#200

Number 200. That’s a lot of challenges. A lot of opportunities to allow us to dig our writerly fingertips into our rib cages and tear them open, bearing all. 200 times we could have bled out onto the page or said things in poetic rage or stepped foot onto the Vocal stage. It’s 100 less than that Gerard Butler Spartan movie, but it’s 100 more than the percentage output we’re expected to put out and into all that we do.

200 is a mighty feat and a fleeting thought, in different strains. There are more calories than that in a pecan plait, but that’s 40 days worth of hiking mileage. In one sense, it’s nothing, and in another, it’s everything. In 200 years we’ve invented the internet, we’ve destroyed the atmosphere and the population is now 6 times larger than it was back in 1824. Yet, in 200 seconds I can barely muster the movement, after a wee, to wipe. The number 200 means 200 different things to 200 million different people.

But for me, when I think of numbers, I think of words.

200 words, pages, drafts, plot holes, meltdowns, journals, software updates, stories trying to vie for attention at any one time.

This year, I want my words to make at least 200 people smile. I want to make a difference in somebody, anybody’s life, even if only for 200 minutes. I want to help 200 cats get rehomed by writing the stories they can only meow. I want - I want I want I want - I’m going to write words and right worlds.

On page 122 of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is the chapter “Why Do I Write?” (That book is 2 pages shy of 200). It’s exactly as it sounds, as it reads. Questioning the nature of why we do what we do, why we bleed ink and overthink. It changes from one moment to the next, naturally, because the world does, and we do, and with every 200 breaths our nails have grown imperceptibly and we’ve thought a million different thoughts that have shaped the day differently to the one before. I write because we all live inside our heads, a sofa bed propped up against our skull, the curtains drawn over the backs of the windows of our eyes. We exist out in the real world, but we don’t know how each other truly experiences it, because we can’t access their minds. Unless we write them out for one another.

I write because I breathe, because I blink, because I think and life would not be life if I didn’t. This year I want to breathe louder, blink harder, think softer, and write wilder. In 200 years, who knows what human beings will be thinking? We don’t. But they’ll know what we were.

Maybe it will help them. Shape them. Teach them. Scare them. Prepare them. Maybe they’ll never read our words, or read at all, but that’s not even the point, is it? We write because we are a strand of the universe, threaded with stories and desperate to know all about itself. We burn bright inside our words.

This is the 200th challenge Vocal has set - but it’s not a challenge, it’s a reminder. A prompt. An iteration of page 122, asking that same question in a subtle way.

Why do you write? What aspirations do you have for Vocal this year?

To push that sofa bed onto the page and make a home here.