An egg timer of writing per day: Inspiration from Jeffrey Archer
One of the podcasts I regularly listen to (see - I promised I’d be listening to more podcasts again soon) is actually produced by a huge chain book store that I actually don’t really like that much, but their podcast series is great. I guess I have to tell you what I’m talking about - it’s the Barnes & Noble Meet the Writers series and the interviewer, Steve Bertrand, just does such great interviews with various writers that I always enjoy listening to them. That, and they’re short - usually under 15 minutes, so it’s a great podcast to listen to if I’m nearly home.
Anyway, this week I listened to the Meet the Writers interview with Jeffrey Archer. Sorry, Lord Archer, as he now is (I think). Personally, I’m not a fan, but he’s undeniably a very successful writer, and there’s got to be a few reasons for that.
Something Archer said that really made me prick my ears up was that he writes in a very disciplined way. And I mean disciplined. He has some beautiful sand timer (I was going to write egg timer, but it’s longer than that) that runs for an hour. He always writes for two-hour sessions, meaning he turns the timer over once. And I can’t remember exactly his pattern, but it was something like writing from 6am-8am, 10am-12pm, 2pm-4pm and 6pm-8pm, every day.
Now obviously writing a novel in such a way is not going to pay the bills for me in the same way that it does for Lord Archer, well at least not yet. But it did inspire me to re-think my approach to my writing buddy system for writing my second novel, which requires me to write one chapter per week. Apart from being a little behind schedule, I also only manage to sit down to actually write these chapters when the deadline is looming very near (or has already passed). I’m making more progress than I would have, but I’m still writing under a pressing deadline and therefore writing stuff just to fill the page at times, or just to move the story in the right direction.
But the sand clock idea got me thinking, and I’m going to try a new idea this week. If I wrote a bit of my novel for 15 minutes every day, I’d have a good chunk of it done when I got to the weekend and needed to finish up and submit a chapter. I can set the timer on my phone to ring after 15 minutes and then sit down and just type. I know, it sounds so simple, but I hope other struggling writers out there appreciate how difficult it sometimes is to get these things done. I’ll let you know how it goes.
How to be miserable: Try to become a fiction writer!
Don’t worry, I haven’t entirely sunk into a can’t-finish-a-novel depression - I just liked the idea of entering the How to be Miserable contest being sponsored by life coach Tim Brownson. But in fact, trying to becoming a fiction writer can certainly produce its moments of misery, so if you’re in the business of wanting to be miserable, here’s how:
- Set yourself a goal of becoming a published fiction writer. Being just a writer is hard enough, but wanting to be published? It’s a guaranteed path to misery. I don’t know the stats - and I don’t think I want to - but I’m guessing the proportion of fiction words written that are actually subsequently published is very, very tiny.
- Try to write fiction while you’re doing a demanding day job like teaching. Better yet, try to write fiction while you’re teaching all day and writing internet posts for travel sites in the evening so that you can pay the mortgage (hey, that sounds kind of familiar). Trying to find the inspiration to write a word or two of enjoyable fiction after expending all that energy is a great way to become miserable.
- Be shy enough about your fiction writing skills that you don’t join any online forums to share your fiction, or attend any local writing groups. Getting feedback might be too helpful and dig you out of your misery far too quickly. Surely a real writer has to do it all on their lonesome.
- Think to yourself that it’s impossible that your novels will ever be published. Don’t head to your local bookstore and find the alphabetical spot on the shelf where your novel would sit. This kind of positive thinking could lead you dangerously far away from being miserable.
- Make sure you keep your desk absolutely covered in bills, books, pencils, old newspapers and unlabeled CDs so that you can’t possibly think beyond the clutter. Even better, start piling the next wave of paperwork on your chair so that when you try to sit down to work, you miserably throw said pile on the floor and then tread on a staple that’s come half undone, providing pain to add to your misery.
- Spend all of your free time reading published novels by great writers and reflect on how you’ll never be able to write that well (as well as having no free time to actually write). Comparing your own writing to that of Jane Austen or Gabriel Garcia Marquez should make you miserable nice and fast.
There you go. I’m quite surprised at how easy it is to become miserable. And a little pleased that I’ve actually done only about half of these things myself. So far.
Buying Australian books at the Book Depository
I’ve mused before about buying books online or from my local bookshop, and my preference is definitely to browse through my favourite independent bookshops and enjoy touching the books, reading the first pages, and discovering books I didn’t even know existed yet. But in recent weeks I’ve been a bit let down by this strategy and I’ve gone online again.
I really wanted to buy a particular Australian novel as a gift for a friend who had a birthday. I can’t tell you which book yet, because I’ve yet to give it to this friend, who might read this blog, and I hate spoiling surprises. In any case, it’s a book that’s probably about ten years old, and I guess for this reason it has now disappeared from the bookshelves of my favourite stores. So I went to Fishpond.com.au but of course, the price, like all books bought in Australia, is astronomical.
