Monthly Archives: Oct 2016

On being a fish out of water

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Post by Hannah Buff

Miranda France (@MirandaFrance1) delivered an interesting, inspiring and eye-opening talk to Creative Writing students at the University of Westminster last Friday. One of the main things that stood out to me as an aspiring writer was how open and honest she was about her work and all that it entailed: from how she stumbled upon writing; to how her publisher told her to go back and rewrite the entire second book as it just wasn’t her. Her editors gave her the most important advice a writer can receive: that sometimes writing is like solving a Rubik’s cube that just doesn’t want to be completed. She was honest about all the highs and the lows suffered while writing, though, as she put it, you suffer many more lows as a writer than you do highs. She mentioned how everything she has been through shaped her to become the writer and person she is today, which spoke to me as everything that has happened so far in life has made me the person I am.

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She spoke about the essay she wrote that launched her writing career and landed her the book deal, and how without that offer she may not have ever written what she has. While her first book, ‘Bad Times in Buenos Aires’ – an extended version of the essay – is not the kind of  genre I usually read, it seems like it would be an interesting and rewarding experience. Her second book, ‘The Day Before the Fire’, sounded more my cup of tea and I definitely want to look into it more. Not only did the journey surrounding the character Ros resonate with me, but the story behind the title also prompted me, and my reflective writing class, into a lengthy reflection about history. It explores how we, as a society, love to preserve the memory of the past, no matter how cruel and ashamed we should be about it, for it shaped the world today. We can assume (based on our own history) that centuries into the future, places we know and the parts we are ashamed of will be preserved for new generations to learn about.

From the talk the one piece of advice I will take with me as I progress as a writer, and I am sure many others will also, is:

“Do not be afraid to feel like a fish out of water.”

Because as a writer you need to throw yourself into new and possibly uncomfortable situations to come up with a great story. Thank you Miranda for a great perspective on writing and showing us that following the road to writing is not impossible.

Hannah Buff,  24 October 2016

Writing myths #1

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Post by Nick Johnstone

A popular myth about writing is that everyone who writes, writes everyday. It stems from the mythology of a blinding passion being the fuel of writing. And who powered by a blinding passion can go a day without writing?

The reality is very different. Writing, as I see it, is episodic, seasonal. I rarely write everyday. And in fact, recently, I took an epic nine month break from writing altogether, to refresh my palette, charge up my fingertips and gather some new rolling down the hillside of life experience.

People skeptically said to me of this sabbatical, Oh but Nick you can only afford to do this because you’ve written fifteen books. But the reality is this: I’ve taken breaks from writing before, in fact quite regularly.

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Studying the fever graph of my writing career, I see episodic seasons of high temperature productivity (for example, in one season, the writing of three 70,000 word books in 15 months); in-between quiet seasons of bitty, fleeting, quick-turnaround activity (journalism, essays, contributions to anthologies, album liner notes, blogging) and hushed periods of no-writing where there was quite happily nothing that I wanted to say through writing.

On the MA Writing Business course, we had a guest speaker recently – a former graduate of our BA Creative Writing programme – and she said that at one point on her road to success, she didn’t write a single word for eighteen months.

The best part of this revelation is that her writing career took off as soon as that sabbatical ended and she’s now doing very well for herself. That eighteen month silence, though painful at the time, with hindsight now, turns out to be the best career move she could have made because she stayed silent when it was the right move to stay silent. When she started feeling her writing again, she followed that call and doors opened for her all over London.

If you look at writing careers generally, of course you’ll find plenty of examples of writers who can go about the work with a factory-esque 9 to 5 vigour, books firing off into bookshops with precise regularity. That’s just one way of writing. Just as my episodic, seasonal variety is one more. The point here? Don’t worry if you don’t write anything for a few days, weeks or even months. You haven’t lost the passion. You’re no less of a writer. You’re just busy being you. Trust that the silence is more fertile than a screen full of empty words. That writing is a journey. And that when you have something to say again, the words will of course come running by the thousand.

Nick Johnstone,  13 October 2016

True enough

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Post by Matt Morrison

Last week, I began co-teaching one of our creative writiFile:Indian Election Symbol Ink Pot and Pen.pngng courses with the playwright Ben Musgrave. And when Ben asked the class to write down something they believed in ‘as a writer’, I thought I’d take part in the exercise too. At first I was slightly surprised by what I wrote: ‘your writing needs to be true enough’. But as we started talking about our different answers, I realised I’d been thinking through versions of Ben’s question for a very long time.

The search for ‘authenticity’ and’ truth’ is a preoccupation for many writers. And at the same time, we’re often given advice like ‘write what you know’ – as if that will automatically confer some kind of truthfulness on our work. But writers are always champing at the bit to write what they don’t know, just as readers want to read what is new and unfamiliar. (Which reminds me of something similar I once heard a theatre director say: that an audience most wants an authentic voice from a world they’ve never been to.)

Writers quickly understand, therefore, that truth and truthfulness are very slippery ideas. What will happen to them both as our imaginations take flight, as characters drawn from our own experience develop lives of their own? And perhaps more worryingly, how can you be sure that your work speaks to your own wider sense of truth? Your feelings about the way the world is, or ought to be. Not all writers are motivated by such ‘moral’ concerns, but many of us worry about the ‘meaning’ of our work, and how that meaning translates onto our own values, our own beliefs about what is true.

The problem for me is that I always find it impossible to quite pinpoint meaning – at least, not without reducing what I’m writing to a banal platitude, or trivially obvious statement. It’s also impossible to ever say, once and for all, what I believe about something. Instead, I find myself constantly testing the things I feel most certain about, unable to avoid the possibility that I’m wrong, that things aren’t really that way at all. In other words, I never know what the whole truth is about what I’m writing, or about my own values, or what I think might need to change about the world.

Which is where true enough comes in – a strategy, maybe, to stop me becoming frozen in the headlights, confused and intimidated by the difficulty in achieving complete truthfulness or authenticity. I find that I can continue to have faith in something I’m working on as long as there is at least some truth – some moments of recognition, some details from my own life and experience which I feel, for now, I can stand by. Perhaps, for me, truth is like a single drop of dye in a pipette, with the power to colour an entire cup of water.

All this is why, when another writer comes to me and says that they are stuck with their idea – when they’ve lost interest, or belief in it – I suggest that they give the story, or one of its characters, a little bit of themselves. To hand over a detail from their own life. Because usually that tiny injection of the author’s real, lived experience is enough to re-vitalise the story, and rekindle the writer’s passion for telling it.

Matt Morrison,  5 October 2016