It unfolds in a country ruled by a military junta. Literature and freedom of speech have been banned and the holdings of all libraries burnt.

The narrative voice belongs to an aging authoress who lives on a vast estate and whose confidante is her old professor who lives in the nearby city.

Despite Draconian laws, they continue to write. They meet periodically to discuss their own works and literature in general.

The novel is divided into five parts, one of which is titled The Fabrication. Here the narrator describes how she creates her fictions, and compares her methods to those of her professor.

Her methods are based on my own, but I have exaggerated them, somewhat, in the novel.

Here are a few extracts:

In my experience, stories already exist, like bunches of grapes hanging from vines in the personal and collective unconscious. They are lush with potential, robustly coloured, waiting to be plucked and pressed into the equivalent of wine, waiting to be manipulated by an author and rendered into text. If an author fails to harvest his allotted share, the fruit will lose vitality, or perhaps be picked by another. Or the characters-in-waiting will grow restless and move on for, like unborn souls, they are urgent for life.

Sometimes my compositions would unfold gently, like the intrusion of morning or evening, or like the stretching petals of an opening flower. Sometimes a tale arrived as haunting visions, forcing me to stay up all hours while great insects chirruped cacophony into humid air. Sometimes I just heard the narrative utterance of the first lines and first paragraph and I would hark and go with them.

While composing my fictions, I followed an indulgent, daily routine. I rose at dawn, relishing the sun’s light, wasting no time, squeezing from the hours every drop of life. I wrote by hand, preferring the hold of a pen and the sensuality of paper over computer.

Sometimes I got up from my pages and strolled through the garden. Or I walked to the ridge and looked back towards the house, with my thoughts on what I was creating, processing it from a distance, allowing it to breathe. I continually modelled the clay of my creation, cutting away at its exterior to release the composition from a foetal place.

I seldom wrote at night, instead reading or listening to music, though I continued living the creative process, occasionally acting it out. Sometimes I glanced through what I had written that day, but made no corrections.

In beginning a new piece, I wrote down the title, which I never changed. This served as a contract, an anchor and commitment to the process … I set down a template, a blueprint, as an artist will sketch a cartoon before beginning on the painting itself, or a sculptor first fashions a wax maquette. This would not be anything rigid, just a rough draft of what I intended the novel to be about. It was not a plot outline. I never worked with plots.

I generally wrote the first and last chapters, marking the boundaries of the tale – the point of embarkation and the final destination. This light embrace positioned me and I felt secure within it. I located the centre of the narrative and composed from there, following the pulsing, life-craving of the story within me, embellishing the narrative with flamboyant and florid devices, peppering it with artefacts and symbolism, sometimes knotting sequins to catch light.

I never dictated to the work, but instead irrigated it, permitting it to grow and reach its fullness organically. I thought of myself, not so much as the creator of the tale but as its unfolder – the instrument that gave it life. The question might arise as to whether I considered myself a mere channel and not actually a composer.

When I had identified the sound of the narrative voice, when it resonated confidently within me, I would decide which wardrobe to dress from for the duration of the novel and select a set of clothes. I would wear these outfits only to write.

Properly attired, sitting at my desk or pacing the stoep, I visualised a door. The world into which this door led would be that of the new fiction and it was through that door that my characters entered. I left it slightly ajar throughout the creative process.

With each novel’s portal there was a precise time of opening, a time when I turned the handle, or drew back a bolt, or flicked a small catch, or turned a key, swinging the door open. From this point there was no going back. Either I walked in, or strode in, or took each step cautiously. There was no telling what lay beyond, in that new world over which I alone had mastery. I would then call up characters from out of the shadows, leaving the door held open on a hook and waiting, like a stage director who had pasted advertisements outside a theatre.

I paid little attention to how my characters turned up as long as they did not let me down once I had accepted them, leaving me stranded. Sometimes I heard the ring of wagon wheels against cobbles, or the clip of a horse’s hooves, or the idling purr of a restored Cadillac as its passengers stepped out.

The  professor was not comfortable with this avant-garde uncertainty, the vagueness, that he judged me to employ in peopling my novels. In a classic way, he composed all his characters, first sketching them, then defining and clothing them, then clarifying their role, all within the preparatory drafting of a foundation plot. He wanted to control his characters and found the untimely arrival of my unknown, ex-directory persons disconcerting. Because the individuals who graced his novels were completely his creation, they were safe and accomplished, posing no challenge to his control of the whole.  He was especially concerned about my emotional involvement and by the way I empowered figures.

Even though I made use of itinerant players, I also drew from everyday life. I took from the world what I needed and altered its shape and purpose to make of it something it was not. I walked the various quarters of the city, but particularly the docklands, frequenting cafés and cabarets, show-bars, strip-salons and gaming-rooms, sitting alone in corners, observing, continually trawling social encounters, hunting and gathering material to enrich my novels. I irrigated reality and harvested substance, borrowing from people their form and manner while taking care never to expose myself as a working author.

I filled a data-base with faces, modes of dress, manners, inebriation, courtesy, vulgarity, desire, the gentlest of gestures, a movement of the mouth, the turning of a head toward light, the glance of one stranger toward another. I took note of how women used cosmetics, how they painted their faces and with what colours and whether they replaced waxed eyebrows with thin inexpressive pencil lines or left their own to give proper feature to their eyes. I was fascinated by the application of foundation, rouge and hair dye. I looked out for unusual jewellery.

When my characters were more or less assembled, inside the place where I was to begin the novel, I would half-close the door for intimacy, still allowing for any latecomers. Then, together, we prepared for the creative process, as though to dance, without disturbance from the outside world, and where all of us felt safe. We knew that there would come a time when I, as author, had to conclude the story and bid them farewell, so we savoured every moment. I would be right there among them, yet apart, enacting with them, yet a few steps back.

On completion, when the tale was done, just before finally closing it off, I indulged in the pleasure of what I had created. Late at night, in the deep silence, I would walk back through the fictitious world. There I would make tiny adjustments, repositioning this or that, adding a colour here or a hat there, brushing a texture, cutting away something that might now seem superfluous. And even at that very late stage, if it was necessary, I might allow a dialogue to extend, or slightly alter the course of an event. I might even permit a character some last, final deed.

Going back into the fiction was like entering a magic land and I would be there like a producer just before curtain-up, just before the entire composition was given over to an audience. The feeling of accomplishment was exhilarating – like placing a keystone or tasting a fine dessert.

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It usually begins with Post-It Notes. They surround my monitor as I type this.

If not those sticky, colored squares, then it’s a ragtag collection of paper bits that start my stories. I get ideas in droves and jot them down for later use. It’s also how I organize what I need to do. If I can see it, I’ll remember.

The stories that shoot into my head have to be noted or they’re lost to the soup of my boiling imagination. Seriously, it’s soup in there. I write bizarro fiction. It’s the genre of the weird.

My publishers like to call bizarro the literary equivalent to the cult section of a video store. We write entertaining, amazing fiction. Bizarro encompasses many other expressions: noir, horror, westerns, fantasy, science fiction, and many other genres. It’s a lot of fun to write and to read. It makes for interesting soup.

So at the moment, beside the burning novella that’s mostly finished (I only have the writing it down part left to do), I have purple and yellow Post-Its to tell me what to write.

Once the littlest kid is fed, clean, and off to preschool, I sit down and concentrate on a note. Or I might first do a load of laundry, play with the dog, make a salad, grab a mocha, clean a toilet, paint, or play on facebook for an hour, then concentrate on a note. It might also turn out that while the kid is involved in video games before school I’ll have a few moments to work on something. Say, a bit about how I write?

Music comes next. I devote time every week to building up my playlists or culling Pandora stations into something I can let go and use to tap-tap-tap my stories out. Currently, Die Antwoord, Love and Rockets, and Modest Mouse make up the majority of my office ambiance.

I have a bit of A.D.D. creativity. Writing is often interrupted by other artistic pursuits. I usually have several projects going on at once. Some begun years ago have yet to be finished. But I’m not usually nailed to my chair when I write.

However, I’ve been initiated into a certain style of writing that I’m coming to both appreciate and enjoy. I’ve not yet done it strictly by the rules, because I didn’t have the time involved. Carlton Mellick III, the Grand Master of Bizarro Fiction, has come up with a three-day writing marathon idea. What he does is spend three days doing nothing but writing a novella. He barely sleeps, eats, or gets up from his chair until his book is done. He comes up with simply brilliant stories that people love.

