So much for writing at night

This is the blog post where I take back everything I said a few weeks ago! No, actually, that's a complete lie, I don't take any of it back. I have been trying out the routine I described here on Jan 1st for the past few weeks, but the writing at night element of it just isn't working. I loved coming into my study at 10pm and writing until 2am, but then I was so hyped up I wasn't getting to sleep til 3am... and was waking J up in the process. I was feeling jet-lagged, and both us were sleeping badly, which really ruins everything. It just wasn't working.

But - I am the kind of person that often needs to make a RADICAL change in order to knock me out of my rut, and this was that radical change. I have learned an enormous amount from what I have been doing, setting off for a walk first thing, and making sure I come back with something. I've learned to really observe the world around me, putting energy into seeing and hearing in a way that I have never done before. I've learned just how much inspiration this close observation can provide me for my writing, as I make notes on what I see and hear, sometimes things that I know no-one else is noticing.

It gives me enormous pleasure to be using my senses like this - when I am out and about, I watch how people interact, and when I sit in a cafe I don't have my head buried behind my laptop anymore or checking my mobile phone. I wonder if anyone has noticed me noticing - do they wonder at the single woman sitting there, with no book, no newspaper? Just a pen and notepad. Is anyone watching me?

Because of this, for the first time ever I have been writing fiction based on real life events, or how I saw them. This is really a revelation - first it takes the pressure off me to "make up" everything, all the time. It lets me give my imagination a kick-start, which I had been doing with prompts and the New Scientist articles in my book, but hadn't done in this way before.

My routine also severed my umbilical connection to the Internet. I do my best every day not to turn it on for the first few hours at least, but when I do, I also now feel freer to just turn it off again, pull out the cable, block the wifi. It's a great relief! If there is something I need to look up first thing in the morning because I hadn't got myself organised the night before, I feel in some way unclean!

So, the current plan is to shift everything back a few hours. I've managed to get to sleep earlier, it took a few days, and I am getting up earlier, but right now I am quite confused about when my writing time is. I love going out first thing, getting the blood moving. I often go out quite grumpy and come back totally exhilerated! I also like not starting to write straight after my walk but to let what I've observed percolate, while I get on with other stuff. So, maybe this should be my writing time right now? 6-9? Late dinner? Early dinner? I've started a new healthy eating regime too... the working at night had the effect of utterly throwing off my mealtimes so I kept skipping a meal, which didn't help.

To sum up: I need to sleep. I need to eat. I need to write. I need quality time with J. I need to let him sleep too. I haven't quite figured out all of those things, but it's only Jan 26th, there's still 11 months and 5 days to go!

Ah, so THIS is the writing life!

Decade revisited

In the spirit of it all, having only just realised that this is a new decade as well as a new year (bit slow, me), I thought about 1999. That was the year I wrote the first short story that was ever published, during my first visit to the sublime Anam Cara writing retreat which I have since revisited several times and where magic always always happens. Anyhow, I may really regret this, but that first story, Doing it in Eden, is still available online, in The Beat's second issue. Ok, yes, you can read it. Hmmm. Perhaps you shouldn't comment. No. Don't!

So, a momentous ten years, one that saw me starting to take writing seriously, attending two Arvon Courses, at the first of which I met J, my partner, and at the second was instructed by my writing idol Ali Smith to drop everything and write full time. An MA in creative writing, several workshops in the US, various publications and some lovely prizes, and then... my first book was born. What a decade!

Finally, I get it

After all that, it is fairly embarassing to admit this. But in the spirit of honesty I shall do it: only this week have I felt that I am really living The Writing Life. A few months ago I was asked to write about my daily writing routine for Branta and, perhaps stupidly, I wrote candidly about all the ridiculous things I do every day online. As someone commented somewhere, I should have been too ashamed to admit it all. Yes, I should have been. it wasn't so much a writing routine as Wordscraper tournaments and Amazon ranking checks with some writing slipping in there purely by chance every now and then.

