I need to write; I have ideas swirling around my mind most of the time. But if I haven’t got somewhere or something to note these ideas down, they drift off, lost.

I’d like to think I’m a good writer, but I know I’m not. Or maybe I’m too self-deprecating. It’s a cultural thing with me, which I’m not going to talk about here at this time. Some other time will feel right for that.

Having said that, words come easily to me. I can create wordscapes with my writing. I’ll write about many things, about love, loss, death, desire, hope and defeat. The images I see when I pen something are real, the patterns the words create are tangible to me.

But I’m also a lazy writer. I love the fact I can find on-line a multitude of sites offering advice for writers, rules to follow to help make you a good writer. I spend a lot of time reading these. What I need to be doing is writing, not reading about writing! You will be amused how many novels I have started to write. Some have evolved into short stories, others into free verse poems. One day I may actually write the novel that’s in me; I’m certainly not short of ideas, when I remember them! And I have folders full of novels I’ve started. Some of them end up as short stories. Lazy, see …

What is hard for me is to focus that inner discipline to write. But when I do tame the procrastinating voices, words spill out in a rush of creativity.

Is that approach wrong? I feel guilty if I haven’t written in a while but I’m good at riding the guilt. Yet if an idea comes to me and then disappears, as is often the case, it annoys me. It’s like a dream you wake from and, for a moment, can remember it vividly, then it’s gone. You grasp at those wisps of recollection but they’re always just out of reach and it frustrates me when that happens.

Then there’s those times when creativity does burst out of me. Perhaps it’s the build-up of guilt that erupts creating a pyroclastic flow of ideas hurtling towards blank page. Liken it to an artist who splatters paint randomly on a canvas; unplanned and random, the words tumbling onto the page, vying for position, for supremacy.

I have to accept that this is the way it is, that’s the way I write. Perhaps after my death, people will say, “He was quite a good writer, shame he didn’t write that novel …