I tried this in a two-day format and wrote nearly an entire twenty-five thousand word novella. The first two days produced the bulk of it, while I sat in my very hot office with very little clothing on and wrote. Later in the week I had a couple of days to go at the rest of it leisurely, and finished it up then. Certainly, after such a marathon one must go back and edit, but surprisingly, not that much.

I’ll soon be doing a full-fledged three-day marathon. We’ll see what I can come up with.

Normally, I’m up and down. Like today. While writing this, I’ve played with my son, fed him, clothed him, and I’m about to clean him up. I’ve answered messages and played around on facebook. I’ve picked through my favorites on YouTube and stared at my half-done painting. I’ll come back to polish this up after I take the kid to school in twenty minutes.

Then I’ll paint.

That’s after I take down one of these Post-It Notes surrounding my screen. It’s over there on the right. It says, “How I Write for Fine Line”.

That’s how I do it.

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Maybe it’s because I have written so much radio drama, I have to be able to see it or I can’t write it. If I’m writing something that takes place in the past – I am drawn to the early part of the twentieth century – then I travel to that place, listen to music, look at old maps, look for tiny telling details and research as much history as I can bear. I don’t want to become swamped with fact but I want to be able to imagine what it was like. I need to be there.

The actual writing, for me, is where the story begins to unfold itself on my screen. There are dozens of analogies of how it feels to write but to me it feels a little like trying to walk through a dark room with my arms outstretched. You stumble across things you weren’t expecting, and as you grope around in the dark take two steps forward in any direction and then one step back again. It can be either frustrating or exhilarating, but this is where I feel I’m most creative, and I usually come up with scenes or situations that I had never imagined before. I have to say here, that I write primarily for myself and when I can impress myself with a good line or an image, then I’m satisfied.

When I’m writing the first third of a novel, I usually have mixed feelings about it. Some days I love what I’ve written and sometimes I get cold feet and tell myself that it’s not too late to dump it and start again. The middle section is always difficult – too far from the beginning to give up and too far from the end to be able to feel secure – it’s like being stuck in the doldrums. Towards the end, I start to speed up, almost finished, but this part is also the hardest. All those choices I made so casually earlier on in the story have consequences. I am now the grown-up left to tidy up the mess of a very messy adolescent and I tear my hair out and spend many hours pacing around as I try to bend everything I’ve written into something complete.

I tend to rewrite compulsively – I usually start each day by rewriting what I’ve written the day before. And when I’ve finished the first draft, I go over it many times until I feel that it couldn’t be any better, at least on that day. I try and follow the dictate that you put your novel away for a few months and then come back to it with fresh eyes, but it’s not always possible. But I do know that the more distance you can put between you and the book, the better. Eventually it stops becoming part of you and starts becoming its own entity that you have a duty to brush up and polish before you send it out into the world.

All of this makes me sound like I know what I’m doing. Although I have written five novels (one lies unpublished in a drawer) I still wonder how the hell I did it. As I make my tenth cup of tea, and it’s only eleven am, check my email again and then download another track from itunes, I feel like a total fraud. If I were employed by anyone, I’d have been sacked long ago.  And so I use the 500 words a day rule. More is ok, but less is not. And when and if, I finally start writing, sometimes I forget the time, the children’s school pick-up time and the dreaded word count. Caution, spelling, self-monitoring all go. Nothing matters but the story. But on other days I stare at the screen for hours and every word is a struggle. And so I go for a walk, read the newspaper and try to imagine what it must be like to be someone else, not a fictional character, but someone with a real job.

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I am a lazy artist. I get some silly/brilliant/stupid idea for a script and get really excited. Epiphany! Light bulb! Yes­ — this comic about a dead moth I saw must be drawn! The world simply must have it. Moaning and whining and procrastinating, however, quickly follow this bolt of inspiration. I want to sit down and work, and I will, for 5 minutes. Then, it occurs to me that those dishes really need doing and, honestly, the toilet is gross and needs to be scrubbed. What I am saying here is that, sometimes, I would literally rather clean my toilet than sit down and draw a comic.

Eventually, I will drag myself to my “studio,” (the half of my kitchen that is not taken up by my Ikea table that I found on Craigslist for $60), and gather my drawing board, a half-empty tablet of Bristol Board (a hot press, heavy paper that many comic book artists use), a pencil, a ruler and some pens. Then, I will half-heartedly limp over to my couch, put my legs up on my coffee table, put on some music or turn on the television, and begin measuring out tiers and panels.

Generally, unless an idea is complex, I don’t write an entire script before I begin the drawing. The idea (whatever ridiculous thing it is), usually forms itself on the page as I draw, although I always have a pretty good script in mind. Once and awhile there’s a thumbnail or two in my sketchbook, but more often it’s a few lines of chicken scratch outlining the general text.

After measuring out the number of panels I think I will need on each page, I sketch the narration (if there is any) onto each blank panel. I then begin to rough out the figures, and speech balloons.  Once I’ve got rough sketches done of the main action and dialogue, I return to the first page and draw the details in pencil.

Then I go get something to eat and spend at least ten minutes looking for my pencil, which is, inevitably, stuck in my ponytail.

Once the pencils are complete, meaning that the entire comic is sketched and the narration and dialogue are satisfactorily placed on the page, I give the whole infernal thing the once over to decide if any changes need to be made, as, once inking begins, it is a huge pain in the ass to make changes.

Writing and drawing comics is a lot like directing a short film. One wants to make sure that each panel (or shot) is conveying the mood and perspective that is best for the story. In my work, particularly, it is important that the characters’ expressions are perfect. I rely on facial expression and gesture to convey what shouldn’t need to be written. In comics, especially, the idea of “show, don’t tell,” is paramount. Comics should never be wordy when they don’t need to be. If one can say what needs to be said using a raised eyebrow, or a look between two characters, or an atmospheric mood, that’s all that should be used. As my work is greatly emotionally driven, much of the dialogue and narration can be dropped in favor of the subtleties of the drawing itself.

Inking sucks. Usually, I do a preliminary inking where I draw over the major pencil lines with a Micron pen, a quill or a brush, and then lay in the lettering. Hand lettering is difficult, but, in my opinion, and for my work, I think it lends a more personal touch than any computer font could do. So, after a great deal of talking to myself about how much I hate it, I sit myself down and lay in the text. After the initial inking is complete, I furiously erase the underlying pencil, scattering grey bits of eraser all over my clothes and couch cushions, surely inhaling at least one chunk of the rubber.

The next step is the easy one. Using a large black artist’s marker, I lay in all the large black areas. Comics with a lot of large black areas mean that I don’t have to do a lot of detail work and that makes me happy. After all the large areas of black are laid in, that’s when I really get antsy.

Unless I have a deadline, there could be up to a week before I begin the detail work on any comic. Sure, I will walk guiltily around the neglected drafting board with the half-finished comic on it, and think, “Today I will finish inking!” But, the reality is, I am easily distracted. Yes, I would rather go to the movies. Yes, I would rather go out for cocktails with my friends. Yes, I would rather do the laundry, stare at the wall, walk barefoot over broken glass.

Eventually, however, the guilt of being a professional artist who hasn’t finished such a simple thing as a three-page comic about the weird next-door neighbor, or the moth, or the last boyfriend, will get the best of me. I will sit down, and start the painstaking work of adjusting all the inked work until it is perfect, re-lettering the lettering I screwed up before, rushing around the house searching for White-Out, and finally, look all the pages over for the tiniest flaw.

Despite my laziness, I am a perfectionist. I will obsess over every detail, until even the smallest area of cross-hatching or the slightest turn of a lip is exactly as it should be. Some flaws I leave, because I believe that it is the flaws in hand made work that makes it beautiful.

Now, with ink-covered, overly-caffeinated fingers, shuffling the large, stiff pages in my hands, I am in love.  Even after torturing myself for weeks (or perhaps because of it), having made this lovely piece is the most satisfying feeling I can have. Nothing compares to the feeling of having crafted even the simplest story from a glimmer in my mind into a fully formed work of art.

Now, I better get back to my inking… except, that bathtub is looking pretty grubby…

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The ideal writing day for me begins when I wake up naturally at eight o’clock. While I sip on a large cup of coffee I stare into space.

This hour sets the tone for the day.

About nine I eat some protein, cheese toast maybe. From nine to ten I go to the computer or, more often I lie down on a couch with a legal pad and pen. I let my mind wander. About ten an idea or character has come to me. I follow that and start to write.

