Exploring

Your writing won't suffer if you take a day off. Especially if you are invited to visit an old disused church tucked away on a backstreet of the city.

And you climb a staircase barely as wide as you are, up and up, to the roof.

And look at out over the city from a place you have never been before.

You will remember how important it is to explore and learn that a day off from writing might not  be a day off after all.

Anatomy of my Study

I love seeing photographs of the places where writers write. Amazing creative things can happen in scruffy attics, corners of kitchen tables and sheds at the bottom of the gardens. Everywhere there are writers sitting alone somewhere working away. There are some fantastic photographs of these places here.

I thought I'd share some photographs of my study with you.  

There is a comfortable chair where I do most of writing. Alfalfa, my littlest dog, usually snuggles up next to me to keep me company but sometimes she wriggles so much that she gets the chair all to herself. I have a pink metal fold-up desk. I bought it years ago to use in the garden but now it makes the perfect desk. There's a little bookshelf overflowing with books that I am currently reading and a cabinet where I keep odds and ends. Outside is the garden. Alfalfa keeps a look out for cats and I watch the flowers grow. It suits us both perfectly.

The walls are bright yellow. I think the landlord painted them years ago and I have grown to love them.

The room is full of books. I also use the bookshelves to keep the little things I love - artwork and things people have made for me. I like having them close by but it gets a bit cluttered sometimes.

This cabinet is called 'Big B'. I can't remember exactly why. I do have a tendency to name things. It's from the 1950s and was once used as a sort of pantry to keep food cold. It even has a cute egg rack inside. It stores all my craft materials and pens and paper too. The front pulls down and you can use it as a table. 

So that's it. My study. I never thought I'd be so lucky to have a room all to myself for writing. I plan to enjoy it for as long as a I can. 

Where do you write? I'd love to see some photographs (add a link to some in the comments if you want to share.)

The Secret of the Second Idea

Imagine that you have come up with the best idea ever. It might be a plot for a novel or the perfect way to describe your character. It just comes whizzing out of nowhere and lodges itself in your brain. You think no idea could ever be better. You might do a little 'I've got a new idea' dance or just feel smug for a while.

But I usually find that this isn't actually the best idea that I am going to have. It's usually just the most obvious idea. It might be a cliche or something I've heard somewhere before. The very best idea comes later. It might take some pondering but the second idea always comes and it's always so much better than the first. I think it's strength comes from not being the most obvious. It's usually more original and has more of me in it.

You might find that for you it's the third or fourth or twenty-eighth idea that is the best but for me the second idea is always the one to watch out for.

New Year Novel Duel ...

I stumbled across this interesting project - a writing duel between two writers, Chris Jackson and Rob Smedley. They each started to write a novel on 1st January 2010 and aim to keep writing until the end of the year. It is a battle, a race to finish writing their novel and document their progress.

Writing a novel can be long and lonely and I love the idea that two writers can spur each other on during the process in friendly competition.

Making Time

Sometimes it can be hard to find time to write. There are always people wanting you to do  something else right now and so writing can easily slip to being your last priority. I want to share with you a few tips for squeezing more writing time out of a day. These are all strategies that really work for me and maybe some of them will work for you too. 

1 . Start thinking

You don’t need a pen or paper or even a computer to start writing. What I do is schedule my thinking time before I even start writing. So, if I am walking to the shops then I decide to plan a certain bit of a story in my head or work out a plot problem. It helps ideas to incubate and it's usually time that you would be wasting anyway.

2.  Carry a notebook

Take a small notebook with you everywhere you go. Try to write in it whenever you can. Write when you are waiting for someone or in the five spare minutes you have when you are early for an appointment. I tend to do these bursts of writing in the car or on the bus. Little and often is the key. You’ll soon feel like you’re getting somewhere.

3. Make extra time

I know it sounds terrible at first but getting up either an hour earlier or an hour later does work. If you can’t manage an hour then even 15 minutes will do. You get a chunk of extra quiet time to write.

3. Tell people that you are writing

I have found that this one really works. If you tell someone else that  are busy because you are writing then it helps you take your writing more seriously. It makes it more real somehow. Hopefully it will stop you putting everything else above your writing.

4. Take the time you do have seriously

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Set yourself goals. Work counts and time limits work brilliantly. You’ll get more done if you use the time you do have more productively.

Do you have any other tips for making more time for writing in your life?

Finishing

I have been writing a story for as long as I can remember. It is one particular story that I have been wanting to tell. It has been bubbling around in my imagination for years trying to get out.

It took me a long time to get started. I worried that it wouldn’t be good enough, that no one would read it, that even I wouldn’t want to read it. I tried and tired and failed to start and tried again. Then I decided to take it slowly and steadily. 1000 words at a time. I chipped away at it gently and now I have almost finished the first draft. I am about 5,000 words from the end. Of course there is editing and re-writing to do but this is the end of the first stage.
 

It feels huge but doesn’t feel how I expected it to. When I have been this close to the end of writing a non-fiction book, I want it to end. I want to email it to someone and never see it again. I want print all the pages off the computer and send them far away. I feel relieved and tired, proud of myself but ready to finish. This time I want to hold on to the book. I am not exactly sure how it will end and I like that feeling. I like it how it is and I don’t want it to finish.

It is funny that I didn’t want to start this book and now I don’t want it to end.

Swimming and Writing

I love to swim. I really do. When I was small I swam every single day. Most of my early childhood memories involve swimming with the hot sun on my back.

I didn’t swim for a long time. For more than ten years I pretended that I didn’t swim, that I couldn’t swim. I somehow forgot how much I loved it. Then one day, I needed to swim again. It was all I wanted to do. I couldn’t think about anything else. I was too scared to swim in a crowded pool so joined a fancy health club. It was the kind of place where they give you a pile of fluffy white towels when you walk through the door. I really couldn’t afford it. I didn’t even have a job but I had a beautiful swimming pool. I swam and swam and swam and kept on swimming.

Now, as I swim, I make up stories in my head. I try out new ideas. I close my eyes and all the sticky bits in my writing come unstuck. It’s a kind of magic that happens under that electric blue water.

It is important to find those places that help you write or the routines that get your mind whirring. You don’t even need to do any writing. It might be that you always get your best ideas by going for a run or on a particular walk or by sitting in a certain cafe. You might already know your secret thinking-about-writing place but if you haven’t then you should go and hunt it down. Try different approaches, go to new places and see what happens. You might stumble across your best writing yet.

Talking About the Internet

Yesterday, I put on my favourite old shoes for luck and drove for three hours to speak at an academic conference.

The conference was all about Transliteracy (defined as ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks’ in case you were wondering.) It as all about how the way we interact with each other is changing due to new technologies, like the internet. I gave a talk about how the role of the author and the reader are beginning to blur and overlap. If everyone is encouraged to join in then how does this change the way we usually think about who write and who reads literature? I spend alot of time researching such things and get over excited by new possibilities for writing.

But oh it was nerve-racking. It is a terrifying business being on a stage with lights shining on you as you try to sound coherent. This was a pretty high-tech conference, so as I was speaking the main points were turned into tweets and posted live on twitter. Even people in the audience were encouraged to tweet about what they thought. There were people blogging about it live and it was being filmed. So clever but a little bit intimidating. In such situations, it is hard not to stare down at your shoes and hope for the best.