Paris Post: C'est Fini

Well, my trip to Paris is fini, at least (6 weeks ago, if we're counting - how time does fly!), and my blogging directly about it ends here - but Paris herself remains as inviting and inspiring as she always has been, awaiting her next visitors.

So, now that I've had the Paris experience and I am naturally creative, how exactly do Paris and Creativity meet?  Not as obviously as I’d hoped, actually; not yet, anyway.  While away, I had hoped to be writing scenes and sketches for Novel Number Two; listening to conversations and sneakily jotting down the interesting bits; and picking places for my characters to live and work in.  This was a bit ambitious, to be honest; rather over-reaching for where I am in the prep work of Novel Number Two.

Now back home (for quite a while!), I have yet to get to know my characters properly, to pin down the schematics of plotlines, and to work out the answers to fundamental questions – and so Paris couldn’t find its place of direct influence amongst all this unknown-ness swirling around.  Still, it was a wonderful place and a great trip, and I have many photos and memories which will conjure up Paris herself when I am ready to knuckle down to these things (particularly as at the moment, a rather pesky time called 'Christmas' is getting in the way...).

Paris has met with Creativity in terms of this blog though; for I wouldn’t have recorded my observations and experiences in the same way if I wasn’t writing it.  Whenever I visit a new place (and this can be at home in England as well as away abroad), I always take a notebook and write down whatever springs to mind, whether it’s straight description, things to look up at a later stage, or creative lil’ bits (as I like to call the myriad jottings!).  I did this in Paris, of course, and it has framed the basis of these posts, but it wasn’t written in the same way.  Writing is communication, and in my notebooks my audience is myself; I can get away with unfinished sentences and random words, strange doodles and personal shorthand, because I know what it all means.  Yet this blog’s readership is not myself, it is you.  And that has forced me to write, to illustrate, flavour and explain, and not simply Deb-note the things that struck me.  So thank you – because the last couple of months have been rather hard on me, and I’ve found being creatively inspired difficult, not to mention writing fresh stuff impossible!

To sum up, then, Paris = a chic, bustling and stunning city, with a certain je ne sais quoi that you’ll only know if you experience it yourself.  So go and book those tickets!  Will I go back?  Yes, I’d love to.  We only had just over four days and that isn’t enough to see everything – there’s still Sacre-Coeur; the interior of the Notre Dame and the Opera House; the Pantheon; Montmartre; Versailles...oh, there’s room in your suitcase for me, did I hear you say?  How kind, dahling – when are we going?!