Journal Friday: Check In and Kick Start

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So how are you doing?  Have you been writing your Morning Pages?  Did you buy yourself a journal and scribble your thoughts?

I started my Artist’s Way ‘Redux’ on Monday, and so far I have only missed one day on the Morning Pages (MPs).  I’m feeling pretty proud of myself.  I keep my MP notebook by my bed, along with my fountain pen, and write when I wake up.  It seems to be clearing the sleepy fluff out of my head, and helping me to work out what I want to do for the day.  What’s important.  (Need to be careful not to get ink on my nice white sheets, though!)

How about you?

Did you have a go with the journal exercise last week, as Puggle did?  Did you find out more about your life, and where you are?  Maybe even where you want to be?

Why not share with us how you are doing by leaving a message in the replies/comments?

Sometimes, its hard to think of what to write, or how to start.  I have to admit, there are times when I sit down with my journal or MPs and stare into space and think ‘what now?’  My MPs especially are punctuated by the sentence:  ‘I don’t know what to write next, my mind has gone blank.’

If you are suffering from this, and need a little kick start to get you going, here are some ideas that might just prime your pump.

Kick-Start Exercise # 1:  What Happened today?

Yes, I know that sounds boring and traditional, but maybe its not if you go about it the right way.  What was the most important thing that happened to you today, the event or feeling that sticks out in your mind above all others as important?

It might be the moment the doctor told you that your child didn’t have meningitis.  (Or did, in which case I am sorry.)   It might be that your boss complimented you on your work for the first time ever.  It might just be a moment when you were sitting at the traffic lights and looked up, and the clouds making were breathtakingly beautiful shapes, and it felt good to be alive.   Maybe nothing happened, and that in itself is a relief, an achievement or a significant red flag for you.

We go through our lives in a state of dazed distraction most of the time.  We barely notice the things that are important, let alone the things that are not, no matter how beautiful or poignant they may be.  Take a moment to stop and record what was most important today, the lasting memory of the waking hours you have just experienced that you want to take forward with you into the future.

Kick Start Exercise #2:  Have a Rant

If you are still stuck, how about writing about somethiing that makes you angry.  Everybody has something.  If you don’t, maybe you want to consider that in and of itself – are you repressing feelings, and if so, why?  Maybe your rant has to do with the neighbour allowing their dog to bark at all hours of the night, or potholes in the road that the council doesn’t fix.   What would you say to them if you could?  Maybe you want to yell at the government for some policy you don’t like, or you hate that your washing machine seems to eat socks and you can never find a complete pair.  Perhaps there are things you need to shout at your parents, partner or children, but don’t feel able to.  Your diary or journal is a safe place for all this.  Let it out.

Good luck with your journalling and MPs this week, and please share how you are getting on with us here.

There’s No Time to Write! (Part 2 – in which the author comes clean about what being a writer is really like)

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So today, according to my editorial calendar, you were supposed to be reading a detailed and amusing essay on why writing exercises are a great way to get yourself writing, even when there is little time.

And then life got in the way.

It does that, doesn’t it?

I am a big devotee of those home interiors and lifestyle blogs that tell you all about how to organise your cleaning equipment, how to update that hideous credenza with a quick lick of paint (here’s one I did earlier), and offer funky downloadable printouts of chore lists and records for when you last took the dog for his shots.  You know the ones?  The ones that are supposed to make you feel like your life is amazing and completely within your control, but actually make you feel like one of those weird hoarding people who live on indoor garbage heaps in documentaries.

Reading this blog, you might feel just that way too.  You may think I’ve got it all together.  That I write oodles of books and I’m so productive.  Well, I’ll let you into a dirty little secret – I’m not.

Just like the lovely ladies who write those amazing lifestyle and organising blogs, I have mess, and piles of dirty laundry, and weeds in the garden.  I get up in the morning and really don’t feel like writing.  Or there is just no time.  Like today.  I seriously did not feel like doing my Morning Pages today.  I felt ill and all I wanted to do was sleep.  I wanted to scream at anybody who came near me, and then get under the duvet and have the world just GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!

(I’m sure you are familiar with those kinds of days.)

Sometimes it happens.  It probably even happened to Dickens.  What the hell.

I didn’t beat myself up about it.  Instead, I wrote my Morning Pages.  I scribbled three pages of growls and groans about how I have no time to do the things I want to do because I’m faffing about doing a bunch of other stuff that is urgent but not important.  In the course of those three pages, I realised that the reason why I am so crabby today is that I haven’t written a story in weeks.