I scribble from ten until about two.  I write down whatever comes into my mind. I spell phonetically and insert notes for later research.   I don’t interrupt the process to look up anything. I just try to capture the dreamlike state I am in.

Around two o’clock I start to wind down. I take a twenty minute nap and then have a shower and get dressed.

After that I go into another part of the day: the one that is for business and chores and relationships with real people.

This perfect writer day hardly ever happens. Even the idea of an interruption throws the unconscious mind off. The telephone is the worst enemy so I don’t have one in my studio.

Other people don’t understand that even speaking ruins the meditative mood. No one really understands how fragile the state is except another writer

By nature I am impatient, nervous and impulsive.

Quotes help me keep steady while writing fiction. Non-fiction writing comes from a different place.

Two of the quotes that help me are:

“The Unconscious is like children and dogs. It loves order and hates surprises.”

The other is from Flaubert.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in you work.”

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I am a huge procrastinator unless I have a sudden inspiration that comes out of nowhere, I am in the middle of a project, or I have a routine such as a weekly column. Otherwise, I may not write a word for weeks at a time, and when I am determined to start again, it is pure torture and I would do just about anything to not have to sit in front of the computer and put words on paper.  Every fiber of my being pulls against the idea until I HAVE to write something – until something fills up inside me and I have to put it down. It’s like I have no choice in the matter, and it has always been that way – I write because I have to write. It is something inside me and I have to let it out,

I have journals dating back until 3^rd grade with poems and sayings and little stories. Poor Mom. She had to read them all. And later, I never wrote in journals about things like, “I hate that boy and my parents are jerks.” Everything was a story. But by that time, middle and high school, I guarded them like the queen’s jewels and never let a soul read any of them. I still keep journals with stories and sometimes snippets of them are used in columns I have published or in books. I love when that happens because it feels like I haven’t wasted so much time and paper.  But actually, I think the journals were to prepare me for the writing that I needed to really do – to work on and craft and (horrors) re-write many, many times.

I write fast, which is hard to believe, since it took me 9 years to complete My Husband Ran Off With the Nanny and God Do I Miss Her. But writing a book is so hard for me not only because of the re-writes my Nazi agent forced on me, but because it is like a gigantic puzzle and all the pieces have to fit just right – the characters, plot, what happens to everyone has to work and it is like not being able to see the forest through the trees.  I used to lay chapters on the floor and make sure they transitioned the right way and then I would read it and go,” Damn! What happened to Jackie the Jack Russell?” or, “I really burnt the kitchen down in February?  Was I kissing Alex and sleeping with John on the same day? What a slut!” And I would have to change it all around. You also can’t have a character just disappear into space. Everyone has to have some kind of resolution. I may never write another novel again. It was traumatizing!

I believe habits and rituals really help get one back into the writing mode. I wrote for four years at the White House for President Bush Sr. and that was crazy. You wrote like a fanatic from 7 am until God only knows when, depending on his schedule and how many disasters were happening at once. But it was the most exciting time of my life and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was very exciting and sometimes you had long deadlines such as a day or two, and sometimes a triple red dot would arrive meaning you had to write the entire speech and have it on the President’s desk in two hours. The boss did that to me the very first day and I went into the bathroom and got sick. I didn’t stay in there long because the clock was ticking. Then the nurse called and said my daughter had a tummy ache and wanted to come home. “Tell her forget it!” I shrieked at the nurse. She hated me ever since. But that was exactly when I decided I missed the nanny much more than my lazy, cheap, cheating, arrogant husband.

So after doing serious writing for the White House, I started writing my book, which is much more in the humor vein. What really helped is I was offered a humor column in a Long Island Newspaper and that got me in the habit of writing at least two articles a week, many of which became part of the book. But when I have no structure and when I am not in the habit of getting up and finishing an idea or a chapter that I had been thinking about all night, you can’t drag me to the computer to write. It’s weird that it comes and goes.

There are times when an entire day goes by and I have felt like I had been writing for five minutes and when I stop I kind of float around as if I had just polished off a few glasses of Champagne. There are other days I can’t get anything right and I keep getting up to do anything besides sit back down to write.

I write mostly late at night, about 11pm until 2 or 3. The day is too distracting. But when I am in the middle of a project such as a book or screenplay or article, I hit it early in the morning, and then at night.

I also listen to George Winston first. It gets that part of the brain flowing. And I try to exercise. But right now as I try to promote my book, which is an entirely different endeavor that I find basically so overwhelming and confusing that if I hear the word social media one more time I could sock the poor person who mentioned it, I don’t write at all. In fact, Kate asked me to do this months ago. So, it’s all, for me, a matter of habit and getting whatever part of my brain that still exists to get out of its own way and let the characters speak for themselves and take me places they want to go. You can’t boss them around too much, and you certainly cannot have your parents in mind when you are writing.

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Hemingway said ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’

Well, perhaps it was easier when it was a typewriter. Now, first thing, I sit down and check my emails. Even if the obvious spam is sifted out, there are various spammish messages to distract me. Maybe even an interesting or relevant one. Then the dog needs walking. By the time I get back from that I’m feeling peckish. The kitchen is a mess, so I move some dirty dishes around, unload the laundry. Then perhaps I sit down and think about what I ought to be writing. But if the sun is shining, I’d much rather be outdoors… and if it’s raining it’s too depressing to work.

A writer ought to have a website. A schoolboy friend of my son’s has been running mine, and I feel it is time I paid it more attention. So I spend a few weeks trying to learn html and uploading material, and wondering where it went – it didn’t upload to where I meant it to go, ah there it is on a completely different page… Days pass in happy distraction. Each day I check the stats. Are people visiting, are they clicking on the ads, are they buying my books? I’m impressed that Google ads can match its offerings to my books. I’ve written one book on paedophile priests (Google offers adverts for legal services and domestic abuse counselling), one on kitchen gardening (buy your own hen), and one on finding an anonymous love letter on a beach (hot water bottles, genies in bottles). After a month, Google ads announces that I have made my first website revenue – 0.007p. I am ecstatic.

A couple of times a week I can distract myself with a fan letter. The Letter in the Bottle came out in French last year, and made a big media splash there. People now write to me about their own experiences – often tragic – and I feel if they have spent time and trauma writing to me, they deserve an answer. And searching for French accents on an English keyboard takes extra time.

So if I’m lucky I actually start real work – writing – around 3 o’clock. Not much time until the kids get back from school… I think about trying to write the novel, but that is going badly, so it would be easier to do something else. Shall I try and write another piece for Private Eye? I write about parks in danger, but it is so depressing – another park being concreted over for housing, or parking, or whatever other rubbish reason. A complex tale has to be squeezed down to about 100 words. And even then, there is so much material on rotten councils that often my piece gets held over, month after month, which is discouraging for me and the campaigners.

Shall I abandon the novel and start work on some of the other ideas that are floating around? Or shall I go and dig up some bindweed at the allotment?

I remember going to a do at my daughter’s school and one of the mothers saying to me. ‘I’ve got a fantastic idea for a book. It’s all ready. It’s all done. All I have to do is write it down.’ And she smiled smugly. But of course it’s the writing down that takes the time, that takes the discipline, the self-belief that it’s worth doing, that someone might want to read it. The research is easy, reading other people’s books, surfing the sites, taking notes, talking to people. It is forcing oneself to actually sit and write something – ideally something original, well-crafted, beautiful, interesting – that is hard.

Looking at the other offerings from writers on this website, I see that I am not alone, and suddenly I feel a bit better. Other writers out there are avoiding writing by noting the bird species visiting their bird feeders! Perhaps writers are only those of us who run out of distractions and suddenly have nothing else to do than turn to their keyboards. Perhaps it is lack of application or concentration, perhaps it is nervousness at what others might think of one’s work, but perhaps it is simply a very natural reluctance to bleed over the keyboard, to lay bare a part of oneself out for inspection.

But the days when it clicks into place are great. The days when you are on a burn, when you forget to be distracted, when email is an intrusion, when the coffee sits there undrunk, those are the days when it is worth it. I just need a few more of those.

© Karen Liebreich

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This fall I’ve been trying to start a new novel.  I hate this stage and will do anything to avoid it.  One morning I was actually thankful for the dead mouse smell in the basement, so that I could otherwise occupy myself for another three hours.

