How to find your process when writing

Art school teaches student to focus on ‘their process’- the optimum way for them to work to make the things they want to make. It is a combination of the manner of working, the speed and timing along with the materials used and the subject matter chosen. It involves everything! Now, as someone with less facility at drawing and painting than writing, I have, over the last few weeks, been forced to look more at process as I have been drawing pages for a rather strange and free illustrated book. First I found a style I liked, and a subject I could draw easily. I like drawing from life, but if I needed to work fast (another one of my self-imposed limits) I needed shapes I was familiar with and could summon up from my memory. I like boats, the sea, prehistoric and shamanic art, islands and…dots. Dots are a great way to mark time as you work out what to do next in your drawing. Using this method I could produce up to eight A4 pictures a day that I was satisfied with. If it all sounds strangely bloodless then that’s a failure of the writing, not the process! It was very exciting and interesting and multi-dimensional to do. However, just as you learn impro acting from some simple external rules; I believe you can ‘learn to be optimally creative’ with simple external ‘process’ rules.

I realise that many artists are TOO skilful. They’re like the slick guitarists who become session musicians unlike the Clash who could only play three chords. But when your palette is three chords you are FORCED into creative overdrive. It’s rather like the lesson on story writing where instead of asking the student to write about their life, or their street or even their house (that’s boring!) you demand a story about one brick in their house. The flood gates often open at that point. We live in a world of fantastic choice and opportunity but that very abundence stymies the creative powers which thrive on problem solving, and for that you need defined problems- which in art are the rules you set yourself which often reflect your limitations. It’s hard to set limiting rules, that’s why real ones created by limitation force the hand and create a ‘no escape’ scenario.

So how can this apply to writing? I think every aspect of the writing process needs examination- the machine you write on, the paper, the printer, the ideas, the subject, the style- all with regard to speed. I don’t just mean absolute speed- so many words per hour (apparently Dr Johnson could manage 1800 words an hour when a deadline was on for the appropriately named Idler magazine) I mean speed over time. It’s not so good if you write 4000 words a day for six weeks and then crash and burn and do nothing for a year. Or maybe it is. That’s how Frederick Forsythe writes his novels. Others drip feed 200- 300 well turned words every single day for a year. Very often you hear of writers doing a 1000 words a day. From my experience the range of the professional writers I know is around 1500-2000 a day. But there are many exceptions and this is all secondary to KEEPING GOING. You have to hone this whole process with one goal in mind- keeping going, because giving up on a writing project is your number one enemy- nothing else. So reverse engineer your process with that in mind. Build in routine, nice little breaks, a policy of having fun as you type (I put in all the stupid puns, rude jokes and pretension I can- all is pruned out later – but it KEEPS ME WRITING rather than self-censoring). You are either in flow mode- downloading and creating or EDIT mode. You can flip between the two, and of course you get better at that, but generally you want to be full throttle in flow mode for good work.

And I think it helps to think about what you are good at and what you aren’t. Don’t try and fix it- try and work round it. Arthur Ransome, when he illustrated the Swallows and Amazons books (and I LOVE his illustrations) was really lacking in confidence when drawing people and especially faces (it’s common and often simply stems from using line rather than shading and as a result, not knowing what the important lines are- in drawing objects that we like, or things that don’t move we find the important lines more easily). Digression aside, Ransome DIDN’T learn to draw faces better- he simply drew people from behind or wearing low hats! And there you have the beginning of a ‘style’. So find the kind of writing you excel at and do more of it. Do less of what you can’t do. If dialogue is not your thing- don’t do it, or, like John Updike, add commentary to any dialogue, thus giving it more resonance. Find your limitations and then get creative- use them to do what you want to do. For example if you want to write a sci-fi book but can only manage travel writing as a genre, write a sci-fi novel which takes the form of a travel book about visiting some place in the future- with all the conventions of a travel book except it is set in an imaginary place. If you can only ‘do’ academic style writing write academically about removing the dog poo that walkers leave behind in those horrid little black bags. Or something! Mix it up. The Nobel prize winner J.M.Coetzee is quite a nerdy left brain kind of writer. He admits to being uninterested in description. But he uses his limited palette to great effect. The creativity doesn’t exist in having a ‘great idea’, it lies in using your limited palette to do more than at first is apparent. The punk rockers could have stayed in their garages playing old rock hits badly- instead they took the tools of old style rock and did something very exciting and new.