100 Day Creative Challenge Day 67: Knitting
I don’t knit. I have friends who knit and they make lovely hats, scarves and baby clothes, but I have not been blessed with the knitting gene. My nana tried to teach me every winter until I was about 14 and then she gave up, relegating me to the knitting wasteland.
Drawing is beyond me, and even when my children were under five they would laugh at my drawings.
My daughter asked me to stop singing to her at bedtime when she was eleven.
‘Why?’ I asked her, thinking she would tell me she was too old.
‘Because you’re bad. Really bad.’
My daughter played piano, my son and husband played guitar and they sang together in the evening. They told me I could clap along, but I wasn’t really any good at that either. They were just being kind.
But, I do have a bit of knack for tying ideas together. I love teaching kids how to knit together a speech or an essay. And, if I may be so bold to say, I’m becoming better at knitting together words, phrases, ideas, images, characterisations into stories.
A few critics have told me I could do better, but I’m good. Good is not an adjective one aspires to as a writer, stellar, genius wordsmith, provocative word weaver—that sort of thing would be give me cause to dance with joy. Good will suffice as I journey through this journey of writing.
Knitting words seems to be my party piece, my creative thing. I’ll stick to that and let my friends knit with wool.
And doesn’t a writer do the same thing? Isn’t she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe. Anthony Doerr
