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Art Historian, Dr Jim Harris

This week, as we’re launching the 500 Words Competition I’ve been thinking about writing.Ìý Not just these 387 words, telling a story, trying to say something about what it means, but all stories - myths and legends, heroes, adventures, love and sadness - the stories of being human.

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My own stories were never great.Ìý My go-to ending, ‘and then I woke up and found it was all a dream’ turned out to be less original than I thought, and as I got older and started writing for work I still struggled.Ìý Once, I got writer’s block and couldn’t write anything at all, so my wise teacher, Pat, locked me in her office and told me just to write something, anything, and that she’d read whatever I wrote.

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So I got busy and I just wrote, and I soon remembered that writing is isn’t about knowing the ending before you start, or the beautifully turned phrase appearing immediately, or the killer plot twist, the brilliant argument, glistening like a jewel in the first draft.

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It’s about starting with a single word or idea and working with it, seeing where it takes you. It’s about using whatever’s around you, maybe something surprising or unexpected, or letting your imagination take you far away, somewhere else entirely.

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Where that single word or idea comes from is another thing.Ìý My friend Anthony Wilson is a poet and he wrote a poem called, appropriately enough, ‘A Pause for Thought’, about those moments when we can stop and think, like a

…pause outside a tunnel:

‘the time with nothing to show the world

except the weight of thoughts we did not know

as ‘thoughts’ but impressions we might one

day push into use’.

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The Bible is full of stories, and full of writers. David, who wrote songs, once found himself on the run, holed up in a cave, an unintended pause but full of ‘thoughts…impressions he might one day push into use’.Ìý So he wrote Psalm 57, an astonishing journey in just 200 words, through fear and anger, to confidence and exultation.

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If you take a look at it, you might be reminded that great writing doesn’t need to be long, or complicated, or have a cast of thousands.Ìý A great story doesn’t have to be War and Peace.Ìý It can be 500 words.