Columns: Tag – Tips
-
Writing Quips and Tips
Holidays don’t always give you writing time
Holidays don’t automatically deliver up everyone’s most productive writing time.
Unless you’re a hermit who works off solar power in a cave somewhere, you are likely to be hit by a barrage of conflicting pressures.
If you have children, they’ll be on holiday too. And if you do already have them, you’ll know what that means. You’ll have a pretty good idea how much wonderful, uninterrupted time you’ll have. And how considerate the little mites will be to your need for some you-time.
If you have a partner, well … ditto. Same goes for parents and extended families – if this time of year means getting them all together.
But holidays can still be good for honing your skills, particularly if your plans involve travel.
Writing Quips and Tips
Waiting for Inspiration
A member of our writing class asked me recently whether I waited till I was inspired before writing.
I think this is one of the greatest misconceptions, that writers come over all creative occasionally. There’s this belief that creativity is a mystical process that mysteriously comes upon one and propels one, against all will, to sit down and write with beauty and power.
Well, if you’re waiting for the feeling to come upon you, chances are you haven’t written anything very much. Writing is scary. If you wrote well yesterday, you’ll scared you won’t write well today. And if you haven’t written for a while, you’ll be terrified of coming face to face with your own talent – or lack of it.
Writing Quips and Tips
Talking a Novel to Death
Someone asked me the other day whether I spoke to anyone about my writing. It started me thinking about writing and the process of talking about it.
First of all, I don’t think writers should talk too much about a work in progress. Telling your story over and over can be an avoidance tactic. Talking is the same as doing – you get the same sense of satisfaction.
And depending who you talk to, it can crush a sensitive idea. Most people can’t quite see how you intend to tackle it. Describing isn’t the same as writing. It takes a certain skill to be able to enter into the writer’s world and visualise it in its finished form.
Insensitive friends can pour scorn on an idea, which will cause you to view it, forever more, with hot and cold waves of humiliation. If it’s a first book, friends will refer to your “NOVEL” in arch tones. It can stop you believing in it.
Writing Quips and Tips
Don’t sit contemplating a famous writer who has committed suicide
Roddy Doyle’s first rule for writers is: “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”
I think that’s just brilliant, largely because writing is harder than many non-writers ever conceive it to be. I often come upon people who ask if I have fun scribbling away while other people are working.
Writing Quips and Tips
Every writer needs a few - personalities, that is
How many writers does it take to produce a novel? One, but with multiple personalities. And that’s not a joke.
It’s a task that requires several selves – or parts of selves. There’s the intuitive, day-dreaming self who allows ideas and scenarios to drift through her consciousness until they begin to form threads. Then there’s the “medium” self, who allows herself to be taken over by her characters while they’re writing it for her.
When it’s finished, the analytical bitch-editor fires those sensitive selves – who are in love with every word – and get on with murdering the babies. After her, the tenacious self must still believe, all odds to the contrary, that a book is worth fighting for when it starts to be shown to people.
Writing Quips and Tips
Changing and growing
Someone asked me the other day whether I always wrote the same way – and the answer, of course, is no.
I’ve said this often: sometimes it feels as though it’s flying, as though I’m a conduit for something larger than myself. Sometimes it plods, it drags its heels. But other things happen too. (It’s called life.)
We change, we grow, and it’s ridiculous to think our personal lives won’t affect our writing. Every event in our lives changes us a little bit. It’s going to change the way we see the world, and the way we express it.
The events themselves may creep into our writing in a way we didn’t quite foresee. I once had a huge fight with a good friend. The next day I was writing about a husband and wife. Almost of it’s own volition, some of the aspects of the fight crept into their relationship – and worked very well, I thought.
But I mean more than that.
Writing Quips and Tips
Absence doesn’t make you fonder of your writing
For me, absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder - of my writing. I don’t know what it is about me, but the more I don’t look at my writing, the more convinced I become that it’s awful.
