Day 23
30 mins editing + 15 mins planning + 1hr planned writing
Hey! Want to be a good writer? Then you need to be doing:
- Wide general reading
- Regular writing
- Study of technique and theory
- Attending writing classes or getting feedback from peers
- Detailed research
- Building a good website
- Learning about social networking and marketing
- Researching the publishing world
- Understanding e-publishing
Sounds like too much? Tough luck, you’re in now. Or are you?
Jacqui talks about our continual choice to become writers. How we are free to walk away if we want. For some people, this will bring needed perspective and allow them to rediscover the reason they chose to write in the first place.
But I struggle with commitment. When I look at the list above, I often think “there’s someone with my name and brain who decided to do all that, but it’s not me today.” It is true that no-one else asked me to write, but I asked myself to write. If I can’t honour my decision, then I will misuse the notion of “choice” to pursue something else which seems less hard (from the outside). I’m not talking about a rational review of my options which might indicate that writing is no longer viable. I’m talking about the chronic feelings of doubt which disguise themselves as “not feeling like it” or “something else being the priority”.
For me, being reminded of choice can be counterproductive. In fact, I often need to do the opposite. Sometimes I pretend that someone has asked me to write and I have no other option. Like some stone tablet or government department decreed that there will be no other role for me. Then how would I approach the work? That brings me clarity and fair bit of mental relief from “what if?”ism.
Where I am aligned with Jacqui is that writing is forever, not just for Christmas. There is no guarantee of success — and even success itself may not be the positive we imagined. It has to be the creative process that motivates us. It is also our commitment to improving it which leads to the sort of confidence upon which lasting success is built.
Jacqui’s wish for the end of this course is that we have the confidence to not fear the blank page. Her wish beyond that is that we develop the confidence to do all the rest.
Exercise
- General: choose to be confident today and quieten the negative voices for the session
- Option 1: 1,000 words: anything
or
- Option 2: 1,000 words (I added 30 mins editing + 15 minutes planning): “A Sense of Place”: Write a response to an artist’s work that inspires you – find a way of weaving this into your fiction
My response
- I tend to go with the prompts, so I chose Option 2. There are a few artists whose work inspires me, although I don’t know much about visual art as a discipline. I chose Howard Hodgkin, an artist whose modern abstract work fits with the aesthetic of my story, and as the story is adjacent to the art world, chose to have the painting included in a scene and responded to by the characters. Making it about a “sense of place” also fits with the fact that the main characters are from different countries.
- I forgot to quieten the negative voices during the writing. I’m not sure how loud they are usually, but this time they were telling me “ugh I have no idea what this scene is for” and “my back hurts” and “how much longer until I reach 1,000 words”. So while I didn’t have an existential writing crisis, I didn’t particularly excel.
- I think there are days when writing is a chore. For me they are when I have had my mental energy taken by other things, usually other work and admin. By the time I get to writing I feel like an ideas shell. I end up pushing my fingers over the keyboard trying to make something happen, but I typically end up with something which doesn’t feel meaningful. It exists, at least. Hopefully I can come back another day to make it mean something.
all course content copyright Jacqui Lofthouse thewritingcoach.co.uk