Now, thanks in great part to the Twyla Tharp book, The Creative Habit, which I blogged about here,  as well as being castigated  by several far more efficient writers (thanks Adam M and David G!), I have made a radical change to my life, implementing it before Jan 1st to get a good start. And a good start it has been. I finally feel like a Writer. Let me elaborate:

• Simplify

The first thing I did was decide not to switch my mobile phone until 2pm or the Internet on til after 5pm . So, when I wake up, I don't run to check anything, don't feel like anyone can demand anything from me, that I have to reply to anything. No-one can need me to do anything. And I am not constantly multi-tasking and doing lots of things half-heartedly.

Tip: if you can get through the first hour after waking up without checking your email, it gets easier, believe me. I was really tired the other day (see later for why) and felt weak, felt like I needed email. But I fought it. Didn't give in. And the craving vanished.

• Feed the imagination

I have, over the last ten years, been both silly and, frankly, arrogant. I have never - I repeat this to shame myself further - never carried around a notebook and pen and taken notes. I never wrote done the great first lines that came into my head, never sat and watched people, recording observations, overheard snippets. I assume that if something was good enough, I would remember it. Well: You don't. It's GONE. Gone. I wonder now how much I have lost. Stories I've written in my head at night in bed and in the morning they've disappeared.

So, first thing in the morning, after breakfast, I go out and, following Twyla Tharp's example of what a writer she knows does,  I determine to come back with something. I take a notebook and pen, phone (for emergencies, switched off).

The first day I went for a wander around the neighborhood streets and while this was physically invigorating (damn cold) it didn't give me anything to take back. So on Day Two I headed the other way, to the shops, and went and sat in a cafe I'd never been in before. Because I didn't have my mobile on, I didn't sit there and check email obsessively every few mins. And I didn't look around for something to read or entertain me.

I just watched.

And I discovered how much I never normally see. The place was very busy, I watched everyone, and I wrote things down. And as I did this, I felt myself seeing in a whole new way, looking out for things no-one would see unless they paid careful attention. And, writing it down made me feel like a working writer. I was working. I sat for an hour and that day I definitely came back with something:  a character. She then provided the inspiration for not one but two stories, or beginnings of stories.

• Don't write yet

So, this is an interesting one, will see how this works, but when I get back from my walk, I go and spend several hours doing other work - with the Internet still off. This week it was finishing the gargantuan Arts Council grant application form, and working on a freelance project for the university's science faculty. And do you know what? Without email and Facebook I not only was more productive, I felt calmer.And all the while the stuff I had fed my imagination with earlier was whirling and percolating in the back of my mind.

• Make an appointment / Write at night

This is something I have been dying to try for a long, long time. A lot of well-known writers work at night, and I am a night-bird anyway, but normally we are watching telly or something. Not this week. This week, I had two hours or so of Internet time, 6-8, then spent time with J, dinner etc...But I had made an appointment with myself, so at 10pm each night I headed back to my study, the Internet off again, and stayed there til 2am, only writing and doing writing-related things.

Are you surprised to hear that I got a lot done? I wasn't sure what would happen. At first, I thought I might fall asleep. But I didn't. I love nighttime, the darkness, the different kinds of noises (city foxes squealing in our garden). I wrote several stories, the beginnings of stories, transcribed things I'd written, and in one hour on Wed night adapted another of my stories into a play.

I tried to simulate the conditions in which stories come into my head as I am dropping off to sleep by lying on some cushions on the floor and letting myself drift a bit. Hmm, sort of worked. Not great. Let's just say it might take some time. 

For me, as a short story writer, it makes so much sense to write at the end  of the day, when stuff has happened, when you have material, rather than first thing, when I am not very awake, when it's all a bit of a fuzzy blank. A novelist has what to work on, what to return to, so that's different, perhaps you need that clarity, that lack of stuff, in order to get back into it. But for me, this seems to work.

