Writing About Writing

Currently, I am sweating over my Creative Writing MA portfolio. This has meant scaling back the blogging, or at least, only doing stuff that repeats every week. As I’ve said before, the writing is easy, having ideas is hard.So, for this week’s blog post about writing: the painful art of commentating on your own work.

You might think blog posts about writing might prepare me for the 2,500 words commentary I have to produce about my 16,000 word portfolio. I hoped so too, but it turns out I never talk in detail about my own work, only that of other people, mostly in broad strokes. Nonetheless, here is what I have found so far whilst commentating my own material.

“I am awesome, yet modest.”

A lot of writers and creative people look at their work and see only flaws. But, not just for critical commentaries but life in general, you have to see the up-side. I want my MA tutors to give me good marks, and further down the line, I may want publishers to pay me money for my stuff.

And if that’s going to happen, I need to be able to point out its good points with conviction, without sounding deluded. I am aware my work has weaknesses, but am definitely bringing them up after the positive stuff. And possibly in fewer words.

“Truthfully, readers, I dare not contemplate the majesty.”

I need to sound more pretentious than I do, really. My tone in the commentaries, although not quite as conversational as these blogs, isn’t that much more serious and heavy. And, when trying to push yourself as a proper thoughtful creative, should I be able to talk about “themes” and “motivations” in a way that would make many people (including me) want to mock me? Perhaps.

“The process matters more than the outcome.”

Yes, I quoted The West Wing. Anyway, I’m not sure that’s strictly true, but creative process is interesting for some, and it’s good to be willing to talk about yours, both to seem accessible and build interest (someone out there might read your process and then check out the story) and because, you know, it’s useful to write this stuff down as a thinking exercise. So be honest and try to think about exactly what you did. If nothing else, it fills up the word count.

Anyway, I hope that’s useful to anyone else who finds themselves having to do one of these commentaries, or even just discuss their own work in general. If you’ve had to write a commentary for any reason, feel free to share any advice in the comments, I still have 60% of the thing left to do.

For every craft, there is an easy shortcut. In cooking, you can just add salt. In fashion, just wear black. In warfare, just launch a nuclear weapon.

And also in storytelling, you can just throw in vampires, zombies, pirates, monkeys, cowboys, aliens, wizards or one of the other big tropes. I’m not saying these things always suck (vampire joke), but I am weary of them being used as a substitute for new ideas.

And, quite possibly, so are other people, as I haven’t noticed as many new books in which the entire premise appears to be “Established plot with added vampires/cowboys/zombies” (“Pride and Prejudice… With Leopards!”). Not to mention the movie “Cowboys Vs Aliens”, wherein the entire film was right there in the title to imagine.

I can’t directly criticise that movie, as I haven’t seen it, but that’s because I read the title and thought “Well, I know what that’ll be like,” saw a trailer which echoed those feelings, and then ignored it happily. A rush of positive reviews might have changed my mind, but they never came.

The problem with these genres mashes, or pointlessly bashing big genre concepts into your story, is dilution. It automatically cheapens whatever your point was, and it’s probably won’t be a masterful take on cowboys/monkeys/whatever either.

Recently, Twilight (love it or hate it) has been successful in the vampire gothic romance area, while Walking Dead has raked in the zombie money. What do those two have in common, beyond  attractive British leading men in screen adaptations? They’re both pretty straight approaches to their chosen area. No genre-bendng or random insertion of aliens.

As ever, I’m doing heavy generalising here. Obviously, sometimes genre-mashing has produced interesting, clever works. I enjoyed Sean of the Dead just as much as you did, but that was deceptively carefully done and affectionate. If you’re going to randomly deploy a huge monkey into your novel, beware the risk of laziness. The fact you’re using a pre-made concept doesn’t mean you don’t have to consider the meaning and motivation of the gorilla and give it a firm reason to exist beyond “monkeys are cool”.

 

That’s where the magic happens. My base station, where I sit for hours to bring you this red-hot stream of content. As you can see, it is untidy. But aren’t “creatives” honourbound to be a disorganised mess? So is this an optimum writing environment, or should I get my shit together and purge my desk with a match?

Sometimes in these blog posts, I leap onto my high horse, but this one will be more tentative, because finding a writing environment in which I can reliably do some damn work has always eluded me.

One possible conclusion: environment is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether I’m huddled in my pit or a nice clean branch of Pret, I will work if I’m in the mood. Because, yes, I enjoy sitting in a coffee shop impersonating a pretentious nob, but I don’t always get a huge amount done.

Still, there are a couple of environmental factors which matter.