I finally took up the tip of heading to the Book Depository, a UK company which offers great prices plus the bonus of free delivery worldwide. I don’t quite get how they manage this, because I’m sure the postage costs to some of the places they deliver will be more than they’re charging for the book. But who am I to argue, and they’re now winging me a copy of this Australian book (ironic, right) for a fraction of the price it would have cost me to buy it here in Australia. This makes me a bit mad, but I’m not made of money and although I would have supported my local bookshops and paid more for it there if they’d had it in stock, that’s as far as my philanthropic streak goes.
In any case, I’ll report back on how the service from the Book Depository goes. When price is the key factor then they are definitely ahead of most when it comes to getting books sent to Australia, so if they also do it quickly and politely I’ll be giving them a big thumbs up.
Enid Blyton was my childhood hero: But do we need new books?
Since my new bookshelves arrived, I’ve been gradually unpacking more boxes of books which had been stored (generously) in my mother’s cupboards. Last weekend it was the turn of my childhood books to appear out of the boxes, and if anybody had been listening to my ecstatic cries each time I uncovered another old treasure, they would definitely have thought that something more than books was involved.
Most exciting to me were rediscovering my collection of Enid Blyton books. At least half of these are in fact from my mother’s own collection when she was young, and then after I’d devoured all of her beautiful hardcovers, she bought me more (but in 1980s paperback style). I adored these books as a kid, and still have images from books like the Faraway Tree series etched in my mind.
My mother - obviously aware of my interest in Enid Blyton, who I never thought was politically incorrect - pointed out to me that they’re about to publish a bunch of new Enid Blyton books, adding to the Famous Five, Faraway Tree and Malory Towers series. And written, obviously, by authors other than Enid Blyton.
I’m really not a big fan of this kind of book. It’s not as if Enid Blyton didn’t leave enough for us to read - some 800 books, apparently - and I’m sure I haven’t read all of them. There’s a theory that publishing new stories will inspire a new generation of readers to discover the original Enid Blyton stories, which is certainly possible - but why not just promote the original ones? I think I’ll stick to them and I might just curl up with a couple of Secret Seven books this weekend and see if I still enjoy them.
PS: Here’s a note for the future. If I ever become a best-selling writer, and then die, and somebody out there wants to continue some series I’ve written in this way: I disapprove. Please don’t do it. Thanks.
I really wish I could write like that: Can I perfect my own writing style?
Regular readers will be glad to hear that the much-anticipated writing buddy system is finally bearing fruit, so to speak. We’re both about a week behind our timetable but a few days ago I sent the next chapter of my novel over to Katrina and have started work on the following one.
Writing this novel is certainly more relaxed this way than under the pressure of NaNoWriMo, the way I wrote the first one. But something’s been bothering me as I write. Last year when I was writing under major time pressure, with the NaNoWriMo goal of simply getting 50,000 words down without worrying too much about how nice these words were, things were easier. But this time round, I’m conscious that I have more time to play with to write beautiful words rather than just bashing out the storyline.
What made me realise this problem a little more clearly was the first half of a guest post at Men With Pens this morning called How to Feel Consistently Confident About Your Writing. The post mentioned that typical experience I have when reading someone else’s work and I love their style, and think to myself “I wish I could write like that”. I often feel like my fiction writing doesn’t have a special style of its own, and doesn’t sound beautiful. Very occasionally I string a sentence or two together that I could class as “beautiful”, but it’s rare.
I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that I’m still not that great at re-working my drafts. I can get the gist down but then revising and making my writing really “sing”, as they say, is something I need more practice at. The second reason is, I suspect, that it’s just really hard to read your own writing as a stranger would. Even if I leave it for months at a time and read it again, it’s still clearly something I wrote and I can’t seem to detach enough from it to figure out if it actually sounds good or not. I’m not sure how to fix this, but I’m hoping that practice helps. Anyone got some good tips for me?
Nobody ever arrested me for overdue library books … yet
You might remember my frank confession about my difficulties in returning library books by the due date. If you don’t remember, suffice to say that I have major overdue library book issues. On three continents.
However, I’m pleased to say that until now I have never been arrested in connection to overdue library books. Heidi Dalibor has. Her library book problems had reached the stage where the library sent her a court summons, which she ignored (presumably she was too busy reading) and this week the police came to her home, handcuffed her and took her down to the station where she was fingerprinted. All for two overdue paperback books. Now I’m scared.
PS: In fact I’m more scared of my writing buddy who hasn’t yet received a copy of the second chapter of my new novel, which I should have sent her already according to our buddy system. I’ve got my long list of excuses ready, of course, and I have written about three quarters of the chapter. I just hope she doesn’t send the police around for this.
It seems that I have original ideas, at least occasionally
Remember a few weeks ago I wrote another short story for a Writers Weekly 24-hour contest? Well, results are still not in yet, but what I read on the Writers Weekly site today still cheered me up somewhat.
Angela Hoy of Writers Weekly wrote a post this week about the common themes that she found in the several hundred short story entries for this contest. Remember, every story has to be based on the given topic - that’s one of the ways they ensure you really do write it within the 24-hour time period - and apparently, this means that many writers end up writing pretty similar stories. Her post included a long list of themes or plots that were common across several or more stories, and the reason I’m cheered up is this: the themes from my story didn’t make this list at all. So if nothing else, it seems that my idea was somewhat original. Whether the idea is good or not is another story, but being original is certainly a positive thing from where I’m standing.
