Author: kathleenjowitt

Find out what works for you, and do that.

And don’t panic if it doesn’t immediately seem to involve writing.

I keep a bottle of brandy in my desk. Not to drink – I can’t write drunk, and, as it happens, it’s the Christmas pudding brandy – but because it makes me feel a bit like Raymond Chandler.

It doesn’t make me write like Raymond Chandler, but it does make me write. Playing at being a writer does result in actual, real-world, words. It’s something about ceremony and ritual, together with not taking any of it too seriously. It’s like putting on a designated writing hat, or socks with a pattern of pen-nibs; something that says to me, and to the world, ‘OK, I’m a writer now.’

It could be argued that this dressing up lark is a bit childish. To which I reply, firstly, that I don’t care; and secondly, that one of the few points with which I still agree wholeheartedly with C. S. Lewis is on childlike things.

Anyway, the brandy has to go somewhere.

For most of this year, all the time I’ve been working on the thing that’s currently entitled Wheels, I’ve had a target wordcount in my head. Eight thousand words over the course of the two weeks of each month that I spend writing. Aim for a thousand words each commuting day, not usually hitting that, but making up the difference when I type it up.

August was different. I knew that from the beginning of the month, but couldn’t quite work out why. After a while I remembered (read: was forcibly reminded) that seasonal depression always kicks in for me in August; also, I’d be spending a lot of my evenings watching the Olympics. I was glad that I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to worry too much about the wordcount. Instead, I was going to concentrate on getting my head around one of my characters, one I didn’t feel I quite knew yet. And I’m getting to know her. Slowly. A little bit faster than my narrator is.

As it happens, I ended up not too far short of that eight thousand, but that’s not the point. I needed very badly to give myself a break, and moving the goalposts helped.

To a certain extent, this is a thing that happens automatically: it’s all very well aiming to write two thousand words a day, or whatever it is (personally, I go for a thousand, and rarely make it), but after a while you have a novel’s length, or even more, and you have to start cutting things instead. You’re forced to redefine ‘a good writing day’.

But sometimes, even if you’re still on the first draft and have just got bogged down at the 25K mark, it can help to say, ‘Well, this month I am not going to worry about wordcount at all, but I am going to try to nail the scene where the main character comes to a major realisation about herself, because I have been scared of getting this wrong so I have been putting it off.’ Or, ‘I’m not particularly bothered about whether I finish chapter three this week, but I do want to get a handle on Bob’s character.’

Often, that kind of little shift can give me enough space to unstick whatever’s got stuck. Occasionally I am tempted to beat myself up about not being able to keep up my ideal rate. But this is my pitch and my game, and I put the goalposts wherever I damn well please.

This is rank heresy in the church of People Who Tell You How To Write. The doctrine, as I learned it, went something like this:

Seek only criticism. If you seek encouragement, you will find only people who tell you what you want to hear. That way lies egotism, laziness and dreadful writing.

There are two reasons for ignoring this, or, at least, taking it with a giant pinch of salt.

Firstly, a lot of self-appointed critics of other people’s writing are… not very good at it. They tend to have subscribed to a rigid interpretation of supposed ‘rules’ for good writing, many of which they don’t even know how to apply properly, and the results are ridiculous.

This is what Ann Leckie says about rules:

Weigh writing advice carefully. Anything presented as a rule is not a rule. At best it’s general advice presented as a rule. At best. Half the time it’s bad advice to begin with. But always consider advice. Consider it seriously, and if you find it won’t work for the project at hand, put it aside.

Secondly, accentuating the negative is depressing. In every piece of writing there will be good things and there will be things that could do with some more work. This applies all the way from My Immortal (and I’m linking to the TVTropes entry there because it always cheers me up; very funny, very NSFW, also don’t blame me if you lose the rest of the day, you’re welcome) to War and Peace. Most writers know that their writing needs work. Some find it easy to work out what particular work it needs, and how to do it. Some don’t. Either way, random people on the internet (or, for that matter, random people in the library; this applies to offline writing groups too) aren’t necessarily the best source of advice. (See reason one, above.) And once someone has had a piece of writing ripped apart by enough people they’re much less likely to show it to anybody at all. And that way lies sticking it up unedited, and nobody wants that.

I am a member of an online writing group, and it is one of the most supportive, encouraging communities that I’ve ever been part of. People are delighted when you’ve had a good day’s writing and can report a wordcount of 2000. They commiserate when you’ve had a bad day, and written three words, or nothing, or have spent the entire day down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and aren’t even sure you can call it ‘research’. Nobody tells you that Jane Austen wrote with all her family bouncing off the walls so why can’t you. They will find something nice to say about whatever you post. And even a supportive comment can make you realise that something isn’t working. ‘You’ve really nailed the fifties atmosphere,’ for example, when the story’s set in the present day. No, sharing writing with this group doesn’t make me lazy. It makes me want to come back, and to come back with something more positive to report.

Later – much later, when I’ve got a story that’s as close to perfect as I can get it unaided – I bring out the big guns. I email the people I know I can trust to tell me what needs doing and where, and I promise them a bottle of gin apiece, and tell them to do their worst. But the cheerful, uncomplicated support of my online group in the early stages of a project is invaluable in getting the thing off the ground.