The urge to write can bite any time, like a blood-hungry midge wreaking itchy havoc on a set of campers. For your average writer in the street there's nothing worse than being struck with an idea, and being desperate to realize it - but not having the time or paper to write it down. It's the curse that strikes all writers on a more or less weekly basis. It's part of the reason why all writers pockets are full of scraps of paper, scribbled-upon napkins, bus tickets crammed with microscopic writing, and notebooks. You never know when the ideas are going to hit you: that's the devil of it.
Just like that, the desperation to realize an idea can catch us scribbling away in the strangest of places. Anywhere that has room enough for a notebook and pen becomes the writer's office. I admit, I've done it myself, on occasions where that idea just couldn't float around my head a second longer...
On a train. We're not talking 40's style romanticism here. I was heading away for a rowdy weekend of karaoke and booze-facedness that absolutely wasn't conducive to the Big Project I was planning. Consequence: rattling along with my pen in my hand and the smell of catering-car Croque Monsieur in my nose, making strange marks on the page every time the car jumbled over "the wrong sort of leaves" on the track.
Sitting on a wall outside a community centre, in Hastings. Long-suffering boyfriend enticed me into coming away on one of his working trips. He thought I was going to make myself useful: I thought I was going to work on my novel. About halfway through the day, realizing I was holding his flash stand in a sulky and entirely unsatisfactory manner, LSB snapped: "You're no use at all! Go and get on with your writing and stop making my life a misery!" Result! With no way of getting to a lovely warm coffee shop, I instead plonked myself on the nearest wall, pulled my fleece warm around me, and got to work.
Under a tree. I'd read somewhere that CS Lewis used to do this, and so I thought if I did it it would be well literary. However, instead of producing a series of seven children's books that have endured through the ages, I got grass on my skirt and bird poo on my head. It didn't really work out the way I'd hoped.
I know I cannot be the only one parking my office wherever inspiration strikes....
Short story writer & novelist. K Blundell Trust award-winning Author, Saboteur Award winning editor (Remembering Oluwale), fiction editor at Strix Magazine. Director of the Northern Short Story Festival.
Showing posts with label writing space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing space. Show all posts
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Writer's foibles
I ought to be working, and so... I bring you this blog entry, not on the theme of procrastination (which I believe has already been quite comprehensively covered both by myself and other bloggers), but on writer's foibles and obsessions.
As a breed, writers are generally accepted to be a neurotic, eccentric bunch. For one thing, a person has to be a bit screwy to want to spend hours of their time making things up. And for a second thing, the conditions that a writer needs to do his or her work - sitting in a room alone, involved with the problems of their characters, depicting and representing what is essentially a 'fantasy world' to others - only exacerbate matters.
Through idly reading through blogs on RedRoom (yes, I should have been working then, as well) and observing my own behaviour - as well as that of writing friends - I've compiled the following list of writer's obsessions.
1. Word counts. How long does it need to be, how many can I write today, how many have I written already, and - horror of horrors - how many might I need to edit out at the end? When so much of our work has an intangible quality, and is subject to - well, subjectivity - word counts give us something concrete, something functional we can hang on to. Never mind the plausibility of the plot, or the coherence of these characters. Word counts are something we can easily judge for ourselves - hell, the word-processor will count them for us - and we don't need objective opinions on. In times of lean inspiration, its the word count who casts his villainous shadow across our work.
2. Comparison with other authors. Am I too old or too young to write a masterpiece like Hard Times? What age was Kazuo Ishiguro when he wrote Remains of the Day? Why did X get his novel published with such relative ease, and what is wrong with me that I can't? Why do I spend so much time messing about on Facebook when I could be working on my novel? I bet Jane Austen never spent this much time commenting on other people's photos. (Only because they didn't have social networking in the 18th century).
3. Notebooks. A separate notebook for everything, and everything in its right notebook. A notebook for keeping track of submissions and competitions, a notebook for writing down true stories from work. A notebook for keeping track of ideas, and a notebook for cutting out funny stories from papers and magazines. A notebook for keeping track of errors and plot lines for the novel, and a notebook for writing to-do lists in. There is no excuse for writing down an overheard conversation in the character-work notebook. Everything must be in the correct notebook, otherwise everything descends into complete anarchy. Boyfriend keeps complaining that there are notebooks all over the house. Suggests that I could perhaps get a notebook to keep a track of where all my notebooks are.