I’m crabby because I am not writing.

Duh.

At this point, it becomes profoundly obvious that even a fifteen minute writing exercise has to be fitted in to today.  Otherwise I will be up before the beak for homicide!

This is why you have to make time to write:  because if you are a writer, you need to write in the same way as you need to eat your greens and take exercise.  Writing makes you sane.

The distance between sanity and insanity is the width of a pen nib.

(I wrote that years ago, it’s good isn’t it?!)

And you’d better believe it.

So join me in stopping the grumps.  Get out your writers notebook and try the following exercise.  I guarantee it will make you feel better.

Writing Exercise:

Get a timer and set it for fifteen minutes – ten, if you are really pushed.  Write down the following phrase and then finish it as a sentence.

I haven’t written anything lately because….

Let your mind tumble onto the page.  It doesn’t matter if it is a list of reasons, like that your husband ought to put the kids to bed a bit more often so that you can have some time to yourself, or that you’ve got the finish that damned presentation to give at work first thing tomorrow.  Maybe it’s that you have a character rumbling about in your head but you are having trouble with some aspect of him or her, in which case, write that down too, and expand on the problem.  If you keep on writing until the pinger goes, you may just have found the edge of a solution.

Write whatever comes to mind.  Complain, moan, plan, get excited, drone, create, wonder what subjects you are interested in.  Whatever you need to get down.   At the end of fifteen minutes, I guarantee you will have either worked out what is stopping you (and if you are anything like me, it may turn out to be that YOU are what is stopping you), or you may have come up with a plan of how to carve out some time to write, or you may even have come up with a new story idea or scene.

Whatever.  The important thing is that you just spent fifteen minutes writing.  Hooray!  Now do it again.  Maybe today.  Maybe tomorrow.  But do it.

Inspiration Monday: Landscapes

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Lighthouse at Dusk

From the Yorkshire Moors in ‘Wuthering Heights‘ to the foggy twilight of Sherlock Holmes’ Edwardian London, landscapes conjure up all kinds of stories for us.  In fiction, they can be so much more than just backdrop.  Tolkein used them to illustrate the journey to the centre of Hell, contrasting the lush green of the Shire with the volcanic wastes of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.  The closer the hobbits get to the heart of evil, the more the landscape breaks down.  Landscapes can even act as a separate character altogether.

At school, my English teacher taught us to describe landscapes in terms of what they looked like, but it is just as important to your readers to describe what they feel like too.

Paps of Jura

Mountains to me feel full of angry, untamed energy.

Adur Valley 1The South Downs, however, are softer, gentler hills, rolling and swelling banks of green pasture.  They conjure an altogether different energy.

DSCI2825

A rustic country lane in summer has a very different feeling to a city street in winter, and the stories that take place there are bound to be different.

Contrast can make your stories all the more interesting – think of that rustic country lane as  an invading tank rumbles by.  Think of the moment the Black Riders from Mordor cross the borders of the Shire, bringing war and evil with them.

The landscape in which you set your stories can enhance your theme, either with a sympathetic atmosphere, or by offering a shocking opposition to the action.

Writing Exercise:

Today is a Bank Holiday in the UK, which means many people are off enjoying the fine weather and the beautiful countryside.  If you have been out and about today, get out your writers notebook and describe the place you have visited.  Seaside or countryside, what shape was it, what colours?  What did it taste like, smell like?  What weather was happening? What plants grew there, what trees, what animals inhabited it?  Were there crowds of people, or just a lonely figure in the distance, perhaps walking a dog?  Did you see a falcon wheeling in the sky, or a rat scrabbling about in the dustbins behind a convenience store?  And what did this place make you feel?  Was it pleasant, foreboding, exciting, relaxing or scary?

Salt this description, however rudimentary it may be, away, and think on it.  What kinds of stories could happen in this environment?  Who might live here?  What problems might they face?

Next time you travel, even if it is only to the end of your road, consider the landscape you are in, and if you can get the chance, write about it.  Let the stories the land around you brings bubble up.  See where they take you.

Journal Friday: Morning Pages

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The Artists Way 2

If you read creative blogs of any kind, you are bound to come across Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’ eventually.  It’s cover bills it as ‘A Course in Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self’, and yes, it does exactly what it says on the tin.  I first completed the whole 12 week course in 2004, and now I am about to embark on a refresher.  I’ve pulled my much loved, somewhat dog-eared copy off the shelf and on Monday 6th May 2013 I shall launch into the unknown once more.