Distractions (okay, the internet)

Sometimes, I am on form and can brilliantly forge ahead with work, whilst keeping up an IM conversation, tweeting intermittently and checking my email whenever it pings. But I will admit those days are rare.

More often, the productivity comes when I step away from the internet, either genuinely bored of it or thinking “Look, fuck this, I have to do something today”. So, yes, if I want to sort my environment out, getting rid of the internet is a big step.

And that’s one reason why going to a cafe with my terrible netbook sometimes works. It can’t connect to the internet, as this burns the battery in minutes.

Peer Pressure

I started going to NaNoWriMo writing groups in 2010. Long before that, myself and my friend Paul used to spur each other on through NaNo with competitive word count battles, complete with embarrassingly geeky trash talk on Messenger.

And I’m forced to admit, more even than turning off the internet, bouncing off other writers does help me get stuff done. Even in smaller groups (right now, I’m in a sandwich shop with five others), it kickstarts my childhood Catholic-rooted guilt brilliantly.

In the future, if the writing ever brings the money in, I might hire an assistant. Aside from the usual boring tasks like accounts and making the tea, their main tasks will be to turn off my internet whenever I need to work, and then stare at me judgmentally until I get on with it. Whether I’ll be happy is debatable, but maybe productive at least.

If anyone wants to do this for free, applications welcome in the comments section. Or, you know, share any tips you’ve picked up about making the writing environment work.

As Twitter followers may know, I am currently on holiday in Austria. However, we are currently having an internet break, so I am going to try and honour my blogging commitment by posting about writing.

(It is currently Monday rather than Tuesday, and I`m sorry if this confuses anyone. I decided the wrong day is better than nothing.)

It may not be as long as usual, I can only apologise, but it is going to tackle a writing impulse I get whenever I go away: the urge to try and be a travel writer.

Because, y`know, I write, I think I`m decent at it, and when I go on holiday, I`m seized by the need to chronicle my holiday in a poetic or emotive fashion. After all, for a writer all life is research (unfortunate for anyone trying to date us, but there it is), and holidays cost money, so why shouldn`t I try and get material out of it?

Well, firstly because I don`t exactly have a soaring, poetic style. But more fundamentally, and this is a problem I found when I used to write blog posts about my so-called “real life”, the proper human world is annoyingly reluctant to follow a standard narrative structure. Hence why I now restrict my real world observations to Twitter, where they get all the length and depth they deserve.

And that`s okay. I mean, if people are interested in my holiday, they can ask me (Feel free to do so in the comments!), but I don`t think the world needs an epic work about it. Luckily, this has come to me quickly whenever I`ve sat down to try and write such a thing and just found that… yeah, this is just a list, isn`t it?

I mean, good fun for me at the time, but I`m a fiction writer with a TV-blogging sideline, not a diarist or Bill Bryson. Even The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin who I admire greatly, suffers from a lack of real climax, no matter how much Sorkin tries to play up the events towards the end. And we let him off maybe, because he was adapting someone else`s book about events beyond his control, so he did the best he can. Still, I see no reason to knowingly dive into this problem.

Don`t get me wrong, I`m not saying this is impossible. There`s a lot of great work out there about holidays and travel and so on, the afore-mentioned Bryson for one, I`m not saying no-one is a travel writer. I`m just saying… pretty sure I`m not.

Once I’ve completed a piece of writing, there are a few steps  I take before showing it to anyone else or slap it up online. Some involve factchecking, rephrasing and reading stuff aloud, but by far the most inevitable and aggravating is hacking “actually” and its tedious ilk outta there.

Equivocators, qualifiers, half-arsed fence-sitting non-words that do nothing except sound clunky and damage the meaning of whatever you were trying to say.

I like to think everyone suffers from an abundance of this crap in early drafts, but my work is always painfully riddled with it. “Actually”, “somewhat”, “quite”, “a little bit”.All of them can piss off and die in a medium-depth swamp.

Even on Twitter, if I don’t glance over messages before I send them, I often end up, much to my fury, somehow jamming two occurrences of “actually” or “actual” into only 140 characters. Where do they come from? Do I have a brain tumour spewing some kind of waste product into the rough area of my lobes that manifests itself as an actual abundance of kinda pointless little words with quite literally no use?

(Hope not.)

For longer pieces of work (meaning anything beyond 1-2000 words), I have a step in my redrafting where I do nothing but run a ‘Find’ in my word processor for all the stupid non-words I can think of and bring a Stalinist purge down upon them.

So, anyway, I thought I’d use what little platform I have to check: everyone else has this problem, right? Is there a cure? Because, even if it involves brain surgery, I’m ready to consider it at this stage.