Creative writing - From think to ink - Lindstrom Simeon 2015

The writing habit

A friend of mine says they write no matter what. If there’s a scrap of paper in their vicinity, it gets scribbled on. This friend’s home is littered with millions of notebooks. Ask them why they write and they don’t have an answer. “I just do.”

This is fantastic. But, sadly, it’s not good enough on its own.

What do I mean?

A writing compulsion is not the same as a writing discipline. Enjoying writing and seeking it out naturally is the first step, but it’s not sufficient on its own to ensure that you’re reaching your potential.

No, to fine tune discipline takes boring things like work, dedication and commitment. If you’re one of these people that believes that writing is a thing you do almost by accident, when the muses smile on you and gift you a fabulous idea one day when you least expect it …well, abandon that idea now.

Inspiration is fantastic, and when it happens, you should thank your lucky stars and squeeze whatever you can from it. The hard truth, though, is that life is mostly made up of uninspiring and regular-looking moments, a whole bunch of them, and if you hope to create something special, it’s more or less up to you to do it.

Be realistic. Nothing in life happens in this fairy tale way. While a flash of artistic inspiration can certainly spur you on and act as a wonderful catalyst, even the most perfect creative gift from heaven is nothing without hard work to bring it to its full potential.

Here’s the bad news: if you want to be a better writer, you need to write EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T FEEL LIKE IT.

Yes, let that sink in for a bit. Consider it a job. Consider it a life obligation on par with caring for your children or paying taxes. If you want to have any success of taking your writing to the next level, you’ll need to work, and you’ll need to work hard.

This means that for every happy moment when things fall into place and you look at an awesome thing you’ve made, there are twenty moments where you’re staring at a horrible thing that doesn’t work. For every paragraph that sings, there are forty paragraphs that thunk and clunk along and need to be thrown to the scrap heap.

Think about it: most of your work as a writer is creating horrible writing. Like someone sifting for gold, most of what you see every day is just plain old mud.

When you commit to being a writer and working hard on your craft, you are not committing to the shiny gold bits — that’s too easy. What you’re committing to is all the mud in between. Are you willing to work away at it, sometimes for days and days only to backspace the whole business and start again from scratch? Are you willing to write the same sentence over 20 times until it’s what you want it to be? Congratulations, you have the temperament to be a writer.

So, how are you going to do the boring day-in-day-out work of writing? How are you going to put in your hours, your blood and sweat and tears?

·  Decide on a daily time commitment and stick to it. For that time, you sit on your butt and work, no excuses. It doesn’t matter if you produce garbage or manage only a few good lines after an hour. Just keep the channels open and keep going. Think of writing time as non-negotiable. Turn up at the page no matter what.

·  Be regular. Make writing a literal habit. Find a place in your schedule and devote it to writing. Everything else can be shuffled.

·  Set yourself goals. This could be word count goals, writing group meetings or some other metric that shows you are improving. Pencil in your diary some specific times where you’ll stop and ask — is this working? Then adjust as necessary.

·  Always, always, always have a notebook and pen around you for if you start leaking ideas anywhere.

·  Make a promise to yourself to stop being self-deprecating about your project. Tell people honestly what you’re up to and be proud. Don’t undermine yourself or be bashful. They may even help you to keep accountable.

·  Don’t share your work willy-nilly with whoever wants to see it. People’s opinions are valuable, but can be a disaster if injected into the process too soon. Get your say out, and know when to take your work for criticism in a controlled way. Nosy partners or family can kill a new work in progress — so keep your boundaries.