Cameron proposes two tools for this course, Morning Pages and Artist Dates.  No doubt we will talk about Artist Dates at some point soon, but today, let us think about morning pages, because they are enormously beneficial, whether you are a creative or not.

“What are morning pages?  Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness…”

Julia Cameron, ‘The Artist’s Way‘ Pan Boo 1995  pp9-10

Basically, what we are talking about here is three pages of brain dump.  You write them by hand because it enables your subconscious to express itself.  You don’t judge them, you don’t ty to be neat, you don’t reread them.  Cameron suggests doing them on loose sheets of A4/letter size paper, but I prefer to keep them in a notebook, the same kind I use for my writing notebook.

You can whine, complain, rave, drool, scream, laugh, giggle, rant, enthuse, or just repeat ‘I don’t know what to write, I don’t know what to write’ over and over again until something presents itself to be set down. Three pages.  Inane babble or heartfelt planning.  As scribbly as you like. (I realised after I had taken the photo above that this particular example of my pages is considerably neater than my usual.  Believe me, most of it is a real mess!)

Whatever comes out.  Three pages every day, no matter what.  Three pages to ground yourself in the very core of your psyche, to drain out the poison and find the shimmering gold doubloons resting on the sea bed beneath.

I have kept morning pages on and off for 9 years.  I have never reread any of them.  But when I do them, I find myself making sense of the world and my feelings, finding a way to my dreams and interests, naming new ideas and enthusiasms, letting out the bile that is getting in the way of health and healing.

I profoundly believe in the healing power of these pages in draining the poison and pain from life.  I have recommended it to several friends and acquaintences who were struggling with clinical depression.  They have found them enormously beneficial, as do I.  I now recommend them to you, not because I think you need help, but because they will help you find yourself, because they will help you become more of who you really are under all the OUGHTS and SHOULDS.

Journal Exercise:

Set your alarm half an hour earlier this week.  Get yourself a decent large notebook and a pen you like to write with (I do mine with a lovely old Parker fountain pen).  Write your three pages every day.  Do not judge yourself.  Do not censor yourself.  Get the dross and the sparkles alike down on paper.

If you would like to join me on the Artists Way, you are more than welcome.  I shall be writing more about my progress on this blog, and I would love to hear from you in the comments if you are game.

There’s No Time to Write!

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(or paint or draw or sew or dance or make movies or {insert chosen art or craft here}).

Every book or blog about writing (or any art) will tell you that you have to do it.  Practise.  You can’t be a writer unless you write.  You can’t call yourself a dancer unless you dance, or a musician unless you play.  But in our busy modern world, in the midst of a double-dip recession, who the hell can find time to pursue their arts?

My husband says this to me a lot.

“I need at least three hours,” he’ll say.  “I can’t just write in fifteen minutes a day.”

Toni Morrison wrote her novel, ‘Beloved’, by getting up early in the morning and writing for half and hour or so  at the kitchen table while her family were still asleep.  She made time to write.  JK Rowling wrote in an Edinburgh cafe while her baby was napping in the pushchair.

My husband doesn’t make time to write.  He is a talented screenplay writer.  He is also an enthusiastic potter and actor.  He doesn’t do these things.  He works instead (for which I am very grateful, incidentally.) He works pretty much all the hours God sends, so far as I can see.  I am sorry that the world is missing out on his talent.

You may be the same.  There may be no time spare to carve out in your life.  But let me offer you this story to illustrate my point, which is:

Just because you aren’t writing, it doesn’t mean you aren’t writing.

Two years ago, I went down to Hampshire to visit my mother.  My stepfather was very ill and in hospital, so ostensibly I went down for the weekend to help my mother with the stress, and the nearly two hour round trip to the hospital and back every day.

Whilst I was there, my stepfather died.

My siblings were not able to stop work to support her at this time, so I stayed with her for three weeks, helping her with the paperwork, assisting with organising the funeral, comforting her where I could.

As you can imagine, it was a very busy, stressful and distressing time, but I was extremely glad I was there to share it with her, and to be of help.