• Don't beat yourself up
  

My final point: I am not going to make myself crazy if one night I don't write much, I don't get much "done". As another well-known writer said, the main thing is to just turn up. And I turned up.

Not smooth sailing yet

Suffice it to say, the new routine has created some sleep problems for both of us, since I am creeping into bed at around 2.30am, and waking up at 11ish. We haven't got that one sorted yet. The other night I couldn't sleep til 4.30am. And, of course, I can't schedule anything for myself before 12 every day. Ok, that might be workable. I don't see why my writer-in-residence position at the Uni's Science Faculty should be morning-based? I bet a lot of the Faculty keep odd hours. Frankly - and I know I am not alone in this - this society is far too morning-based. New Scientist reported a while ago that, given the choice, the majority of us would go to be at around 1am and wake up at 9am. (Of course, if you have kids this is pretty impossible, I know. Sorry!)

So, there you have it. My first week truly feeling like a Working Writer. It is a relief to have got here. Because I didn't have a Creative Habit, because I didn't have a way of working, I was coming up with a load of bizarre scenarios - getting a job in a flower shop, for example - that might serve to force me to write. But now it all feels right, at last. I have a routine, I have time slots for different things, I have ritual activities to do, I have a way of generating inspiration.

It's all new and I know it will take time, will evolve. I am really excited to see how it goes, to incorporate days in the Nanoscience and Quantum Information Centre into my routine. I will write more as it happens - and wish you all a wonderful year in which you are able to do what you most want to do, calmly and without too much frustration, guilt and angst. Happy New Year!

A wonderful book on creativity; a present for everyone

I have never read a book about creativity by a non-writer, so renowned dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit was a real revelation to me. So refreshing to hear from someone who deals in something other than words - an artist in her 60s who has choreographed over 150 dances - and to see so clearly how I can learn from her in terms of setting myself up to be creative on a daily basis, something I sorely need. It has been years since I was last in that kind of routine - not since my MA in Creative Writing. I just haven't managed, as a writer of short and very short stories, to set myself up properly, and as a result I feel highly unproductive, uncreative, dissatisfied.

Something Julia said last week on her blog about her NaNoWriMo experience struck a chord: " I am calmer, more purposeful. This feels like a job now. I go to work and actually manufacture something." This is the feeling I want, the feeling that this is my job, that I am making something.

Twyla (if I may be so bold as to call her that) spoke to me from the very first page. She is talking about the blank page, the white canvas, the empty dance studio:

"Some people find this moment - the moment before creativity begins - so painful that they simply cannot deal with it. They get up and walk away from the computer, the canvas, the keyboard; they take a nap or go shopping or fix lunch or do chores around the house. They procrastinate. In its most extreme form, this terror totally paralyses people.

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling the empty space constitutes my identity."

Yes. I hear that. All of it. When I read the above I thought, This person can teach me something. And I was right. With chapters entitled "Rituals of Preparation", "Your Creative DNA", "Before You Can Think Out of the Box, You Have to Start with A Box", and "Ruts and Grooves", I started learning, in just one day's reading, a whole host of new ways to set up the Creative Habit.

I especially love starting a new box for each new project and filling it with the things that inspire, so I have begun a box (an old shoe box) for my new fiction-writer-in-residence position at the University's Science Faculty and have in it the program from last week's showing of five films made by the Faculty interviewing mathematicians. Inspirational.

My first box!

Now that I have my box I feel like something will come of this, that it is in some way "official" in my head, regardless of the outside world. And I love the idea of being able to rummage through the box in search of new inspiring material. What a great idea!

There is a great deal more wisdom in here, never passed on in a preachy or insistent tone, but gently yet firmly. This is someone who knows what she does, how she does it best and why. An ideal present for anyone who wants to do anything with a passion. I am off to read it again. And again. So no, you can't borrow my copy. Get your own!