4. Thinking too much. From reading blogs with keywords like "it won't write itself" to "nobody procrastinates like a writer", I've gathered that this is a common problem among us. We all spend hours thinking about what will happen in our books, or what our lives could be like as a 'successful' author (how we define success differs from person to person, of course; for some of us, success is being as commercially successful as Stephen King; for others, success is being as critically acclaimed as Muriel Spark; for others, success might be having a few friends read your work and genuinely enjoy it). From what I've heard, some writers spend hours caught up in these thoughts, and too little time writing. Not that I ever spend too much time thinking myself, with a heavy side-order of unproductivity, you understand. It's just what I've heard from other people.
I realise this is only a short list of four, and that there are probably other writer's quirks and obsessions that I've missed out. I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the strange habits of the writer!
As a breed, writers are generally accepted to be a neurotic, eccentric bunch. For one thing, a person has to be a bit screwy to want to spend hours of their time making things up. And for a second thing, the conditions that a writer needs to do his or her work - sitting in a room alone, involved with the problems of their characters, depicting and representing what is essentially a 'fantasy world' to others - only exacerbate matters.
Through idly reading through blogs on RedRoom (yes, I should have been working then, as well) and observing my own behaviour - as well as that of writing friends - I've compiled the following list of writer's obsessions.
1. Word counts. How long does it need to be, how many can I write today, how many have I written already, and - horror of horrors - how many might I need to edit out at the end? When so much of our work has an intangible quality, and is subject to - well, subjectivity - word counts give us something concrete, something functional we can hang on to. Never mind the plausibility of the plot, or the coherence of these characters. Word counts are something we can easily judge for ourselves - hell, the word-processor will count them for us - and we don't need objective opinions on. In times of lean inspiration, its the word count who casts his villainous shadow across our work.
2. Comparison with other authors. Am I too old or too young to write a masterpiece like Hard Times? What age was Kazuo Ishiguro when he wrote Remains of the Day? Why did X get his novel published with such relative ease, and what is wrong with me that I can't? Why do I spend so much time messing about on Facebook when I could be working on my novel? I bet Jane Austen never spent this much time commenting on other people's photos. (Only because they didn't have social networking in the 18th century).
3. Notebooks. A separate notebook for everything, and everything in its right notebook. A notebook for keeping track of submissions and competitions, a notebook for writing down true stories from work. A notebook for keeping track of ideas, and a notebook for cutting out funny stories from papers and magazines. A notebook for keeping track of errors and plot lines for the novel, and a notebook for writing to-do lists in. There is no excuse for writing down an overheard conversation in the character-work notebook. Everything must be in the correct notebook, otherwise everything descends into complete anarchy. Boyfriend keeps complaining that there are notebooks all over the house. Suggests that I could perhaps get a notebook to keep a track of where all my notebooks are.
4. Thinking too much. From reading blogs with keywords like "it won't write itself" to "nobody procrastinates like a writer", I've gathered that this is a common problem among us. We all spend hours thinking about what will happen in our books, or what our lives could be like as a 'successful' author (how we define success differs from person to person, of course; for some of us, success is being as commercially successful as Stephen King; for others, success is being as critically acclaimed as Muriel Spark; for others, success might be having a few friends read your work and genuinely enjoy it). From what I've heard, some writers spend hours caught up in these thoughts, and too little time writing. Not that I ever spend too much time thinking myself, with a heavy side-order of unproductivity, you understand. It's just what I've heard from other people.
I realise this is only a short list of four, and that there are probably other writer's quirks and obsessions that I've missed out. I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the strange habits of the writer!
Writing Space
I laugh when I read other writers saying, "Write wherever you are". A laudable aim. Who amongst us has never written on a busy train, whilst sitting under a tree, in a cafe, or even in the living room while others are watching the telly?
But the truth is - and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it - I've become precious when it comes to writing space lately. My excellent boyfriend, who is handy with a couple of rawlplugs and a drill, built me a desk right under our living room window, so that I can write and look out over the allotments. Excellent, work, boyfriend. Now what can we do about getting me a bit of peace and quiet?