A family death is an all-consuming experience.  Grief seeps into your very bones.  You think of nothing else.  But even thought I loved my stepfather very deeply, and mourned him intensely,  I realised that I needed some respite from the pain and the busy-ness.  So in the tiny moments I had alone, in the loo or the shower, at night before sleep, I bathed in the world of my stories.  I wrote.  Maybe I didn’t actiually scribble notes down, but I told the stories I needed to tell myself to keep myself calm and sane.   During those three weeks, I organised, plotted, and even wrote parts of a major story in my mind, a story which became ‘A Case of Resurrection’, which deals with grief (unsurprisingly).  It is a work of which I am still proud, written at one of the most difficult, and probably busiest times in my life.

The purpose of this story is not to pluck your heart-strings, but to say that not only can you write when you are busy, but that when you are, writing can become a life raft, an antidote to stress, a way of expressing your feelings when there may be no other way available.  You might remark that I wasn’t actually writing, but I ask you, in response, to expand your definition.  Writing takes a great deal of planning and long hours of thought, as well as lots of typing.  You write it out on the keyboard eventually,  but first you have to think it.

By all means, put writing time into your busy schedule.  Mark it in your filofax or diary.  Make daily time for it.  No one would advocate that more than I. But consider it in a wider scope.  You can write under any circumstances if you really want and need to.

A Little Melodic Inspiration

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Where do your ideas come from?

That is the question most writers dread.  Or rave about.  Iain Banks rants about it at great length in his glorious book, ‘Raw Spirit‘:

“Leaving aside the obvious, ‘Class A drugs, actually’ or, ‘A wee man in Auchtermuchty’, I’ve sometimes wondered what sort of answer people really expect to this.”

(‘Raw Spirit’ by Iain Banks, Century Books London, 2003 p255)

And so he goes on. I asked him at a signing once about how he dealt with getting stuck in the middle of a novel, and he obviously interpreted it as me asking The Question, and didn’t take it well!

But in my mind its a reasonable question for one thought alone, and it is this:

Maybe we don’t know where the ideas come from, but how do we get our minds into the right place for them to arrive? 

Its about putting lots of mulch in the ground to make it a rich, fertile place for new things to grow.

I have an assortment of answers to this problem, but today I thought I would share one of them with you.

Music.

I make a playlist for every novel I write.  When I am sitting down to work on a scene, or with the characters, I play the playlist on my headphones, and this gets me in the mood, gets me in touch with the characters, the environment, the colours and sounds through which they move.  Often, particular characters end up being associated with specific tracks.

And sometimes, it is just one piece of music that I hear that sparks a story, or gets me in the mood to write.

Here are some to try:

Richard Hawley – Standing at the Sky’s Edge

(This is the core soundtrack for a novel I am working on at the moment)

Suede – Asbestos

(This is the ‘title theme’ for a novel about my favourite character, Evenlode.)

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughn Williams

(This last one I listened to for six months pretty much continually while I was writing the climactic scenes for my first novel, which was set on the South Downs in Pre-Roman Britain.)

Writing Exercise:

Get out your CD collection, or your iPod, or fire up youtube, however you listen to music.  Listen to a few tracks and see what mental images are conjured up.  What landscape can you see?  What kind of people inhabit this world? Can you see their faces?  What challenges are they facing?  Who do they love?  Who do they hate?

Get out your writing notebook and begin to set down what you can of these images.  You may need to make lists of ideas or words, or you might like to write passages of description.  You might even draw!  Note everything that comes to you, and listen again, as many times as you need to in order to get out as much as you can.

Don’t forget to write down the piece of music and the artist whose work generated the images you have found.

This exercise may prompt a whole new story, or you could use your descriptions to feed into something you are already working on, or something you have yet to write.  Nothing you write is ever wasted – it can all be recycled into new work.

Happy listening – and writing!

Journal Friday: The Rules

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2013 diary

There is something about keeping a diary that makes us think there has to be rules. It may be something to do with those little lockable five year diaries girls were bought by well-meaning aunts in the 1970s.

If we aren’t careful, diaries become about OUGHTS – you know, how you OUGHT to do things – and I gave up doing OUGHTS about 10 years ago.  I don’t live in SHOULDland anymore.

The truth is that there are as many ways of keeping a diary as there are diarists.  But over the last 38 years I have found that the following guidelines are useful, for me and for friends I have helped with diary writing.

Guideline # 1:  Absolute Privacy is Non-Negotiable.