It’s not just the fear of failure that keeps me from writing those first pages – it’s knowing how much I’m going to flounder before I figure out the damn book I’m trying to write.  I’ve written five novels, and all of them have involved throwing away at least the first 200 pages.  I keep reminding myself that it’s all part of the process, but still:  when I’m starting a new novel, the idea of being an accountant, or a pet euthanizer, suddenly has a lot of appeal.

Here’s my short-list of avoidance techniques:

• Vacuum
• Digitize pictures of your ancestors
• Make backup disks of the kids’ high school essays
• Take a special 5-mile trip to the hardware store for a whiskbroom
• Learn origami so you can make cool gift tags this Christmas
• Practice the guitar
• Identify all the birds that come to your feeder in one morning and mark them in your Field Guide
• Rehearse an encounter with a mountain lion, which is a pretty good possibility here in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains; see just how big and fierce you can make yourself appear to a 300 pound cat
• Read the fine-print on your insurance policy
• Redo your will
• Clean out the storage shed where you’re paying $57/month to store the kids’ Legos
• Google knitting patterns
• Find out where to recycle old wine corks
• Spend a morning fiddling with your keyboard height so that your workspace is ergonomically correct
• Spend another morning at the Better Back Store trying out office chairs that cost twice as much as a new laptop
• Make a Genius appointment at the Apple store to find out what iDisk does for the $100/year you’re paying
• Learn how to use the power drill you got last Christmas, so that you can drill two tiny holes in the front door molding and attach the doorbell ringer with two tiny screws, making sure that it’s absolutely perfectly straight.  Which takes a really long time.
• Color code your husband’s shirts
• Color code your T-shirts
• Discover you have 14 black T-shirts, take a pile to the thrift shop, and come home with more than you donated
• Learn how to put on eyeliner
• Learn how to take off eyeliner
• Read Al Gore’s speeches

Okay, I didn’t read Al Gore’s speeches this fall.  But I did do just about everything else to avoid the dreaded first page.  To paraphrase Gene Fowler, it’s easy to start a novel; all you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

But here’s what blows me away: while I’m down in my husband’s workshop sorting his nails into little cubbies, someone else has turned on the coffee maker.  Words are beginning to percolate.  Plots are hatching.  Characters are starting to speak their minds.  And suddenly it wouldn’t matter if there was a mountain lion climbing onto my deck and pawing at the door – there I am, practically flying to the computer to click on that Word icon, and I place my hands on the keyboard and close my eyes and just listen: because that first line is already channeling itself from my brain down through my fingertips and onto the screen, where a whole new story is waiting to be told.

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I know I must be a writer because I have procrastinated writing this piece for weeks, promised myself that I’ll sit and properly cogitate it before I lay finger to keyboard, promised I’ll make a list of what I want to say, and yet here I am, throwing myself onto the page before I’ve had a thought in my head. That’s how I write. For me, writing is all about a high-wire act: keeping the nerve. The nerve is the thing. Hold the poise, one step or word after another, and don’t look down til the end.

Writing is the most incredible act of daredevilry and it doesn’t do to think about it too much. My writing is a mystery to me. When it’s going well I basically take dictation from the voice in my head; as long as I have a vague notion of what I want to say, the words find themselves. I consider this a gift from the writing gods (cat-shaped, inscrutable totems with eyes you can’t stare at too long) and try not to question it. When I question, I lose all my nerve and the words won’t come, or are all quite astoundingly repulsive.

Much of writing, in my belief, is waiting. I wait a lot. Sometimes weeks or months, while thoughts slowly percolate and drip into place. I’ve discovered the efficacy of putting off a novel for several years; by the time you finally allow yourself to have a go, it’s no longer toil, it’s a treat. And I rehearse lines in my head—as I do the washing up, sit on a train, walk around the block, daydream in the morning before I get up—until I at least have a first line to start with. When I’m feeling sharp I realise I am phrasing descriptions of almost everything that happens to me, almost as instantly as I experience them. Obsessive and weird, sure, but helpful.

I work on various things and in various ways but I am always fast, I’m grateful to say. In addition to two memoirs and two unpublished novels, I write feature articles, frequently answer interview questions, tried my hand at a short play, and have the great gift/terror of a fortnightly newspaper column.

This last is my cardio exercise, compared to the weight-bearing endorphins-blast of the other works. A column takes speed, brio and impetus, and I am amazed to realise that I have now penned over a hundred of them, each one a discrete mini-essay contained in around 800 words. The form and length is now familiar to me so I can turn it as neatly as a sonnet, but each fortnight as I face that blank screen I experience the inevitable panic and sense of hubris. Who am I and why the hell do I think anyone wants to know what I think? Hence the need for nerve, until I email it off with my eyes clenched shut and it’s not my problem anymore. Think of it like a cardio sprint on a tightrope. It’s invigorating, that’s the least of its joys.

One thing I’ve learned is to allow plenty of time for my procrastination, but still aim to finish something well before deadline. That way my ‘edge’ about writing won’t collapse into fully fledged panic about not getting it in. The procrastination and the sinking into doubt and the finicky editing is all built into my timeline. There are few things worse than genuinely running out of time and having to submit something you know isn’t properly cooked.

Longer works I can also write quickly. There’s nothing like the rush of a first draft. I can work up a full first draft in a month. Every morning when I’m working on one I fumble blindly over the contours of the previous day’s work for a few minutes, teeter at the vertiginous edge of the last-written paragraph, and then dive forwards. Like Indiana Jones found in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, what looks like a terrifying chasm actually has an invisible bridge across to the other side.

I don’t know what I enjoy more, the initial draft in all its mystery and thrill or the luxurious scraping down of the text afterwards. I love making sentences—I confess, I can caress and admire my own writing—but I am a bad rewriter. I can delete but it’s almost beyond me to change a text beyond fiddling with word choice, punctuation, syntax and ripping out great chunks. Nevertheless, it’s an almost erotic feeling, scraping and shaking and pressing down a piece of work into a tighter, fitter, leaner shape. Work is never finished but it can always improve. That’s why I love, adore, cherish and am occasionally frightened of editors.

Almost always I feel distant from my writing almost as soon as it’s left my fingers. Sometimes I have no memory of writing a piece, and often I view my work as a phenomenon I simply have custody of. Then I recollect the satisfaction of having chosen that adjective, removed that adverb, rearranged the clauses of that sentence, and I can claim a little—mostly the errors and weaknesses—as my own.

Of course I welcome criticism; and of course I don’t really care for it. So I’m outside the writing, and then, when prodded, very definitely inside it, baring my teeth.

My most dreadful fear is not of writing badly but of missing the golden subject, ‘the one’. I keep notebooks, but they catch only a snippet of all my thoughts and the wonders I observe and the conversations I have and the facts I learn and the anecdotes I marvel at. There’s too much in the world, a writer hurtles past it, and can only hope that her butterfly net has caught a little as she speeds.

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‘There’s rosemary that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies. That’s  for thoughts. There’s fennel for you; and columbines; there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me: we may call it herb grace o’Sundays: O you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy; I would give you some violets but they withered all when my father died: they say he made a good end.’  Ophelia, in Hamlet by William Shakespeare

If singing is the outward expression of a song, then I inverted this song. Rather than performing it on stage, as has been done many times since Shakespeare wrote ‘Hamlet’, I took the structure of Ophelia’s song and made a little book. She sings of seven herbs which, perhaps to an audience in the 16^th century, would have been commonly understood to represent different medical, mythical and symbolic things. It is hard for a modern audience to understand why it is relevant that the violets withered when Polonius was killed.

So, I researched each of these herbs in different ways, I was meandering, not heading towards a goal. I spent a morning digging with a herbalist in Devon, he enlightened me on the relationship each herb has with the planets. For instance, Rosemary is of the Sun, because it flourishes in the warmth and light; but it is also of the Moon because of its silvery underleaf. This way of describing qualities in a plant can also inform one of its medical uses. I read the writings of Hildegard Von Bingen, a 14^th century nun, whose medical advice blurs myth with science. Nicholas Culpepper worked on classifying plant categories, not long after Shakespeare’s life. His writings on plants inform a lot of what we know now.

