. Instead of a potential mental health assessment, Sally's ideas as a writer gave her originality, quality, depth, entertainment value. It gave her permission, in short to be a people avoiding, self aggrandising, melancholy loony drama queen.

Today, Sally was challenging that. She asked herself why she had sent that stupid email, and if she had committed herself to tonight or not. Why had she allowed herself to be influenced to do this? Sally was going into the public domain amongst a species she rather dreaded: other writers. Of course, she was the most talented person in the city and this other lot would be way below her literary prowess. They could learn from her… but perhaps too much. Sally didn’t want anyone to learn from her, to steal her brilliantly original ideas and beautiful prose style.

She also told herself that she was superior because she actually feared that she wasn’t. What if the clever novels she had spent as long writing as acquiring her many degrees seemed like …. she struggled to mention the word 'populist'.. oh gosh, was her work destined for the common holiday reading tables in commercial bookchains? What if everyone at the group was much younger, and yet had attained a higher level of maturity and insight than she? What if this was a group for prize winners whose work would squish her self image as a writer of quality… and then what would she do? Sally had spent nearly 40 years in this belief, telling herself that her pen's powers were what made it not matter that she didn’t fit into the rest of society too well.

Sally's worst fear was not fully formed when she made herself go into that wretched room of people. She clutched her work proudly, then like a rag doll. Would she really have to share her work with people tonight? She had chosen a piece which she felt appropriate, a nice Biblical quote which she meanly wondered if the others would get. 'Pearls Before Swine', she had entitled her piece. Did they realise that they were the swine, and her wondrous prose was the pearls that she did not wish to waste on them? What if her pearls gave more away about herself than she realised? She practised an unstudied air in the mirror before she came out: 'oh - this isn’t my real work. it’s something I just knocked up… so if you don't like it, you can’t actually be criticising me and my writing.'

Sally's meanness meant that once she had paid, she would commit herself to whatever that money had purchased  - a disgusting meal, to the bitter end; a disappointing film. And in this case, she would sit through this evening of sharing and - oh horrors - workshops.

But she hasn’t really thought that HE would have been there. He arrived late, so that Sally was ensconced in a seat in a circle, in a position which made it hard to leave. She had not seen him for 10 years and had no despite to again. She wished she had researched this group better. When had he taken up writing?

Sally's heart pounded. She gripped her two pages of work and her moleskin notebook hard. There was not way that she would share in front of this man - not her work, her opinions. Sally was lonely and had hoped that she might meet someone at this gathering - not run into the man that had caused so much suffering all those years ago, but the effects of which were very much with her now. Sally calculated how much therapy she had wasted in his single entry to this room and taking a seat and glancing at her. Of course, Sally was resolutely staring at the course leader, shutting that odious man out of her periphery, which had been as hard to do the last decade from her mind as it was to do now in his presence.

Sally's story continues…