A journal/diary is a place you need to be able to be yourself.  Otherwise it is no good to you.  Where else can you say all the things you really need to express, but daren’t because someone might get upset or hurt.  Where else can you confide your deepest desires, wildest fantasies, greatest irritations, and the things you plan to do to Brad Pitt if you every get your hands on him?

I suppose this is what the lockable diary was about, all those years ago – I never had one, but I had a friend who did, and I envied her’s so much.  Funny – she never wrote in it.  I wonder why?  Maybe for her, it was an OUGHT.  Or maybe, she was worried that the lock was an invitation for her brother to break in and read her most intimate thoughts.

However you ensure privacy is up to you.  Maybe you need to get the agreement of those with whom you live.  My husband and I have shared a home for the last 16 years, and he has never once looked at my diary.  He knows it is my private place.  (I respect his privacy in turn.)

You may have to physcally hide your journal from prying eyes, which seems a shame to me, but then I don’t live with annoying siblings anymore.  You may need to keep it in a locked drawer at work, or hide it under a loose floorboard (I hope you don’t), but whatever you do, you need to be satisifed that whatever you say is safe and for you alone.  Otherwise you will not say what is in your heart, and that is not only defeating the object, but denying the healing power of the diary.

If your partner is upset and worried about your keeping a diary, comfort them that it is not a threat to your relationship with them.  Reassure them that it is a place for you to express yourself, to have a freedom that will in turn invigorate your relationship with them.

Guideline # 2:  Date Every Entry

Duh!  Yeah, this seems obvious, but sometimes people forget.  You need some kind of way to navigate this mountain of paper you are going to create.  Chronology is the way human beings connect things within their own lives, so it makes sense to use that.

Guideline # 3:  Write when you have something to say

Don’t allow yourself to fall for the tyranny of writing every day.  Sometimes you will write every day.  This is especially useful to do when experiencing difficult and demanding times, when you are trying to work out how you feel, or where you want your life to go next.  But do not force it.  Write only when you have something you wish to record, understand or work out.  And don’t beat yourself up if you look back and find a gap of months at a time.  Those were the times when you were too busy living to write, and thats okay too.

Guideline # 4:  It doesn’t have to be perfect

This is especially true if you have the nasty habit like I do, of perfectionism.  After all, whats the point in doing something unless you can do it perfect first time?

Reject perfectionism.  Make a mess.  Scribble.  Write scruffily.  Make blots.  Have fun.  Use different colours.  Play.

If you are doing art journals, beware of perfectionism in the images you create.  Its just for you.  You aren’t going to show this to anybody, so it doesn’t have to be Leonardo first time.

Aways tell Nigel (your perfectionist’s voice, remember him?) to bugger off, and just enjoy yourself.  Have fun.  It really doesn’t have to be perfect.

Journal Exercise – Where am I right now?

I hope that following last week’s post, you have been out and bought yourself a lovely notebook to write in.  Maybe you are already scribbling down your thoughts.  But perhaps you feel a bit stuck.  Sometimes it is a bit hard to get started.  Here is what I do:

Write down the sentence:  This is where I am right now.

Now, write whatever comes to mind after that.  You might want to describe the room you are sitting in, the town you may be visiting, the lover, friends or colleagues you are with.  Or you might want to talk about where you are in your life, the joys and frustrations you are experiencing, the hopes and fears lurking in the back of your mind.  Write whatever comes out, and don’t censor it.  No judging, no Nigels, remember?  Just do a brain dump.

Then, when you have finished saying where you are right now, maybe you can go on from there, and write about whatever else pops into your head.  Or maybe you can stop.  And use the same prompt tomorrow.

Whenever you feel you need to write, but don’t know where to start, this prompt is a great one.  It grounds you in your life and your feelings.  It often tells you things you didn’t know about yourself right now.  It illuminates, as well as getting the wheels rolling.

Happy journalling!

New Fanfiction! Three Years is a Lot of Time to Think…

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Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC TV's 'Sherlock'

Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC TV’s ‘Sherlock’

I’ve just published a new piece of fanfiction!  Its nice and fluffy and romantic.  You can read it here at fanfiction.net, or here at AO3.  And here is a little smattering to give you an appetite…

“It starts with breakfast in a café.  There is a table in the window.  There is a checked tablecloth, red and white gingham.  There is one of those plastic tomatoes that holds the ketchup.  There is sausage, egg, bacon and beans, and a tomato sliced in half and grilled.  There is cheap, stained cutlery and mugs of milky tea.  And there is happiness.