From this research I boiled down a key element which linked to each plant. For some it was obvious; Rosemary for instance, took on ‘Memory’, for others it was less so. In my meandering it had struck me that another way to ‘invert’ Ophelia’s song further was to carry on this ‘research’ away from myself. So, I sent seven letters out to seven women who I know, and who are interested in gardening or plants. I sent them seven cards on which were written the following:

• A memory
• A thought
• A vision or image
• A discovery
• A cure
• A secret
• A beginning or tending to

I invited them to write, or draw, what first came to mind when they read these headings. Their responses were varied; some were deeply personal, others were mundane or scientific. When I compiled them into chapters corresponding to the headings I began to see connections in the responses.  For instance, bees were mentioned twice in the chapter on ‘A vision or image’. I suppose I was playing with the idea of a critical mass of information – how much does there need to be in order for you to see patterns. Perhaps 7 is quite minimal for this to be possible, but I think it works.

Coming back to Ophelia and her herbs, each chapter is introduced with a small sample of my research and how it led to choosing each heading. So although I inverted her song, I keep coming back to it.

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I know two kinds of writer: there are the ones who like to plan everything very carefully, maybe even writing little personality profiles for their characters on postcards and sticking flow-chart plot diagrams on their wall; and then there are those who reckon the whole point of writing is making it up as you go along.

I’m the second kind. I don’t knock planning, I just find that it doesn’t work for me. Which is odd, really, because in most other respects I’m the think ahead type. I’d never dream of going on holiday without a guidebook – I’ve even been known to take a compass with me when going on a picnic (which is, I know, simply stupid). But writing is different. It’s the one corner of my life where the usual rules no longer apply – and that’s why I like doing it. Writing, in other words, is a matter of split personality or, as they call it nowadays, ‘second life’.

Robert Louis Stevenson had it sussed long before the internet, though it was Borges who really understood the Jekyll and Hyde plight of the author: one of his stories begins, ‘The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.’ I know that feeling. The other Crumey – the one whose name is on the book covers – is, I suspect, the interesting one. Me, I’m just the guy who makes sure he shows up for work. I give him plenty of coffee to start the day. The school walk (more eco-friendly than ‘run’) is a further wake-up, so that by 9.30 he has no excuse not to be writing. Except that I decide to peek at my inbox first and before I know it I’m reading somebody’s damn blog. But eventually he gets going, the writer inside me, and then there’s no stopping him.

Until lunchtime, anyway, though already a good day’s work is done: anything that happens in the afternoon is a bonus. The one thing I/he always make sure of is this. Stop work when you’re half-way through something: a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence – then forget about it completely. It makes it so much easier to start again next day.

You might not guess it, but I teach creative writing, and I expect I’ve confused a great many students with my ‘tear up your synopsis’ approach. My excuse is that I didn’t start out as a literary type: in my zeroth life I was a physicist, and I’ve always felt some sympathy for Bertrand Russell’s advice: ‘Say everything in the smallest number of words in which it can be said clearly.’ But while physicists want to get from A to B by the shortest logical route, novelists prefer the most circuitous: a geodesic of a different kind. Eureka moments in the bathtub are nice, but novels don’t get written unless somebody’s doing a lot of typing. So that’s my life. Boring, eh? I save the exciting stuff for my books.

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The sad truth is I don’t write that much, or, at least nothing like as much as I’d like. What I do is spend an awful lot of time doing things around writing. Mostly this involves publicity, events and editing of stories for One Eye Grey (the 21st century penny dreadful I publish). Then there is the ongoing, and extremely dull, rewriting of existing material so publishers can find new ways of rejecting it and, of course, there are the scripting of my London walking tours and attendant communication around them. Oh and of course the four days in the library that actually keep body, soul and cat together.

What writing I do is structured around those and naturally the everyday things from grocery shopping to hobbies and social events. I expect this is true for many people and don’t wish to make a big deal out of it because I’m lucky in my job – working in a library is handy when it comes to research – and increasingly my social life has followed my interests in writing. So the book that is currently being kicked into the long grass by publishers – Football Voodoo – and One Eye Grey to which I contribute a few stories every year are helped by going to football and folklore events, for example. These are useful for research (I’m very boring with my notebooks of hastily jotted bits and pieces), keeping focused on the idea and meeting like-minded people. The latter group are vital because how I make myself do things is to talk about them, that way in order not to appear a liar I have to follow through. The other thing is to be very organised about taking opportunities when they present themselves, this piece for example is being written on a train journey to North Wales.

Averaged out over the past five years I suppose there is a non fiction book published every 18 months (the latest called Lost English is out now and written in a rush from December to May) and for every published one another goes unpublished, not to mention the completed but unstaged Margaret Thatcher musical. Alongside these have been twenty five published short stories, a dozen talks, twenty fresh walking tour scripts and a few articles. At the moment I’m involved in a project relating to delivery of fiction down mobile phones, an idea for a Welsh version of One Eye Grey called Dark Valleys and am warily sniffing about some of my older ideas like the great Brixton lido novel I’ve wanted to write for years.

The reality is though that most of what I think of doing doesn’t get done and a combination of idleness, pragmatism and finance dictates the writing agenda as it does all others. The simple facts of my day to day life and interests naturally predispose me to short easily assembled pieces that link together to form a whole. For example my book on London’s Bridges (Cross river traffic) is simply broken up by bridge as my book on nursery rhymes (Heavy Words Lightly Thrown) is by rhyme. This coupled with an ability to link seemingly unrelated facts together means I can work in bits and small time frames, assembling a book or larger project. In fact it’s the only way I can work because the writing time is pretty much snatched at, though weekends and Mondays do allow for longer stretches.

With the larger projects I do construct a framework – which may initially be completely different to the finished one – that can be no more than a list of song titles or bad puns from which the chapters emerge. One thing which astonished me was how much work there is from the decently advanced draft stage to the finished item, hence my vexation at rewriting the numerology chapter for Football Voodoo for the tenth time. Publishers increasingly want something as near to the finished article as possible and the support formerly offered to many writers quite simply isn’t there as it once was. Working with an editor – however much that might annoy you – is incredibly helpful as it provides what most writers want, feedback from a professional source. It was one of the things I noticed writing Heavy Words which was initially self-published then republished and edited by Granta in the UK and Gotham in the US.

I don’t have that contact now through any one publisher, nor do I have an agent (another source of such advice). I do use an editorial service – for polishing One Eye Grey and own material sometimes – and do have friends in publishing I can ask for specific advice. I also have noticed that since editing One Eye Grey I’m getting very good at spotting how other people’s stories can be easily improved. Sadly I can’t seem to transfer that talent to my own output very well.

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• I play my guitar until I get a chord sequence I like.
• As I do this I usually write a melody at the same time which includes (whether I like it or not) the vowel sounds that the words will/should have.
• Then I think about what subject matter the chords and melody represent to me. This can be anything from an emotion or an image of something etc.
• Now what I’m left with is quite a strict ‘guideline’ to fit the lyrics into; the subject matter, rhythm (including syllables) and the sound of the words (vowel sounds).
• The next stage is to write the words – it’s usually a long and frustrating process but can also be rewarding. Let me tell you why all the above is so important to me.

For me song writing is about true and honest expression through sound (I know, tell you something you didn’t know), and writing in the above way keeps me honest. It would be easy to over complicate my songs. I know because I did it for years. I see lyrics as being no different to key changes and time signatures etc and therefore tools employed to get the message across – not the message itself. The sounds of the words can still carry the message to someone who speaks a different language which is why I try and keep to the original sounds I hear when I’m playing the chord progression on the guitar. Keeping to the subject that the tune represented gives me a clear focus and is useful for holding all the facets of the song together as one working unit.

Of course I do have to compromise with myself as sometimes the syllables don’t fit my first idea or my (Scottish) accent doesn’t suit a particular word that I might want to use. For example I love the colour purple and have wanted to use it in the past, but I couldn’t make the word sound right in the song. When this happens a decision has to be made about what’s more important for the message.

So, there we have it. Some may see this approach as limiting, but they are usually people with books full of unused lyrics waiting for a home. For me it makes more sense to think about what the lyrics are for. Why should the words themselves be more important than what they are trying to express, communicate, suggest, give, transmit, deliver?

Have I made my point yet?

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My experience of writing has been so various that it seems difficult to abstract generalities about the process which may then    apply across all genres – from the attempt at snapshot poetic insight, say, to the aim of chronicling centuries. But here follow a few sketchy observations on the making of a text, as viewed from the writer’s side – not so much about craft, maybe, as the emotional experience.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING – All seems possible, unfixed, the project is infinite, mysterious and ineffable. We may feel we are gods at this moment, that we have our powers and themes, and so may call to life our creations whole … but in reality, we spend hours, weeks, months, years in the laboratory, intermittently gaining and losing heart or patience, stepping back to review, to consult and consider, then engaging again… so that any work is a pattern of thinking/writing/thinking and so on … a gradual revelation.

