Blog 26:Evolution

Hello and welcome to the halfway point of the year. Can you believe we have gone through six months of 2025 already? Shall I make myself sound old by commenting on how time goes so quickly? Perhaps not.

Well, tomorrow is a special day in our house as we are celebrating my eldest child’s 18th birthday! Yes, I shall have an adult child and feel even older. It can be a strange experience having children. They arrive as defenseless babies and then suddenly, are bigger than you, and though it didn’t occur overnight, you can’t quite figure out how it happened. Even my youngest child is my height now, and she’s only 13. I have become used to being the smallest person in most rooms. Maybe that’s why I have collected so many cats. Although they have a habit of getting up onto the cupboards and looking down on me too!

Ella was my first experience of being a mum. Everything with her was new and a little scary. I got pregnant and was given a book from the NHS that explained all the different stages of the foetus’s development, with illustrations. This was fantastic, I loved finding out what was happening to my baby while she was kept hidden and protected as she grew. The feeling of her moving and kicking, and the jumps when she got the hiccups. Even when the contractions came, I was excited because I was finally going to see my long-awaited baby!

There was a slight cause for worry when the woman in the bed next to me was in labour and was using every swear word under the sun, demanding gas and air to help her with the pain. And she was on her fourth child and still seemed to be going through torture! I can remember thinking, What have I done? There’s no going back now; this baby needs to come out! And there was further worry when I had to have an emergency C-section, which somehow resulted in internal bleeding. I had only been holding Ella in my arms for a few minutes before I began throwing up and was rushed back into theatre.

But that wasn’t the scary part! Well, it was for my family. I was unconscious at the time and had no idea how hard everyone was working to help me. The scary part for me was when she came home, and I had this helpless, tiny thing, and she was my responsibility. Her life was in my hands. I could not mess it up. I asked myself constantly, Am I doing what is right for her? Is she getting what she needs? Of course, when she was diagnosed with ADHD, and we signed up for a parenting course, we realised that we would have to rethink some of the ways we did things. All children are individuals and have to be treated as such. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. My youngest is very different from her sister, and we do what is best for them both in different ways.

The whole parenting thing is about evolving your technique alongside the ever-developing child, or adult, in this case. She needs me today, but in a different way than she did when she was younger. As she changes, I have to too.

As much as we may want to, we can’t stay the same. Life is all about pushing forward, learning new things, improving your skills, and getting up to the next level. When you look back at your writing from when you were younger, or even the last few years, you should see a difference in how you have developed. There’s always more to learn about how we write.

So, is it time to ask yourself what you can do to evolve how you write?

Perhaps sign up for a course or give your work out for feedback to establish if there is room for improvement. Some writing groups have opportunities for you to send your work for critique from professional authors. It may be useful to ask yourself which areas of the craft you don’t have as much confidence in or can be improved. Is it character arcs, plot, dialogue, POV, or something else? Is it time to look at leveling up and adding more skills to your writing toolkit? What is that saying, if you aren’t moving forwards, you are moving backwards? It can even be helpful to grab some books on the things you want to know, whether it is other fiction that you want to learn from, or ‘how-to’ reading material. Whatever you can do to become a better writer, it is always going to be worth it. We don’t want to sit in tepid bath water. Let’s switch the hot tap on to get fired up and fresh for our readers!

Are you poised with pen in hand, hovering over a notebook, ready for a writing exercise? I can feel your enthusiasm from here. As this blog has been about evolving, I think I will offer you a prompt this week.

Evolution Writing Prompt

Write a short story about how someone has had to adapt to their new surroundings. This can be any kind of world or predicament, a prison, a floating island, underwater, or in space. Whatever you fancy. Make sure you have a character arc where the reader can see how they have changed from the beginning to the end. They could perhaps fail at adapting after several attempts. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending. It’s up to you.

Off you go, I’m waiting to see what you come up with. You can post in the comments below or email me your stories for feedback if you like. Catch you later.