            John cannot remember the last time he was this happy.  He thinks it may have been in Dartmoor.  So long ago.  Before the grief.  Before the loneliness.

            And now here he is, three years later, and the man he missed, the man he mourned, is sitting opposite him.  And the most unlikely thing about it all is not that he is having a greasy breakfast with a dead man, but that Sherlock is tucking into the full English with extra toast.

            ‘Who are you and what have you done with Sherlock Holmes?’

            And Sherlock actually laughs.  John has the distinct impression he has not done that for a very long time.”

Don’t forget to comment.  I love your comments…

The Habit of Art, or How Benedict Cumberbatch Taught Me to Write

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Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC TV's 'Sherlock'

Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC TV’s ‘Sherlock’


Once upon a time, I did a Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.  It was the first proper writing course I had ever taken.  One of the first things we were told as students was that in order to get better, we must write every day.

Writing for me has always been a very instinctive thing.  It comes in bursts. (I’ll talk about your creative rhythm in a future post.)  So I didn’t think much of this ‘show up at the page every day’ theory.  I believed that inspiration dropped from the sky and you did it, whatever it was, to manifest the story or the picture or the dance, or whatever your particular art form was.

Years later, in the midst of a story drought, the BBC TV series ‘Sherlock’ happened to me.  (I say ‘it happened to me’ because it was almost against my will that I eventually watched the reruns, having heard all the fuss people were making about how good it was the first time around.)  And what intrigued me about this version of the stories with which I was so familiar was not the modern setting, but the relationship between the two men, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

What would happen if two such men were devoted to one another?  What would happen if they fell in love?

The idea had not occurred to me before with any characters I had created, or anyone else’s for that matter.  And possible scenarios started to blossom inside my skull.  In the end, there were so many of them that I had to write them down, just to make room for things like ‘remember to buy light bulbs’, and other such modern survival thoughts.

Before I knew it, I was writing something new every day.  Paragraphs became pages became short stories became novellas became books.  Every day.  Thousands of words.

This is a practise.  It is similar to an opera singer or concert pianist doing scales, an artist doing studio sketches, a ballerina doing barre work.  They say it takes 10,000 hours of practise to truly master a skill.

I have worked daily.

Yes, I have written fanfiction, which some literary writers sneer at.  But I have done my 10,000 hours and more.  Fanfiction has caused me to write daily.  Through it, I have learnt more about crafting stories than I could ever have done with my hit-and-miss, inspiration method.  I have learnt the lesson that my tutors on the Diploma sought to impress upon me, and failed.

To get good, you have to practise. Daily.

You have to try things out, stretch yourself, sometimes do the same exercises over and over again from different points of view and in different styles.  But you have to practise.

In my experience, yes, discipline has a lot to do with it.  You have to show up at the page, as they say.  You have to sit at your desk.  But it is important to have some motivation too, some enthusiasm that drives you.  I’m useless at self-discipline, believe me, and I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t had Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman circling each other like dogs on heat inside my skull.

So my advice to you is this:  yes, show up at the page.  Every day.  Practise, practise, practise.  Write the same scenes over and over again from different angles, different perspectives, different times of day, or life.  But practise.  Enthuse, rave, drool, froth at the mouth over gorgous characters or actors if you have to, but practise.

Get the Habit of Art.  Get creative every day.

Writing Exercise:

Get out your writers notebook. (You haven’t got one yet?  See my post about why you should.)  Think of a scene from a favourite movie that really grabs you, preferably with more than one character involved.  It might be a talky scene, something emotional, or some action.  Now put pen to paper and describe it from the point of view of one of the characters in the scene who is not the hero or heroine.  Someone periferal.  Or a secondary character.

For example, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mr Spock are facing off about whether to transport to a dangerous planet when the transporter machine is on the blink and they might not be able to get out quickly, but you could write it from inside the head of the security man standing on the door, watching.  How does it feel to him to have the two men in charge of his future well-being fighting over something he maybe doesn’t understand?

You might choose to write Mary Bennett’s experience of her sister Elizabeth’s first meeting with Mr Darcy, from ‘Pride and Prejudice’, or housekeeper Mrs Fairfax’s dim view of Jane Eyre’s carrying on with Mr Rochester in ‘Jane Eyre’ (Jean Rhys wrote the entire novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ in this way, from the point of view of Rochester’s wife, Bertha.)  Or you could write from the mind of one of James Bond’s jilted girlfriends!

