Category: writing

This happens for me automatically: I quite often run out of writing time before I get to the end of the scene I’m writing. I can’t, obviously, sit on the train and finish it off, or I’d end up being taken straight home again, so I have to stop. Mid-sentence, sometimes.

Also, sometimes I run out of steam at or around Finsbury Park, so I shut the notebook and look to see whether there’s an update from Lady B-, the Comfortable Courtesan as was.

On the train home, I often find that the morning’s part, which I’d thought would only take a paragraph or so to wrap up, wants to run on and on into the next scene. Or a different part of the book entirely. I’m not fussy.

… that’s it.

I do most of my writing on the train. My daily rail journey is fifty-five miles each way; it takes about as many minutes. Once I’ve read the office and put my make-up on, I have about forty minutes left. It’s a regular, predictable slot of time, with reliably unreliable internet access, that I can devote to writing. I write all the way from Royston to King’s Cross.

Well, that’s the theory. In reality, of course, it’s earlier in the morning than I’d like it to be, I’m sleepy, I’d rather be in bed, I am wondering why the hell I commute into London anyway, and I am not feeling in the least inspired. I might have thought of what to write next as I cycled to the station, but I equally well might have not done so.

If I’m in that sort of mood, I make a bargain with myself. I do not have to write anything. All I have to do is get out my notebook and my pen, and find the last thing that I wrote, the next blank page.

And then I wait.

Sometimes it works instantaneously. I catch sight of the last thing I wrote the previous day, and I remember what was going to happen next. Suddenly the train’s passing Stevenage and I’m most of the way down a page.

Sometimes – less often, actually – it doesn’t. In which case I accept that it probably isn’t going to happen, read something instead, and try again on the way home.

Barbara Sher and Havi Brooks would call this an example of a CWU. Officially this stands for Complete Willingness Unit, but Havi is a great advocate of renaming boring initials, and I’m a trade unionist, so in my head there is a bunch of grumpy postmen saying, ‘Our members are prepared to take the lids off their pens, but that is as far as they will go.’

Sometimes I make it Cockatrices and Wyverns Union. But they still have postbags.

… or turn your computer off, whatever.

If I’m feeling a bit stuck, I try to get out of doors and do something that makes writing completely impractical. I go for a walk; I ride my bike; I go swimming. Sometimes I combine it with the technique described last week and walk four miles downstream to The Bridge (that’s the name of the pub) where I buy a pint of something interesting looking and sit down to talk to the book for an hour.

Quite often, I find that turning away from the blank page and the blinking cursor is enough to unstick whatever’s stuck. Words are perverse things: they hide in odd corners of my mind when I think I ‘should’ be writing, and come out when they think I can’t catch them. Sometimes whole sentences will form as I walk, or an important fact will make itself known. I don’t think I stopped dead in the middle of the path and exclaimed, ‘Oh! Gianna’s a silversmith!’ but it’s possible. It felt like sufficiently major breakthrough to justify that.

And at the very worst, even if I’m no further ahead with the current book, I tend to have realised that there is, in fact, more to life than the current book.

I’ve participated in a lot of month-long writing events in my time. NaNoWriMo, to start with, and later a lower-pressure imitation where we set our own goals – where ‘goal’ could legitimately equal ‘something, anything at all’. This is one of the kindest, most encouraging communities I’ve ever been part of, and the absence of pressure is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a great motivator. A couple of years ago it moved from running in November only to also having sessions in June and July, and I was very happy indeed.

The more months I devoted to writing, however, the more I noticed that month-long sessions didn’t work for me. The first few days were always brilliant: I dived in and swam around in a glorious sea of words, surfing an exhilarating wave. I’d write on the train, I’d write in cafés, I’d type up what I’d written longhand, editing as I went, and find that I’d doubled it in the process.

After the first few days the ocean would become a stream. I didn’t have that sense of boundless potential any more, but I could tell that there were words queuing up, waiting to be written.

After a couple of weeks the stream would dry up. I could squeeze a hundred words or so out of the dry ground, but they were forced, and looked it. I’d still show up at the daily check-in posts. I’d still have encouraging things to say about other people’s work, but my own had hit a wall.

Last year I decided to see what would happen if I stopped fighting this pattern, and just let it play out instead. For two weeks of every month, I told myself, I wouldn’t even try to write. I wouldn’t think about the book at all. I’d read, or go swimming, or play the piano, or play Animal Crossing, or make patchwork, or read some more, the theory being that by the end of that fortnight I’d have replenished the stocks of whatever resources I’d depleted, and would be ready to move into the next stint of writing.Was it realistic, after all, to expect my mind and my body to sustain a daily writing habit on top of a full-time job? Probably not, and could I blame my writing mind for shutting off when it had had enough?

Is it working? It seems to be. I’m only eight months into it (and the first few weren’t representative, as I was preparing to launch Speak Its Name, and not actually writing) but the indications so far point to it being a sustainable way of work. At the very least, it’s working at least as well as the previous pattern, and it’s stopped me feeling guilty about the times when I’m not writing.

Would I recommend it to you? Not necessarily. You’re welcome to try it – it’s not as if I have copyright on the idea of Deliberately Not Doing Stuff – but don’t feel that you have to persevere with it if it doesn’t work for you. This works for me because it’s what my mind wants to do anyway, and I’ve no idea whether anyone else operates on the same schedule as me. I’d recommend that you look at your own existing patterns and see if you can find a way to make them work better for you. Or a way to stop feeling bad about the fact that they exist. They’ve probably got your best interests in mind.