Five Tough Truths to Unleash the Writer Within You

You want to be a writer?

Here are five things you need to confront, if you want to succeed on that road:

1. Ask yourself ’Why am I not writing right now?’

You’re reading this. You’re not writing. That tells you one things straight away: you haven’t yet placed enough importance upon being a writer to stop doing other things and start writing. Horrible, but true, simply by the fact that you’re still reading this.

2. You have enough writing time to get started even though you think that can’t be true.

Do you have an iPhone or other gadget that you carry around with you? Does it have the capacity for keeping notes? You don’t need anything super-duper or complex: you just need something that you can write into and save. Preferably something which holds onto content which you can then email to yourself.

Because you tend to carry your phone around with you at all times, use an app on your phone.

Now, every time you are waiting for a bus, sitting on a train, are in between meetings, write. Notes, ideas, chapter headings, insights. Sentences, poems, dialogue. Whole chapters if you get a chance. It’s possible to write the basis for entire novels in this way, chapter by chapter, in the time that you didn’t even realise was ‘spare’. Try it. You’ll be amazed. And your writing morale will start to go up and up. You won’t forget those flashes of genius you had on the way home before you get to your laptop; you won’t forget that you even had a flash of genius. It will all be there in some form on your device. Apart from recording stuff, the notes on your gadget will begin to give you confidence that you can actually write. You’ll get practice, in small doses. They say it takes 10,000 hours to master something? Well then, over the last eight years or so you’ve probably let 10,000 hours slip through your fingers literally by not having something to hand upon which to record your thoughts and ideas in these ‘invisible gaps’ in your life.

3. You are your own worst enemy.

Don’t waste precious time ‘going over’ what you wrote last time, picking out spelling errors, grammar problems, things you’d like to ‘tweak a little’. Hit the keyboard and don’t stop until your head collapses onto the space bar. Set yourself high word targets per hour if that works for you. Whatever you do, don’t stop - don’t even pause - for any editing or ‘re-drafting’ or even basic corrections until you reach 200 pages of writing.

Why? For several reasons: firstly, and probably most importantly, getting 200 pages written is a tremendous morale-booster. You know that it’s far from perfect, you know it will take major editing work, but there it is: 200 pages of your very own writing. That’s a decent-sized book, right there. Think of it as the first step in making a cake: you’ve been to the shops and bought the ingredients. There they are in the pages in front of you. The second step, re-writing, is making the cake. But until you have the ingredients, making the cake is just a fantasy.

Secondly, writing flat-out like this will teach you a few things about yourself as a writer. When you read it over, you’ll see patterns, strengths and weaknesses, places where you falter and places where you demonstrate real skill. It’s a training programme for writers, getting your writing muscles fitter for the real thing: the next draft.

Thirdly, you avoid the counter-productive ‘pottering around’ that happens if you do it any other way: write a page, stop and think, change some things, correct spelling, maybe alter the whole way the page works, wonder if you could have done better, and so forth. This tortuous pattern has produced one or two successful works, but at the cost of so many more that could have been written in the same time with less bother.

4. You’re expecting Life to timetable you into the writing chair. It won’t.

Take a look at your weekly schedule; examine your commitments; work out about three hours a week, preferably contiguous but not vitally so, and block that out for writing. Get everyone’s agreement. Ideally, pick a time that is interruption-free, or at least when you are less likely to be in demand. It’s possible to construct a schedule so that you are writing in the early hours of the morning - or even through the night, as long as you get sleep some other time- and to get a 300,000 word epic fantasy written in three months. But that’s an extreme. One long evening, or a weekend afternoon, or something like that, and, if you stick to it, you’ll find that in a few weeks you have made significant progress - provided you don’t keep interrupting yourself. Which leads to the final point.

5. You are interrupting yourself.

See ‘You are your own worst enemy’ above. The primary enemy of a writer is interruptions. Devise a schedule that keeps these to a minimum, and stop interrupting yourself. Self-interruptions range from ‘I’ll just check my email’ to ‘I’ll get a coffee’ to ‘There’s no way I can write this scene in front of a fireplace until I’ve read this three-volume History of Fireplaces in the Seventeenth Century so that I can be convincingly authentic’.

Put distractions aside and get to the keyboard, or desk, or whatever you use. If you’re trapped by some kind of inertia from rising from your chair, use the gadget from Tip # 1 and write right there, wherever you are stuck. But watch out for the interruptions, subtle or not-so-subtle, and just get on with it.

Before long, you’ll be a writer. Then you’ll have to tackle the questions about making money from your writing.

But that’s another story.