It struck me – when I was coaching a client recently – how important focus is in our writing lives. I’m not talking about the need to focus during the act of writing, but rather the idea of having a focus in the work that we do.
The client in question was talking about the books that he had published during a fairly prolific career. His problem, as he perceived it, was that there was no specific link between his books. He could understand why his agent was struggling to ‘get’ him, as he was struggling to ‘get’ himself. If a single writer wanted to write books about such a plethora of subjects – and in different genres – as he had done, how could a future potential publisher possibly categorise him (and thus sell his work)?
My first response to this was to think, ‘it’s OK that you are multi-faceted’. My client might express himself thus, in the words of Walt Whitman, ‘Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’ Such an answer, however, would not help my client. I sensed that he needed to see a connection between the works that he had completed (and the works that he wanted to embark upon) in order to regain his writing equilibrium and understand what it was that he was trying to do.
I was reminded of a time in my own writing life when I asked myself the same
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question. I’d always defined myself as a ‘literary novelist’ yet I had written three novels at that point: one historical, one mystery and one contemporary women’s fiction (about a woman struggling to come to terms with motherhood). I was beginning to think there was no connection between my novels, but on a long train journey I began to mull this question: if there were a connection, what might it be? I wrote a long-winded answer in my journal. As I free-wrote around the subject of connections between my works, I saw that despite the apparent differences between the novels, there were several strong connections. The most important one, it seemed to me, was that all of my protagonists were obsessed by their own past lives – so the unravelling of the past was clearly a key theme. I was writing about people who needed to make sense of their past lives before they were able to move into their own futures. In addition, all of the novels were about women and the roles they were expected to play by society: about the effect of exterior societal pressures on women’s lives.
Seeing these connections (which were unconscious) was a light-bulb moment. What has been interesting, however, is that since this discovery, I haven’t feel confined by these themes; indeed, awareness led me away from ‘the past’ in my fourth novel as I created a character who was much more forward focussed. Sometimes looking at connections can make us aware of the ruts we may be in within our writing.
When I was thinking about my client’s situation, for some reason, I began to wonder how he would market himself as a writer. I imagined his writer’s website (which doesn’t yet exist) and wondered what he would write on the ‘About’ page. I suggested that he write an ‘artist’s statement’. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why every writer didn’t do that as a regular exercise. For artists, the
‘artist’s statement’ is an integral part of their artistic identity – it is expected that one would have such a statement. Why is that no so for writers?
Here’s an extract from an artist’s statement from my friend the artist Stephanie
Wilkinson’s
website:
“My work revolves around the theme of domesticity. I am interested in both the physical and the psychological spaces we inhabit and our complex relationship to them. Clever design, interesting shapes and vibrant colours all inspire my work as well as oral and written discourses on domesticity. My work is mainly created from imagination but sometimes inspired by images in books or catalogues revolving around 'the home', rendered in different media. These ideas find expression in different forms such as playful animal drawings, thread drawings, abstract still life paintings and designer-wear (aprons, oven gloves and shopping bags) that list a mother's chores.”
And here is artist Tina Mammoser :
My paintings are abstract landscapes involving the presence of water since I have always lived near water (Lake Michigan, the Tay, the Thames). The underpainting, most of which is obscured in the end, entails a time-consuming process of many thin glazes and scumbles of colour in sweeping Turner-like style.

Recent paintings are an exploration of the relationship between horizontals on the picture plane, including the top and bottom edges of the canvas. In different proportions the areas represent shore, water and sky.”
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Your writer’s statement may be for personal or public use, the choice is yours. You may wish to use it as a guiding force or a public statement of who you are as a writer
– or both. It may be longer than the examples above, but I don’t believe it should go much beyond three paragraphs.
Important: This is not an attempt to use pretentious language and write some kind of pseudo-statement to impress potential future critics. Rather, this is your statement of who you are as a writer, what inspires you; of what and how you like to write. The language must be your own.
This is not a ‘standard’ expectation for writers in the same way that it is for artists, but rather something that I believe that you – and your readers – may find useful.
The following ideas may be a good starting point:

Your preferred genre/s

The form of your work

Your inspiration

The themes that you return to

The subjects that fascinate you

How your work has evolved over time

How this particular work has evolved/your processes

What you are trying to discover through your work

What drives you to write/your writing purpose

How you would like your reader to engage with your work

What fascinates you about being a writer

What you are trying to discover through your work

What publishing medium you prefer
I’d suggest beginning this exercise by freewriting around the above questions. Then you can begin to distil your statement down into its essential form, via the editing process.
You may also find the following links useful: http://www.mollygordon.com/resources/marketingresources/artstatemt/ http://artistemerging.blogspot.com/2006/08/writing-artists-statement.html
http://www.theabundantartist.com/how-to-write-an-artists-statement-that-doesnt-suck/ http://www.artquest.org.uk/articles/view/how-to-write-an-artist-s-statement http://www.ebsqart.com/Education/Articles/Business-and-Marketing/14/How-to-
Artist-Statement/75/
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If you would like to share your writer’s statement, do email it to me together with a photograph of you (or preferred icon) and I will include it in a PDF document of our members, which I will compile. If you prefer to send me a simple biography for this
(or indeed both), please do. Please limit your statement/biog/photo to a single side of
A4 max. I look forward to reading your statements.
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