Even a week’s break can make me anxious. And because I’m in the sad position of actually having a day-job, that happens every week. I have to read back a couple of chapters, as much to reassure myself as to remember exactly where I was.
You do flow better when you can write regularly. But clearly, if you’re busy on a long project, there are going to be times when you can’t write: a big project comes up, you go away, a major personal event holds you up … or maybe you lose confidence for a while.
I read some advice recently that suggested you “visit” your project regularly, even if you aren’t writing. Glance back over it, keep it in mind. It probably would be a good idea - it might stop you (if you’re anything like me) from convincing yourself of its general unworthiness.
Writing Quips and Tips
Getting back into the zone
Okay, here’s a really practical little tip that helped me recently. It seems obvious, now I come to write it down. But I never thought to do it before.
Last week I wrote about having a break from your writing, and touched briefly on getting back into it.
It’s not as easy as it seems. First you have to break the resistance, which makes it seem absolutely urgent that you tidy the linen closet or tackle some project before the deadline looms too near.
I don’t have any real answers for that, except that you set aside the time, ring-fence it, don’t allow anything to intrude, and force yourself to start at the beginning. I’m a great believer in rewards. Offer yourself a treat if you manage to get right through it and write even a line or two.
I don’t think you can throw yourself right into the next chapter when you’ve had a break. Besides the fact that you might have forgotten all their names, and may not remember the threads you have waving about in the air, you have to get back into the zone. Every book has a “state of mind”. Find that, and you’ll be back into the voice and world of your characters.
Writing Quips and Tips
A book is a cathedral
A book is like a cathedral.
This isn’t my own idea. I found it in a piece on writing by Philip Gerard. But I do like it.
If the cathedral is the solution, what is the problem it was meant to solve? Chances are you’ll say: “To give glory to God” or to create “a majestic object of beauty”.
And you’d be caught in our “narrow Romantic aesthetic” without even being aware of it . You’re thinking about the cathedral’s effect on you, the message it gives you in its completed form. In other words, you’re thinking like a reader.
Those creators of the cathedral were thinking less about faith, legacy or the message they were trying to impart, than the prosaic details of load-bearing walls, holding up the middle, and how to light it.
Writing Quips and Tips
Too many rules
We may be a lawless society, but we can be very rule-bound – particularly with regard to writing.
People often engage with both fiction and non-fiction on the basis of what “ought to” have been written, and in what way. You may have come across this attitude in reviews, sometimes even with a sense of outrage that, say, a certain class or race of character was portrayed in a certain way.
There is also sometimes a tendency in writing groups for members to criticise a central premise or theme. They believe a piece of writing to be too right wing / too left wing / too white / too black / too feminist / or simply to give “the wrong message”...
• We run face-to-face and correspondence writing courses - see www.allaboutwritingcourses.com for range and dates
Writing Quips and Tips
Reading builds empathy
I fear for a society that doesn’t read.
Lately I keep coming across people who maintain, with a certain pride, that they never read. Okay there’s some self-interest here. I don’t like to see writing as anachronistic or arcane.
But we don’t want to become a society unable to concentrate on anything longer than a blog. We don’t want to be an ignorant society.
Readers learn without realising. Off the top of my head, just this year and entirely through fiction, I’ve learnt about consciousness, about Tudor society and the role of Thomas Cromwell, the gritty underside of Edinburgh, about mathematicians and the behaviour of chimpanzees, about sexual ambiguity and genetics.
What I fear most is that, when we no longer read, we lose the ability to enter different worlds, to place ourselves in other people’s shoes. Nothing makes us identify with other people quite like accompanying them on a life journey.
I fear that a society that doesn’t read is a society that lacks empathy. And that we can’t afford to be ...
• We run face-to-face and correspondence writing courses - see www.allaboutwritingcourses.com for range and dates
Writing Quips and Tips
Reading as construction work
If writing is a blueprint which we, as readers, turn into cathedrals or palaces, then isn’t it also a route map?