Tag Archives: Writing

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!

How to begin?

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If you want to write, just write.  If you want to paint, just paint.  If you want to do anything creative, as the Nike people say, ‘just do it’.

Only, its not that simple is it?  How do you get out of your own way?  How do you crush all those voices in your head, the teacher who told you that you were rubbish at art, the music teacher who threw you out of choir because she said you couldn’ sing (actually she didn’t like me, but thats another story!), and the old Devil Himself, the Perfectionist voice (I call mine Nigel for some reason) that says nothing you do will ever be good enough.

Well, let me begin by telling you a little story about how I gave my Nigel voice a good kicking, and ended up here, writing my first post on this website about Writing and Creativity.

About two years ago, I was stuck in a creative hole.  I have been writing for as long as I can remember, literally since I could hold a pen, but I didn’t take my writing seriously until 2001,  Since then I had written seven novels and dozens of short stories, but none of them satisfied me, felt good enough, or finished enough.  I was not achieving the standard of writing that I wanted.  I was not getting published.  I had ground to a halt.

Then I heard about fanfiction.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard all about that stuff thanks to ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.  Well, let me tell you something you don’t know about fanfiction.  There are literally thousands of people writing it out there, and the standard is at times gobsmackingly good, as good as anything you would find listed on the Man Booker shortlist.  Yes, some of it is terrible, but a lot of it is written by people for whom English is not a first language, or by college students, so you have to take that into account.  (Anyway, this is not intended to be a defence of fanfiction.)

What happened next:  it occurred to me that I had been writing fanfiction for years.  I just didn’t know it had a name.  I tell myself stories every night while I wait to go to sleep (insomnia has been my constant companion since childhood).  Often they are peopled by the characters I see in TV and films – in other words, they are fanfiction.  I decided to write the stories down.

By the end of the first year, I had written over 100,000 words, was writing every day, sometimes two or three thousand words a day (which any writer will tell you is an enviable productivity rate) and I was getting better at my craft.  I was learning.  Fanfiction turned out to be a great playground to test out techniques and ideas.

And all I was doing was writing down my daydreams.

It was money for old rope, as they say here in Britain.

The day I hit the ‘publish’ button on my first story at fanfiction.net was a huge turning point.  My work was out there.  People could read it.  It was terrifying.  Nigel was having a nervous breakdown!  But you know what?  The readers were kind.  They loved my work.

Fanfiction doesn’t have to be perfect.  That is why it is perfect.  The perfect learning place, a supportive community of writers and readers who give you positive feedback, encourage you and help you to do better.

Since my first publication day, I have put out 27 works in various fandoms, and get on average over 100 readers per day.  In one month last year, I had over 44,000 readers for my works.  How many conventionally published writers can say that?

What I am asking you to do today is to think about this story.  I went from scribbling down a daydream to a massive readership, because I found a way to outwit my own fears.  I’m still terrified, don’t get me wrong.  But there is a way, and if I can do it, you can too.

This is what this website will be about.  Outwitting our Nigels.  Taking baby steps.  Finding ways to be creative.  Being gentle with ourselves.  I hope you will join me on the ride, and I hope we will have fun making glorious pictures in the clouds together.

Best Wishes,

Evenlode’s friend.

(You can find my fanfictions at fanfiction.net and at An Archive of Our Own, but be warned, these are NSFW and deal with VERY adult issues.)