My writing day

I am always fascinated by what other writers have to say about their working method. Yesterday I was reading an article in Mslexia magazine about Naomi Alderman, author of the marvellous Disobedience. Naomi advocates a strict regime of working six hours a day for six days a week, and writing between 800 and 1000 words at a time.

This seems to be a regime that is quite popular with writers, and I wish it was something that I could adapt to. My writing is more chaotic; a famine or feast. During the famine I seem to spend all my time reading or daydreaming, or just getting on with the mundane stuff of life. During the feast I can sit at my laptop, oblivious to the demands of starving family members, while I knock out around 6000 words at a time. Obviously not all the 6000 words are fabulous, and they often get edited down significantly. However, what this process does is get the bare bones of the story, character, dialogue on paper so that I can tweak it at leisure. The only novel that I have completed ended up being over 200,000 words long. The current edited version is only 108,000 words. Quite possibly, if I had worked at a slower and more thoughtful pace I could have spent less time on the editing. But the fact remains there would always have been a significant amount of time spent on editing and I would rather have too much detail than not enough.

My inspiration for writing seems to work in a strange way too. When I am faced with an essay, short story or the continuation of a novel, I think about what I am going to write while I am doing other things. I plot storylines when I am driving, washing up, watching TV and even reading; talk about multi-tasking! When I have got an idea going I sleep on it. Actually, sleeping on it is not quite accurate. I am a dreadful insomniac and have been for many years. I have tried many things to cure this but nothing works, so now I make use of this “dead” time. I lie in bed and watch the “movie” of my story pan out. As the director of the movie, I change dialogue and edit the plot as I go along and then quite often I fall asleep dreaming of the story. In the morning I find that I can remember it remarkably faithfully. When I get a chance to write that day I simply have to write out the story/essay as I dreamed it; hence the ability to write, almost as quickly as I can type.

In the same magazine there was an article about Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Julia suggests starting the writing day by writing three sides of stream-of-consciousness text. This counteracts the internal critic that every writer seems to have, to sometimes detrimental effect. I have never been a fan of stream-of-consciousness writing, possibly the reason why I can never get on with James Joyce, however, I thought that I would try this method for a while, hence this blog. I intend to use my blog to kick-start my writing day; and it will comprise of random ideas that I have been pondering.