Choose a story you are attracted to and try a few scenes from an alternative angle.  See where it takes you.  And if you find yourself with something that intrigues you, stuck with it, and see where it takes you.  Every day.

(More on writing every day, and writing exercises soon.)

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The Writer’s Notebook

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Writers nbk planning 22-04-2013 14-59-52 3648x2736

My spiral bound writers notebook – these pages show planning for a historical novel I am working on.

Every craftsman needs a workbench.  The notebook is to a writer what a workbench is to a carpenter.  Every book about how to write will tell you that.  The trouble is that there are as many ways to keep a writing notebook as there are carpenters’ workbenches.  So I thought I would say a little bit about this most basic of skills.

Your notebook travels with you continually, wherever you are.  It is the hopper into which you throw all the useful scraps you collect on your journey through life.  It is like a memory that you carry with you – one that won’t malfunction, unless you drop it in a pond or set fire to it, of course!  This is where you scribble all your ideas, the clever sentences and metaphors you dream up, the quotes that inspire you, the snippets of conversation you overhear on the bus.  In the old days, this was called a Commonplace Book, something like a scrapbook, but one in which you record more than events.  It is a little like your journal, but more functional.  I always like to think of mine as a record of the development of my mind.

Most teachers suggest you start out with one notebook.  The important thing to know is that this is a skill that evolves, ebbs and flows.  You will find a comfortable way to do it after a while, a way that fits into your lifestyle and way of working. In anycase, to start out, choose yourself a notebook that will stand heavy use, and one that you like (otherwise you won’t be drawn to write in it.)

I use an A4 hardbacked spiral bound lined notebook by Pukka Pad, which I love.  I can fold it over, stick things into it, draw diagrams, and because the cover is plain, I can decorate it however I like.

However, A4 is a BIG size, and its not something I can just stick in my pocket and carry everywhere.  As a result, I’ve evolved a second notebook.  It is a tiny Moleskine, which I carry in my handbag. It is hardback too, so it withstands a great deal of getting knocked about, and chocolate stains.  This is my scribble place, where I note things down on the move.

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My baby moleskine lives in my handbag. Snippets get stuck into these, as well as overheard conversations and quotes.

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Just to prove notebooks don’t have to be neat, or be devoted solely to your writing life – this one also has details of some tights my mum wanted me to buy her!

This is a method of recording that I have developed over time.  It may not work for you.  You may need to keep everything in one place, in a single book, or you may need several different notebooks for different purposes.  It depends on how you work, so it will be different for everyone.  There is no one right way.  But I suggest you start with a single notebook to make life easier.

Here are some things you can do with it:

  • Reflect on where you are with your writing, and what you would like to achieve
  • Scribble down a paragraph that comes to mind
  • Record useful or inspiring quotes
  • Plan your stories
  • Write your characters’ back stories
  • Draw pictures of your characters, or collect photos of actors and actresses who put you in mind of them
  • List books you might like to read
  • Do writing exercises
  • Stick in interesting newspaper stories for future inspiration
  • Stick in inspiring pictures or postcards
  • Review books you have read, movies or TV shows you have seen, art exhibitions you have visited, music gigs you have enjoyed
  • Take notes at meetings of writers groups you attend
  • Note ideas for new stories or characters
  • Mindmap plots
  • Draw diagrams
  • Describe the weather (you wouldn’t believe how useful this can be when you are trying to write action set on a sunny August day but living through a wintry November afternoon!)
  • Doodle
  • List music that inspires you. (A playlist for every novel really helps set the mood for writing)
  • Potential character names – I came across someone called Theodicy Godbolt one day when  I was researching 16th Century British History – you couldn’t make that one up!
  • Whatever else takes your fancy – it’s your notebook!

There is one absolute that every writer’s notebook should have at the back.  A list of words and their meanings that you come across.  Every writer should be expanding their vocabulary all the time.  Come across a new word?  Write it down somewhere you can refer to it, and then you will remember it!

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Sticking in pictures of actors who inspire you can be useful!

These are just a few ideas to get you started.  I’m going to talk a lot more about notebooking in future posts, not least because I am a notebooking fanatic, but you might like to grab yourself a pad and pen and start scribbling right now.  And if this doesn’t inspire you, maybe you might like to read this, or this, which is one of the best books on writing I have ever read.