Unspectacular beginning to writer buddy system
So … yesterday was the first deadline in our writing buddy system. Both my buddy Katrina and I had spectacularly disorganised weeks last week with the odd drama and hiccup thrown in for good measure, and failed to meet our deadline yesterday. Instead, we ate cheesecake together. (Baked cheesecake, the best kind).
However, we are not giving up, and decided that our deadlines are there to help us make progress and the deadlines are structured to give us a little room for movement - so we gave ourselves a small extension. Technically, it is still Sunday in many parts of the world, notably across North and South America, and we’re going to be using that time zone instead for our deadline! Yes, we’re totally cheating, but it’s better than giving up entirely.
My goal for yesterday was to write the second chapter of my Bratislava novel. I have an outline for it and a couple of pages written, and I am fairly confident I know how the rest of it is going to sound. After I do a little paid writing this morning and take a good walk with a friend, I’ll be raring to go and polish it off this afternoon. I promise. I’ll report back here with a little edit to prove that I really do get it done.
A big lack of writing motivation
So far, it’s really been one of those weeks. My paid writing gets done only because a deadline is looming; my poor fiction writing has only got a couple of looks in and only in the form of me opening up a Word file and leaving it open most of the day, hoping that seeing it down there on the bottom of the screen will inspire me to write.
But sometimes, you have those weeks where motivation for nearly everything is lacking. The Olympic Games are on - they’re a great distraction. The weather is warming up a little, so it’s substantially warmer outside than in my freezing house and it’s much more tempting to take a book outside than to sit doing any work. My desk is messy, full of piles of stuff I know needs doing, but I’m not sure where to start. I whittled some piles down this morning by discovering that several of them were full of bills that needed to be paid - I paid them, but you won’t be surprised to hear that this activity didn’t leave me feeling that full of inspiration. And then there’s all kinds of other stuff going on, personally, that doesn’t leave me with that much brain space for writing.
Surprisingly, I don’t really feel too guilty for neglecting my blogs, but I did feel the urge to mention some of this stuff here. The Word Wyrd blog linked to me recently on a list of “Ten great blogs for writers” (very flattering) and described this blog as being about “An aspiring writer shares what she’s learning as she goes along”. And this week, what I’m learning is not very much about writing, but about how many ways there are to not write.
If this was somebody else’s problem, I’d have a long list of tips to give them, and have pretty much given myself a lot of advice too. But sometimes it just seems like waiting for the next, fresh week to start might be a better option. I owe my motivation buddy a first chapter by Sunday, but that’s still five days away, so there’s time for the motivation to kick in again before then. Fingers crossed.
Getting back on the train soon
I’ve had a car for most of winter, which is handy for getting to work when it’s cold and dark in the mornings. But it does mean that I’m missing an important ritual of my teaching days: catching the train and the bus. I’ll have to give up this car again soon, but I’m really looking forward to getting back into the public transport lifestyle.
If you haven’t tried it (and especially if you otherwise sit in the car for a long commute) I heartily and thoroughly recommend a few commuter trips on the train and bus to inspire some good fiction writing. Getting on the train works for me on so many levels that I can even feel a bullet-pointed list coming on:
- I see (and eavesdrop on) all kinds of people. On the commuter train headed into the city centre in the mornings there are all kinds of workings; the teenagers and school kids are there in the afternoons on my way home from school; on the bus I find immigrants and students studying English here, some of them my own students, and I’ve even met a bunch of librarians who take the same bus. You don’t get to hear how these people talk, what they talk about, how they dress or how they move their hands - all important fodder for writers - from the inside of your car.
- I get a chance to read more. I’ve noticed the decrease in number of novels consumed since I’ve been driving the car to work. Train and bus time is a bit like going on holiday, in that it’s a guilt-free chance to get my nose stuck in a book.
- And I listen to podcasts on writing and books - something I miss most at the moment because there aren’t that many other moments when I have a good block of time to listen to my favourites. Sometimes I put them on in the kitchen when I’m cooking but it’s hard for me to listen properly and still follow a recipe correctly!
- When I’ve got a story or a chapter to edit or proofread, I can do this surprisingly well on the train - as long as I get a seat. Perhaps there’s so much noise around me that it helps me focus on just my tiny world in front of me, those few pieces of paper that I’m trying to perfect.
- Finally, call me weird but I also adore the walk through the city or through the central train station when I transfer from my train onto the bus in the mornings. The city is alive, and people are heading in every direction. I can sometimes even buy my copy of the Big Issue if a vendor is standing near the art gallery. When I don’t get this injection of city life I really miss it.
Come the hot summer months I’ll no doubt be complaining about the suddenly longer walk home from the train station (it’s only ten minutes, but when the temperature hits the century that sure feels like more), or about Transperth buses that don’t come on time or don’t stop because they’re already full, but if you hear me doing that, just point me back to this post and remind me how good the journey is for my fiction writing.