THE PHYSICAL ACT IS NOT UNLIKE BREATHING – At times it is slow and hardly perceptible, at others we feel about to burst with the race of it … a polarity – like inhalation/expiration: firstly, mental absorption in composition when the mind is fluid and thought fluent, followed by times of committing fixed text … walking can be healthy in the thinking phases.

BORN IN LANGUAGE – The true birth of a work as writing is not unlike acquisition of a new language, and begins with a kind of listening, as if we are learning about the world (small or large) that will be made. In these early stages, as with the young child, there is playfulness and experimentation that in time becomes an agitation, and ideally an imperative … some speak of the beginning as the arrival of an irritant, like the grit that gives birth the pearl.

COMING INTO FLUENCY – The work seems to develop (inner) voice or register, resulting in a desire to be heard, and the need to record, to confide – impressions, thoughts, ideas: a presence in the world, interpreting. Though, paradoxically, to record that presence, we generally retreat into solitude. This is not a time to employ the internal critic. We must forgive our first drafts for being first, and however vague, at this point, it is necessary to have faith that sense will be made of it all, finally.

THOUGHT COAGULATES –  This mental energy of language use crystallizes ever more words and phrases of text, clusters encoding a perspective, a mood, perhaps an action or scene … a mapping of micro-structures, clause-by-clause, a line-by-line orientation that begins to reflect a macro-structure not written, but which shapes in the mind like a constellation – an arrangement of definite yet indistinct elements, a complexity of notional bits, signifying more than themselves, creating an embryonic structure, a pattern … form … ‘architectonics’.

MAP THE TERRITORY – At this point, though the road is as yet not taken (and may never be), we can see where it may take us, and guess at whether the end is a place we want to go. We can sketch a course, though if we commit, if we decide to travel, our rudimentary map will rapidly reveal its limits. Yet having once embarked, we learn as we go, referring all the while to the half-visible constellation … we watch and adjust our course accordingly, enter the subliminal.

BITS AND OTHER BITS – All writing is made up of many little pieces, and we try to string them together to make some kind of sense. The arrangement of these elements is vital, yet is often one of the last things to be done, as deciding their ideal order depends on having made them all first. But even after that, we must examine the juxtapositions carefully, for transitions too can be elegant or not, and meaningful or not.

AUGMENTATION – In most of the gaps between bits lie growth points where still more writing could be added – another adjective, a further sub-clause, places where we might leave the path and explore the scenery or the history behind the scenery, describe yet again the joy of those madeleines. This is not always advisable. Sometimes these gaps are genuinely places where more is required, for purposes of linkage or useful elaboration, but it is also possible to get lost in these, even waylaid, and buried at the roadside of our own invention.

TRAVELLING CAN BE DANGEROUS AND TIRING – While we can hold a certain size of map in our head at once, with say 100,000 distinct words this is impossible. In writing as in reading, we get lost, footstep by footstep, syllable by syllable, in order (we hope) to find our way. While lost, we are excluded from the real world and may lose things we love, as we live imaginatively … dinners may be ruined, partners may leave us, homes may be repossessed – we may even lose ourselves.

AVOID UNNECESSARY RETREADS – Page by page, a big work is exhausting at the deepest level. We don’t want to have to repeat parts endlessly and repeated redrafting can become a rut, as if trailing backwards and forwards over the same ground in the hope of hitting rock for the reader’s wheel to grip on – though that is, sometimes, what we must do. Most times we end up somewhere, but sometimes we don’t get there at all … we die on the road, stuck … so avoid redrafts unless they are necessary. Deletion is often preferable. Even with short forms, we can damage the cohesion of the whole by constantly rewriting a single part. Where possible, try to write decisively – practise the deft stroke: prepare properly, perform one action … rest.

SMALL CHANGES MAKE BIG DIFFERENCES – Much good work can be undone by small errors of judgement or carelessness, just as a single degree of deviation in course can carry us far elsewhere. Similarly, a good and grand dramatic scene can be punctured by a single ill-judged line, a poem spoiled by a solitary word, even a syllable in the wrong place. Finding these spoilers and eradicating them is the greater part of finishing, along with perfecting transitions … this may take years, with even the smallest work … these little creatures can be very good at concealing themselves.

THE TEXT IS THE CORPSE OF THE IDEA – Sometimes the end comes upon us suddenly, appearing around a bend, sometimes the road meanders on forever and never reaches the peak in the distance where we’ve set on to arrive. Even in the best case, when a satisfactory conclusion is achieved, that glorious unbounded potential of beginning will have become dead black marks on paper, unless a reader’s mind brings it back from silence. Is it possible we’ve left the spark of life within, for them to find? Whatever, we must forgive the corpse for dying, and accept that listening for news of resuscitation is a waste of time … (and who would really want to be surrounded by undead creatures of their own making anyway?)

HOPE IS ALWAYS FOR THE BEST – So we make more, new living ones … take a deep breath, and enter a fresh world of language, a new discourse … journey on, for the journeying is joyous, and each trip different. Once smitten by the art, the true devotee will write, whatever the weather, whatever the terrain, and whether anyone reads it or not.

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I’ve given myself the time it takes to drink an Asahi Tall Boy to write this essay. Arbitrary constraints are important.

Why are they important? Cause without arbitrary constraints I’d get nothing done. Nothing. I am a lazy summofa bitch and without a deadline or social pressure, I end up excelling in the art of nothing.

This causes guilt, for which I blame the Protestants, but that’s another story.

When I do get a deadline, real or otherwise, I can get to work. Now how I get to work isn’t how you should get to work. There is no one magic way to write. My “organization” consists of a pile of notebooks and stacks of reference material and re-everything I own that even vaguely relates to the project and become inspired (read: steal) structures, devices, or plot lines I find interesting. Because I work mostly in graphic novels and comic books, I start every story with thumbnails. How many pages I have, how much information I can put in, when to include big motions or when to scale it down, Expanded vs. Condensed narrative, I love shit like that. I do the same with prose, writing down arcs and points of Big Emotions and What Does The Audience Think Now and anything else I want to make sure I include.

But it doesn’t actually make you write it down. It doesn’t actually make you turn all those notes and outlines and sketches into words and sentences and paragraphs. That’s the hard part. The part where you start sweating and doing jumping jacks and developing really involved hobbies. You should see my bathroom: spotless.  And then, if you’re me, you start hating yourself.

The guilt of not writing was making me not write. Self-imposed constipation. Utter bone-chilling fear. I thought I wrote things cause I liked to write things and I love comics. I thought this was *fun*.

The guilty blocked confused haze? Not fun.

The only advice that ever seems to work is to just. keep. writing. Hell, keep rewriting. What if you tried another viewpoint? What if it’s funny? What kind of story do you *really* want to tell? This is where other people come in.

For all my self-professed hermitage, writing is a social activity. Storytelling is a social activity. Stories *should* be talked about, at length, with people you trust and respect. A fresh pair of eyes is more precious than gold. Grab your thumbnails and drafts and doodles and have your friends or betters rip them apart and paste them back together. Be liberal with your literary masochism. You’ll thank them for it. You’re not alone, we’re all in this cloud of doubt and insecurity together. But having other people to talk to about writing or comic books or the proper panel sequence can mean the difference between finishing a book and drinking shoe polish.

Just don’t talk so much you never get to the whole letters-turn-into-words-turn-into-sentences-thing. Minimum daily word lengths can help, but I just go with naked fear of being a never-was rather than a has-been. Seems to work. So far.

P.S. Beer not done. The internet and its multi-armed ilk are excellent for getting feedback, not so much for getting shit done. I have personally broken more than one wireless router.

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`I’ve never sat down and said to myself – “Now I’m going to write a poem!” wrote James Stephens, the Irish poet.  `It really happened the other way about, and I had very little to say in the matter.`

The paragraph above is taken from The Dream Mind by author of Alfie, the late Bill Naughton who goes on to say `What is spoken of as the `imagination` or `creativity` affirms the flair of certain persons to receive intimations from the Superconscious – the artist having the aptitude, skills, and volition to express them.

Naughton’s practice of starting writing almost on waking up made him more aware than most people of this `imaginational agency` that operates in dreaming.  `Vestiges of it` he says, `can often be felt during the immediate post-sleep period, when problems that baffled one are unexpectedly solved, and the writing flows without hesitancy or much thought, asking for no more than a certain form of concentration.`

I quote Bill Naughton, not least because I was winner in 08 of the Naughton Short Story Competition but because this section of The Dream Mind has to do with the one thing every writer starting out – and even established writers – are most likely to fret over: being blocked.