Our house is not a large one. We live in a terraced house, in a quiet street in a quiet area. The walls are thin, and one gets used to 'tuning out' the sounds of life that come from the adjoining houses: children playing, the sound of somebody else's television, a person who owns only one CD and listens to it repeatedly over and over again. (Why does it have to be Keane?) But try as I might, I can't tune out the sounds that come from within the house. It's these that break my concentration and leave me a quivering, twitching wreck.
I know it's the luxury of silence, and a dedicated writing space, that has made me this way. There was a time when I could write anywhere, even with my housemates howling and chattering over How Clean Is Your House? in the same room. I'm just not the same girl any more. I can't stand to be interrupted when I'm working, especially if it's to be asked a question; more so if it's a stupid question, and most questions seem to be fairly stupid. Whether its "How do you spell tomorrow?" or "Do you want anything from the shop?", an innocently asked question is liable to send me twitching and gnashing my teeth down into the kitchen, where I will stomp around noisily making a cup of tea until the offending question-asker has discreetly removed him or herself away to a safer location.
It got me thinking about what other writers need to write? Do you have the same obsessive need for quiet as do I, or can you write in just about any conditions? I'd love to know!
But the truth is - and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it - I've become precious when it comes to writing space lately. My excellent boyfriend, who is handy with a couple of rawlplugs and a drill, built me a desk right under our living room window, so that I can write and look out over the allotments. Excellent, work, boyfriend. Now what can we do about getting me a bit of peace and quiet?
Our house is not a large one. We live in a terraced house, in a quiet street in a quiet area. The walls are thin, and one gets used to 'tuning out' the sounds of life that come from the adjoining houses: children playing, the sound of somebody else's television, a person who owns only one CD and listens to it repeatedly over and over again. (Why does it have to be Keane?) But try as I might, I can't tune out the sounds that come from within the house. It's these that break my concentration and leave me a quivering, twitching wreck.
I know it's the luxury of silence, and a dedicated writing space, that has made me this way. There was a time when I could write anywhere, even with my housemates howling and chattering over How Clean Is Your House? in the same room. I'm just not the same girl any more. I can't stand to be interrupted when I'm working, especially if it's to be asked a question; more so if it's a stupid question, and most questions seem to be fairly stupid. Whether its "How do you spell tomorrow?" or "Do you want anything from the shop?", an innocently asked question is liable to send me twitching and gnashing my teeth down into the kitchen, where I will stomp around noisily making a cup of tea until the offending question-asker has discreetly removed him or herself away to a safer location.
It got me thinking about what other writers need to write? Do you have the same obsessive need for quiet as do I, or can you write in just about any conditions? I'd love to know!
Bradley's foolproof 10-step procrastination method
Want to get some writing done? Frustrated at your current overly-productive rate of activity? Gurn no longer! I can help you, with my tried-and-tested, guaranteed foolproof low-yield ten-step procrastination method.
Following my advice, any newcomer to the writing game can easily fritter whole days away in the pursuit of less fulfilling activities that produce no writing output whatsoever (unless you count commenting on somebody else's Facebook status updates).
For the purposes of following the method, you need to be at your desk and ready to begin by 09.00. Follow the points step by step, and don't miss any out. It won't work otherwise. Ready? Let's get started!
1. It is still too early to start writing. There is too much else to do in and around and out of the house. Begin by writing a list. Spend no shorter than half an hour writing this list, and include absolutely everything on it, from the physical ("paint the outside of the house") to the metaphysical and / or spiritual ("What is the meaning of life?")
To improve of the efficacy of point 1 as a timewasting activity, you may wish to embark on some of the tasks named thereon. Ensure that you do not complete fully any of these tasks, as completing any sort of task could be considered productive, and is thereby contrary to the spirit of the ten-step procrastination method.
2. To engage brain and to warm up into the writing activity, open three tabs on your browser window: one to Facebook, another to web-based email, and a third to the talk-board or forum of your choice. Spend at least one hour providing ill-informed advice to strangers on the internet and commenting on your friends' status updates. Oh look, are those pictures of Tom's wedding? 256 pictures of people you hardly know! This is procrastination gold. By the time you have looked at them all, there will be more status updates, and more strangers seeking advice. You have already spent up to an hour and a half at your desk, and not a single minute of it spent in the task of writing. Keep up the good work!
