Here’s the secret to good writing habits
When I first started to seriously consider writing I was a very mature age student attempting a PhD with the purpose of turning the life of a man I knew into a commercially viable biography.
By the time I was ready to write, I had collected so much research material and it was churning around in my brain like a fully loaded washing machine, and I was completely paralysed, because I had no idea how to use it.
Each day for two weeks I’d click on a new blank page on the computer and it just stared straight back at me, its whiteness dazzling. How could I possibly assault it and disturb its serenity? I was near desperate when my mother out of the blue suggested I should go to a hypnotherapist friend of hers. I won’t go into the details but the result was that at the end of that first (and only) session, I left her office and went straight home to my computer, opened a blank page and began writing.
That was in 2006, and I haven’t stopped writing since then.
I love the feel and the visuals of that white page and my black keyboard, and they act like a spur for me. In that first year of my PhD I maintained a tight discipline and started work immediately after I’d finished breakfast, ignoring all domestic duties, usually working till lunchtime and then putting in an extra couple of hours in the late afternoon. Deadlines were constantly looming, even if they were only ones I set myself. My husband got into the habit of ringing when he was about to leave the office, in the hope that I might have pulled myself together and was ready to think about dinner.
I hate to say it but more often than not, he came home to a darkened house, with only a desk light and the glow of my computer screen to indicate that there was someone at home.
I also found that it was useful to get up at night if I had a good idea and write it out, having suffered the loss of several good ideas by going back to sleep and not remembering a thing about them in the morning!
Since then, I’ve imposed more control over my time at the computer, and I’ve discovered an odd thing. I find I can sit down at any time of the day to write, but that it has to come from an inner compulsion, which is driven not in any overtly conscious way by me, but by something inside me that tells me I’m ready. I therefore am not disturbed if I don’t go near the computer for days, as I now have confidence in my subconscious mind directing my actions re writing. I like to have a couple of projects on the go at the one time, and it seems to me that as I’m going about my non writing life, the back of my mind is working on one or other without my knowing.
Actual real life is terribly important to my writing habits. It’s amazing how a remark, be it in the grocery shop, or from an intimate friend, can add to what’s going on in the back blocks of my mind!
Recently I accompanied my 13 year old grandson on his walk with his wheelbarrow on his weekly collection of his neighbours’ recyclable items that he could then take to the machine that would pay him 10c a bottle or can. I’d been wrestling with how to give extra depth to the grief my 12 year old heroine was experiencing after the death of her best friend in the novel that I’d almost completed, and I suddenly realised that this experience was a perfect vehicle to develop another side of the two friends, Azita and Holly about which I hadn’t given enough time up to that point. It also allowed the great secret that Azita was holding close to her to take shape.
It involved a pretty big rewrite and another strand to be woven into the whole, but it worked, and helped me plait together into a coherent graceful swirl the several themes running through the book that include bullying, coding, climate change and endangered species, learning to see the world from a refugee’s point of view, and the journey towards independence and self-belief that my heroine, Holly aged 12, takes during Year 7.
The other thing I’ve discovered is that if I come to a knotty problem that seems intractable and isn’t going anywhere and feels like a tangled fishing line, I have to just keep on working at it, deleting, editing, looping backwards and forwards, rewriting, altering the sentence, adding and subtracting words, as I search for a way forward. This is the most intensely enjoyable aspect of writing as far as I’m concerned, and the moment I’ve unravelled all the knots and can see my way through to a possibly useful conclusion to the particular problem, I get up and walk away from the computer. This has happened so many times and I only realised several weeks ago that it is more than a coincidence, it is a pattern in my writing habits. It means that when I come back to the computer and look at the problem, I’ve got a fresh mind to review the solution, and can move on from there, or cancel it out and start again!
Writing Azita and Me taught me to understand my own writing habits, and how important it is for me to maintain a normal life and not to be wedded to my computer every day.
It was one of the most enjoyable writing experiences I’ve had to date and, most particularly, it gave me the chance to inhabit the skin of my twelve year old narrator, on the way awakening in me a greater zest for life which I won’t forget in a hurry.
Find out more about Azita and Me here.