Being blocked is the reason we call on others for help, the reason we scour the libraries and shops for Craft of Writing books, the reason we attend workshops, and talk to other writers. I found much to recommend Dream Mind,  especially Chapter 19 Writing and Dreaming for I have long since suspected that to grab a pen immediately upon waking and jot down errant thought gleaned during sleep was the way to unleash creativity.

To quote Naughton: `Once those billions of cells become excited that is the time to be writing: never say, `I’ll remember that and write it down later`, the active synapse must be caught on the move or the freshness is lost.`

Naughton has put on paper something many writers instinctively know but never thought to express.  Writing upon waking is something I now practise.  `Because of my age I allow myself to be didactic,` I muttered to myself some time in 06 upon waking towards dawn. `And few contradict me,` I added, as I left the bed and padded across to the bathroom.  Before I’d pushed open the bathroom door I came back for a pen, and with appalling disrespect scribbled that sentence on the back blank page of a Dick Francis novel, my jotter being nowhere in evidence (it was undoubtedly on the floor between bed and wall but I didn’t want to waste precious moments getting down on all fours and scrabbling about – the sentence was in danger of being lost).

And so Because of my age I allow myself to be didactic, and few contradict me became the opening to a 4,500 word story which would later take me on a journey.

Among other things, it was shortlisted for the Stella Artois Pitching Awards. I was invited to make my pitch at the Galway Film Fleadh in summer 07 and it was here I met the much respected Jimmy Murakami, veteran of animation, Director of The Snowman, When the Wind Blows to name but a few.

Although I didn’t win the Pitching Award, Mr Murakami read my story, suggested changes, found a production company to develop it.  In the meantime he and I became friends and worked together on a number of projects. His advice for script/novel/short story writers: `Don’t set out to write a masterpiece, or even something `good`. Just get the story out.  The story is what counts.   Later you edit.`

It is the advice of tutors, literary agents, editors, filmmakers, established writers everywhere: let the writing flow, get to the end of the story. Somehow. Anyhow.  Bash it all out no matter what the style.  Story. Just story.

If you stop to fret over technique, voice, and style and so on, then that monkey on every writer’s shoulder – Self Doubt – is sure to set in.  So don’t for heaven’s sake go over and over a certain piece (opening, climax, a sentence, a paragraph), looking for perfection.  If you’re thinking Booker Prize, masterpiece, impressing the eds, you will never get to the end of your story.  Scribble it, wallop it out, bash it down.  There’s your first draft.

By the time you get to draft number three your `piece` should be reasonably presentable.

Edit and re-edit, and you will know when you start to tingle you’ve got it exactly right.

Writing an outline – even for a short story – is important.  To engage a reader start, if possible, in the middle of conflict or at the point where the protagonist’s frame of reference is about to change forever.  Move on for as long as possible in linear fashion so we can get to know your protagonist/narrator.  Later you can allow him/her to look back and reflect.   Flashbacks, in the view of Mr Murakami, take you out of the reading experience by slowing the story down, and are best avoided although not every editor would agree with that.  Keep them as lean and spare as possible, let them segue into the story and out again. Seamless is the key word.

Your characters can and must be larger than life.  They must compel but at the same time must be believable.   If their voice is natural/real they come to life.  Without strong characters your story is just a string of events, empty, vapid.  So let your characters off the leash, allow them to do the unexpected, let them surprise and shock you, have them look at the world in different ways.  We want to know them, fall in love with them, care about and root for them.

Finally, wage war against adverbs and even adjectives.  Use them sparingly.  Turn your back on clichés and never indulge in sentimentality.

Which do you think has more impact?  `Dead?  Terence?` Angela screamed on hearing the news, bawled her eyes out, tears came tumbling down her cheeks`.  Or: `Dead? Terence?`  Angela turned her face away.  She was dry-eyed, disbelieving.

More effective, isn’t it, understating?  Best never to raise your voice when trying to make a point. Think Alan Bennett, the emotion in his work which at the same time is entirely devoid of sentimentality.  In the words of Michael Palin `As (Bennett) scrutinises the small print of everyday life…he does what only the best writers can do – makes us look at ourselves in a way we’ve never done before.`

I could expand on all this, talk for an hour about opening hooks, cliff hangers at the end of every chapter, tension and how to built it, sentimentality and how to avoid it, but it’s 7:10 am, snatches of my dreams continue to drift in and out of my consciousness.  And I want to grab them, for I’m half way through a novel myself, wondering will I ever write those two words beloved of all writers The End, and at the same time thinking that nobody is going to mind if I snuggle down beneath the duvet and snatch another forty winks.

Keep writing, that’s my advice.  Never let rejection get you down.

Do a Stephen King and get up after every knockout blow.  If you have courage, doggedness, and just a little talent, then next time you will make it.

If it happened to me, it can happen to you.

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Dialogue in work meant to be read (as opposed to that spoken onstage) requires you to manage at least two simultaneous conversations with concentric purpose.  The first, a conversation between author and reader, is the narrative.  Within the narrative is a conversation between characters that the author must pass along without damaging the suspension of disbelief.  This is the most difficult aspect of writing fiction.  Here are some general rules.

• No adverbs in reference to dialogue
  • Any descriptive comment following lines of dialogue will only diminish the effect
• Attributive remarks only when absolutely necessary
  • Which is almost never with two- and three-party conversations, after the beginning
• Minimal scene blocking
  • Interrupts the flow of dialogue
  • Block with misunderstandings (indicating distance, ambient noise, facing the other way)
  • Block with word choice (people speak differently when nose to nose, out of breath, etc)
  • Block by directing remarks toward or against a character
• No linear stretches
  • Conversations grow geometrically, or they jump between subjects erratically
• No Q&A for plot development
  • Verbal answers are rarely 100% declarative, or 100% responsive – almost never both
  • Directing the plot with dialogue is only appropriate in children’s books
• Use lies in dialogue, especially in omniscient narration
• Incorporate non sequiturs appropriately
• No contrivances (distinguished from colloquialisms)
  • Don’t phonetically spell for accents
  • Don’t overdo dialects, if you must use them
  • The ellipsis in conversation has no meaning whatsoever
• Utilize restraint – as regards:
  • Profanity
  • Exclamations (with attendant punctuation), as people rarely exclaim anything
  • Lengthy put-downs and witty verbal sparring
• Listen, pay attention
  • Do you speak like you write your dialogue?  Do you know anyone who does?
  • How often in conversation are you allowed to finish a thought in one exchange?
  • Does everything merit a considered response from you?
  • How often is anyone convinced of anything by the end of a single conversation?
  • Record yourself and others – Do you speak in complete, correct sentences?
• Laziness kills dialogue
• Bad dialogue kills the narrative
  • Until you do it effectively, stay away from it as much as possible

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I feel very lucky that I can support myself doing something I love. Writing is a job in the sense that you are paid to come up with a book which has to make profit for you and the publisher, but it is also a very personal thing, a craft or art that brings to the surface something of the writer’s character, his obsessions, his sense of humour, his curiosity. The fact that a writer is paid to do it doesn’t make it any less personal or serious. I enjoy sitting on my own for several hours every day and using my imagination to create characters and worlds that don’t exist until I create them. I have a particular interest in magic realism, exactly because it lets free one’s imagination—whether he’s a writer or a reader.

Writing is not a stressful job, there are no tight deadlines to meet, emergencies etc., but it can be frustrating. When I was an engineer, some time ago, I had to be part of a team. Any problems I had with a project I could discuss with colleagues and my line manager, brainstorm ideas and the like, which is a very effective way to come up with solutions. But when writing a book one has to do all this on his own. A novel is a very private universe dreamed by the writer. If he had a committee to help him it would be an easier job and perhaps a faultless novel in every sense apart from the uniqueness of vision, the humour, the ideas behind it. Films today are often made this way, which is why truly original ones are rare. Besides, working on his or her own, a writer is a bit like a chess player, and showing him which piece to move next takes out all the excitement.

When I hit a creative brick wall I usually carry on, trying different techniques, changing the plot and the characters. It is rare that I give up and wait for inspiration to return. When I do, I usually read books—any book, it doesn’t have to do with what I’m working on at the time. I have found that it helps me to concentrate again.