3. Jeez, nearly lunchtime. It's time for a well-deserved break, to have a root through the fridge, and to watch a bit of Come Dine With Me off the Freeview Plus box. You can't write on an empty stomach, and in any case, Come Dine With Me counts as research on account of the human drama and the interaction of all those different characters. Also worth watching to get some ideas for lunch.
4. That's enough time-wasting. Seriously now, get back to work. Maybe it would be useful to spend a bit of time updating the old internet 'shop window'. Update blog, spend a bit of time browsing Red Room. (careful now. Overdo it and you might be in danger of doing something useful).
5. This computer is filthy. Clean screen, get desktop vacuum out, vac out keyboard and inside mouse. Carpet and coffee table also need vacuuming. May as well do those since have vacuum out. Look for other opportunities for housework. A clean environment is more conducive to productivity.
6. Still haven't got anything done. Can't fix mind to writing somehow. Seems like very hard work today. Maybe I could concentrate better if I did a bit of exercise?
7. Go for a walk or bike ride, or put on latest Girls Aloud album and dance around the living room. Close curtains if the neighbours are home.
8. If plan has been correctly followed, it will now be around 3 (possibly after) and partner's arrival home from work will be imminent. You have not yet written one single solitary word other than "lol" or "fail". These barely count as English. Allow feeling of destitution and disappointment to gather over you for a few minutes.
9. Time to knuckle down. Straight after this cup of tea.
10. Congratulations, you are a successful (?!) graduate of Bradley's foolproof ten-step procrastination method....
Following my advice, any newcomer to the writing game can easily fritter whole days away in the pursuit of less fulfilling activities that produce no writing output whatsoever (unless you count commenting on somebody else's Facebook status updates).
For the purposes of following the method, you need to be at your desk and ready to begin by 09.00. Follow the points step by step, and don't miss any out. It won't work otherwise. Ready? Let's get started!
1. It is still too early to start writing. There is too much else to do in and around and out of the house. Begin by writing a list. Spend no shorter than half an hour writing this list, and include absolutely everything on it, from the physical ("paint the outside of the house") to the metaphysical and / or spiritual ("What is the meaning of life?")
To improve of the efficacy of point 1 as a timewasting activity, you may wish to embark on some of the tasks named thereon. Ensure that you do not complete fully any of these tasks, as completing any sort of task could be considered productive, and is thereby contrary to the spirit of the ten-step procrastination method.
2. To engage brain and to warm up into the writing activity, open three tabs on your browser window: one to Facebook, another to web-based email, and a third to the talk-board or forum of your choice. Spend at least one hour providing ill-informed advice to strangers on the internet and commenting on your friends' status updates. Oh look, are those pictures of Tom's wedding? 256 pictures of people you hardly know! This is procrastination gold. By the time you have looked at them all, there will be more status updates, and more strangers seeking advice. You have already spent up to an hour and a half at your desk, and not a single minute of it spent in the task of writing. Keep up the good work!
3. Jeez, nearly lunchtime. It's time for a well-deserved break, to have a root through the fridge, and to watch a bit of Come Dine With Me off the Freeview Plus box. You can't write on an empty stomach, and in any case, Come Dine With Me counts as research on account of the human drama and the interaction of all those different characters. Also worth watching to get some ideas for lunch.
4. That's enough time-wasting. Seriously now, get back to work. Maybe it would be useful to spend a bit of time updating the old internet 'shop window'. Update blog, spend a bit of time browsing Red Room. (careful now. Overdo it and you might be in danger of doing something useful).
5. This computer is filthy. Clean screen, get desktop vacuum out, vac out keyboard and inside mouse. Carpet and coffee table also need vacuuming. May as well do those since have vacuum out. Look for other opportunities for housework. A clean environment is more conducive to productivity.
6. Still haven't got anything done. Can't fix mind to writing somehow. Seems like very hard work today. Maybe I could concentrate better if I did a bit of exercise?
7. Go for a walk or bike ride, or put on latest Girls Aloud album and dance around the living room. Close curtains if the neighbours are home.
8. If plan has been correctly followed, it will now be around 3 (possibly after) and partner's arrival home from work will be imminent. You have not yet written one single solitary word other than "lol" or "fail". These barely count as English. Allow feeling of destitution and disappointment to gather over you for a few minutes.
9. Time to knuckle down. Straight after this cup of tea.
10. Congratulations, you are a successful (?!) graduate of Bradley's foolproof ten-step procrastination method....
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