Varifocals has just returned from Paris! A magical city I have never before visited and on the first afternoon there I was convinced I was going back. We went to Le Marais, an area of small streets, unique shops and tiny restaurants spilling out onto the pavements. A blog shouldn't be a tourist guide - just look it up for yourselves - and go if you can! The Left Bank is now more Armani than intellectual so I stayed on the Right Bank, drank wine under a bridge over the Seine, sat in cool squares lined with Chesnut Trees and walled in by eighteenth-century buildings.

The city is a wonderful place to people watch (actually so is anywhere one can sit quietly with a coffee or a drink and see the world wander by on a nice day, doesn't have to be Paris - try Much Wenlock or Shrewsbury, but I'm in love with Paris right now). I made word sketches of the people I saw and short sentences about places to remind me afterwards. Text photos to be the basis of stories and perhaps part of the much neglected novel that is supposed to be 'on the go' and is more usually 'on the stop'. I bought a selection of black and white postcards of Paris in the 20s and 30s and thought I could make stories out of them.

Paris seemed quieter than London, easier to be in somehow. And, for once, I didn't get lost. Varifocals is renowned for shortsightedness and a serious inability to find the way anywhere, famously turning the wrong way to get home from Sainsbury's. (Oh, Telford!) But not in Paris - no confusion, never stuck for the right (or left) turn and even the map in the Rough Guide was comprehensible. The Metro was simple and cheap and the trains full of buskers who got on and off at every stop. I'd never heard a saxophone played on the tube before.

All this must make for some writing material of course. And the blog is doing its work because now I am recharged I've set myself tasks of at least an hour a day at the keyboard and / or making more sketches in a notebook to use at a later date. I don't use the moleskins (although they seem to work for everyone else!). There's a brand of stationery called Clairefontaine in all sizes and very bright, cheerful colours which inspire me. I stocked up on some notebooks, big and small when in Paris - carrying the baggage back home was a problem! So this is a happy, post- holiday blog with no axes to grind, only written for the joy of it all.

That's it. Time to go the vet. to discuss latest ways of cat flea control.

Varifocals has turned the spectacles on a writing competition wanting 500 words from survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA for convenience). It seems wrong. Why? Writing about one's own experience is normal and writing is a powerful therapeutic tool. But for a competition? It may leave the writer feeling very vulnerable, especially if she / he has no back up. It may help to celebrate survival of one of the most cruel experiences a child may undergo. Indeed, there was a piece in Saturday's Guardian from a CSA survivor. She sounded alright (mostly). But others may not be so free of their experiences and perhaps 500 words for a competition, which involves money, may not help the fragile. Presumably it would be judged on the quality of writing.

I think it calls into question what we write about. There are more questions than answers here. We write from experience; maybe alter that for fictional purposes. We write from the imagination - but that's ours too. Bereavement, dying and death are normal, part of the human condition if you like (forgive the cliche), and plenty of novels, blogs and short stories revolve around death. But CSA is not normal: it breaks down the usual healthy barriers we need in childhood. A simile I've read is that it is like a watch that has the cogs broken away from the mechanism. So how do we write about it? It's abnormal and abhorrent, but writers use the abnormal and abhorrent in literature. I'm not suggesting that it is never written about, that it's swept under a carpet of silence as it once was - not at all. There's more protection and help for children and adult survivors than there ever was (despite what the papers may claim)and the openness helps the victims and the punishment of the perpetrators. I think making CSA as part of a competition is perhaps problematic, maybe not. What does everyone else think?

There's also the question of whether one should always write about what one knows. Eric Ambler wrote a novel about Turkey without ever being there - he had a photograph. Chaucer made up stories gleaned completely from other texts. How do we make things up? How do we get the research right? I get really annoyed if I read a book that has detail wrong (at least, the detail I know about -I must miss plenty I don't know about). One popular novel has larks singing from a tree in a town (never, they inhabit open fields), another put eggs into a freezer for storage (try it!).

On a more cheerful note my inspiration for the week came from hearing a snippet on Radio Four, I didn't catch who the speaker was. She said something like 'If your boat doesn't come in, swim out to meet it.' Something to apply to writing, to keep going, to keep swimming out.

That's it, the cats might want lunch now.

Firstly, a huge public thank you to the people of Wrekin Writers for encouragement, patient answering of questions with good humour and arranging this to link up with the Wrekin Writers website. All this advice one reads about starting to write says 'join a writers group' and it's absolutely the right (write) thing to do. Without the group I would have never have had the nerve to start a blog.

2. I think I want this blog to be a tool: a journal of how writing a blog helps me write other things. It's a bit like having a big pot of soup on the stove. I don't have time to dedicate a lot of time to writing and I have to write in small bits and pieces. So writing a blog more frequently feels like having a pot simmering - with what I'm going to write on the blog and - importantly - everything else - all the time (somewhere in the background of whatever else I'm doing), instead of having to re heat it again to boiling point every time I sit in front of the keyboard or pick up my fountain pen. So this is a journal of how I feel about blogging in terms of my writing rather than a public diary. It's also an exercise in desensitizing myself to exposure and to keep writing.

3. I found a marvellous inspiration in the Guardian this Saturday (Review, 4th July, 2009). It's Alice Munro (aged seventy, by the way), saying how good it is (and how good she finds it) if "you've still got life up for translation ... you're always fooling around with what you find, not so much interested in its usefulness as in transformations and revelation.' I'd like to think that's what writing is about. Especially for me is the "fooling around'; taking every day things / events / scraps of overheard conversation and turning them around into a story, making a narrative that might mean something, something that might grab a reader to make them think differently. Or perhaps to try to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary experience for the reader.

That's it for my second blog. Time to lock the cats up for the night.

1. This is my first blog. I needed a long-hand version of what to say plus two glasses of wine before gathering courage to do what the rest of the world seems to do in its sleep. I had to work out what an URL was.
2. BUT. It seems to me that those who want to write successfully (in whatever terms) write all the time: letters, articles, stories, novels, commentaries and - blogs. So it's selfish - this blog. Its to inspire me because by writing more (here) I will write more. If I'm blocked I think I can blog and unblock - that's the general idea. Perhaps along this selfish route I may inspire others - or at least interest someone for a few seconds. I'm not altruistic but I'm not entirely selfish either. My ego is not large by any means.
3. I might not write the truth, about me or about any experience of mine. Or about anybody else. Writing is all story. (Read Hayden White about history for this). I might produce a false persona or tell little bits of real stuff. But that's what writing is all about. It's all glimpses of 'what might be' or 'what if' or something real transmuted into a story so the 'real' is mixed up. We all carry with us 'editors' in our heads so that what we say or write is checked automatically so we don't reveal too much or it is turned and twisted to suit the situation we're in at that moment. After all, crafting a story to suit the audience is just like that. I try to write to suit a woman's magazine and that's really different from crafting an paper for an academic journal. A friend once told her PhD supervisor she'd make it up as she went along and he was really horrified and lectured her about the saintly nature of research. But there's no real truth out there (at least not in the arts subjects) and one opinion or one story is as good as another.
4. That's it folks. Time to feed the cats. More to follow.