I think that it is probably easier to publish a first novel today compared to the past because modern technology has made it cheaper to produce and distribute a book but also because people read more than they used to. But it is probably still hard to have a full-time career in writing. When you start to write you’re judged on promise, but two or three books down the line you are judged on achievement.

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I wake between four and four-thirty in the morning. By five, I’m up drinking tea and journaling about the weather, my weight, how I feel, the dreams I remember, rhymes, lines, scraps of poems, and whatever else comes. Lately, my dreams have become repetitive so I guess at meanings — the babies must mean that I want a dog, the traveling that I’m still trying to get home.

Otherwise, I mostly write by reading. I read more than one book at at a time: fiction, biography, poetry, criticism, spiritual books. Today it’s Joanna Scott’s novel, Follow Me; Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems; Robert Bly’s My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy; Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed; Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form edited by Annie Finch and Susan M. Schultz; and Eknath Easwaran’s The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Volume 3: To Love Is to Know Me. I tell you this not to impress but to confess my need to be blanketed with other writers’ words. I may not read much of every book every day, but they occupy me, they lodge in my hangouts — armchair, couch, chaise, bed, bathroom, deck chair — and they hide. I roam the house calling, “Rae,” “Eknath,” “Charles.”

Things I want to remember — new or favorite words, phrases, sentences — I copy into my journal. Sometimes these jottings become blog posts. I seldom go back and read my journals, but the writing down often makes a memory.

Whenever a book triggers something — a sound, an image, a line, a character, a story — I close the book and reach for my journal. I write the date and then whatever comes. I try not to think. My rule says if I think something, I must write it down. If I’m telling the truth, I must tell the real truth (If I’m inventing, anything goes). I don’t cross-out. I accept the banality of my ideas and phrasing. My censor chatters, but I turn her volume down. Frequently, I look back at the triggering book for quotes or additional inspiration. When the energy runs out, the session ends. This write anything practice generates drafts that become part of my ongoing project(s) as well as material that doesn’t appear to relate to anything, but it all comes out of me so they must be part of my lifelong project. I need them whether or not I can figure out how or where.

If I’m excited about what I “heard,” I copy what I wrote to my laptop with a text editing webapp that runs inside my browser (read the Wikipedia entry for webapps). The advantage of a webapp over Word is that my work is stored on public servers that are backed-up and replicated in numerous locations. Nothing short of a worldwide calamity will lose or corrupt my work.

Everything I type into my laptop, I print out and file in a 3-ring “drafts” notebook. I sort by title, or if no title, by the first word(s) of the piece. Regularly, I pull pieces on a particular subject or from a specific time period and read through them. Then I arrange the printouts on the floor until I find a pattern or order that interests me. Usually something happens during this process that causes me to choose one or more pages and start revising. Revisions, which may occupy me for days or weeks, go into notebooks labeled “cooling,” “done,” or “publishable.” “Cooling” means the piece still needs lots of work, but first I need to forget it. “Done” means I want to say it’s done — it’s close but needs another tweak or two. “Publishable” means I’m ready to submit it. Whatever work is left on the floor at the end of a revision period goes back in the “drafts” notebook.

This all sounds very organized, but it’s not. I forget to print, forget what I’ve written, refuse to file for weeks on end, change my filing procedures from topical to chronological and back again. Still, my filing methods, even when out of date or reinvented, make a framework for me. Days when I can’t journal because my head is empty or too full, I sit on the floor and browse a notebook, enjoy (or hate) my work, find something to revise or start all over. Days when I can’t do anything else, I read. Everything I’ll write is there.

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Let me make it perfectly clear that I am no writing expert.  I am only doing what comes naturally to me, writing what I feel like writing, for little-to-no profit besides personal satisfaction, for better or worse, till death doth part me from my personal computer.  I write for the most part at my desk, in the living room of my second storey flat in Edinburgh.  I am alone; it is quiet; in this room are just me, my thoughts and the prospect of hours upon hours of uninterrupted writing time.

Daunting.

A lot of writers would probably give their first chapter for time like this to sit down – pencils sharpened, no distractions – and write.  I, unfortunately, do not work this way.  And so I have over the years developed a laundry list of tricks to get myself writing and built habits into my regular life to prepare for the inevitable writer’s block.  I’ll share a couple of them.

First, I got a notebook. Being a student up until last year, I’d usually have a schoolbag with something to write on in it, but now I make a point of always having a notebook on me.  It doesn’t matter what type you use (I go for the Moleskine with blank pages), but don’t get anything so fancy you’ll be afraid to write in it.  I’ve got a small one for my ‘party purse’, and another for beside my bed. You never know when inspiration will strike, so be prepared.

Second, I got organised.  I’m halfway there with the notebooks.  After they get a bit full, I sit down at my laptop and write all the good bits out into a computer sticky-note or a Word document. This way, they’re searchable and all in one place.  If I’m luckily at my computer when inspiration ‘strikes’ then they’re already easily accessible and I just tack on whatever I’ve written to the existing list.  New words, nice turns of phrase, friends’ Facebook status updates with interesting grammar, things from my childhood that have suddenly come to me, memories of my time in Japan, anything goes in the list.  Anything is useful, if not for a final piece, at least for getting me into the zone for writing.  You never know when you might find a good place for: amanuensis, agony aunt, bon mot, costermonger, crèche, dandelion clock, magus, moonboots, popinjay… and on and on.

Then, I studied.  I’ve only in the past year or so begun sending my poetry to magazines and journals for publication.  However, for far longer than this, I’ve admired and bookmarked and scribbled notes to myself about magazines I am interested in, and I try to always keep tabs on their deadlines and themes.  See, magazine themes are a great source of inspiration.  For example, when Fuselit put out a call for writing on the theme of ‘Mars’, I started straight away squirreling through my old notebooks and lists for anything Mars-related I might use.  I found a few good nuggets – links to red things, links to Roman things – that set the ball rolling for me mentally.  I used all the resources I had at my fingertips (Google-search everything, wiki-search everything) until I found something interesting to me to latch onto.  I made a couple poems that I was pleased with on the topic and sent them off.  Whether the magazine chose to use them or not (they did!), it had allowed me to write something new.  This tends to work quite well for me, as I like a deadline, am interested in learning new things, and work better under pressure and with parameters.

Another trick is form.  Surely most people these days can write a haiku or do a sonnet, and others are masters of the limerick or Standard Habbie.  In my MSc course at Edinburgh University, we spent a fair amount of time studying different verse forms – sestina, pantoum, villanelle, even concrete poetry, ballads and odes.  If I’m stuck for a jumping-off point when I want to write, I’ll sit down with a sestina in mind.  I’ll mark off the lines, choose the repeating words, and try and see if I can’t make it come together.  Usually I can get a good stanza or two in before petering out, and if I’m lucky, I can develop what I came up with into a poem I like.  Or perhaps I’ll get inspired mid-way and the poem will evolve into something completely new.

A dry spell is inevitable though. The best mentors I’ve had have always encouraged me to read when I can’t write – to really gorge myself on the writing of my contemporaries and predecessors until I’m full up.  This both keeps me focused on language and words, and either up-to-date on what people today are writing or helps me to stretch a canvas for myself on the frameworks of what people before me have written.

Likewise, here are a couple more quick tips and things to do in the meantime:

- Take your headphone off.  There are tons of great sound-bites in real life happening all around you.  Write them down for later.

- Practice your hobbies.  Get some exercise.  I like to bake. (Emily Dickinson baked!)

- Travel.  I spent a whirlwind year in Japan. Worked full-time in Los Angeles. Moved to Edinburgh.  Each place has its own quirks and style, its own sounds and smells and colours.  Even if it’s just to the corner shop or your grandma’s house, getting outside and moving about is a great stimulus.

- Try not to get discouraged.  With writing, perhaps especially with poetry, try not to get down on yourself if your poems aren’t published straight away or winning huge prizes.  Take time to let your writing rest, come back to it later when you can see it in a new light.  Simmer.

- Get involved.  Look for literary projects, online or in your area, where you can volunteer.  Go to readings, support local talent. Join a writing workshop.  Take a creative writing course.  Visit the library.  The Scottish Poetry Library (http://www.spl.org.uk/) in Edinburgh is an excellent and friendly resource.  The Golden Hour at the Forest Café (http://forpub.com/) is a great friendly and free monthly reading.

- Remember why you write.  I write because I can’t help it, because it allows me to collect my thoughts, and because I love writing.  If writing is not making you happy, take a break.

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