One thing I’ve been keen to do since
setting up the blog is to write a series of posts about the writing process
generally. This stems from the fact that whenever I tell people I’m a writer, I
generally get asked the same questions, so I figured that people must be
interested in this stuff, right?
I plan to address a bunch of these
questions in future blogs – the tricky ones like ‘Where do you get your ideas?’,
the more complex ones like ‘How did you go about getting published?’ and the
personal ones like ‘Don’t you get lonely?’ (There’s a whole series of blogs in
those questions. Watch this space).
First up, a simple one: ‘What do you do in
an average day?’
This is an interesting question, because it’s
often laden with meaning. It’s people wondering whether or not writing is a
proper job (I often joke that it’s not, but it really is), and how someone can
be motivated to stare at a screen for eight hours a day. The answer to the
question varies from writer to writer, too.
 |
| Bromley House Subscription Library, Nottingham. A safe haven for a lost Victorian writer. |
I try as best as I can to keep to office
hours. That’s not always possible in a purely creative process, because really
you have to write, research and plan when the mood takes you. Chaining yourself
to a desk 9-5 can be counter-productive in that respect. However, I try my best
to do this, simply because I’m a married man with a wife who really does have a
‘proper job’, and so it’s only fair that I’m available for family time at the
end of a working day. To that end, I’m at my computer at 9:00 a.m. on the dot
every day, and down tools some time around 6:00 p.m. the first few hours of
every day are almost always spent answering correspondence, doing the social
media rounds (which is actually a real thing these days), and getting all
planning and paperwork out of the way. The rest of the day is the real job of
work, punctuated with frequent coffees. A couple of days a month I work at the library (I pay a subscription to a wonderful olde worlde library for just this purpose), and at least once a week I work at a coffee lounge, just so I can see some real human faces. I have a fully equipped office at home, complete with whiteboard, wall calender and many bookshelves, because only by having everything to hand can I guarantee that I won't wander off and get distracted.
I do two types of writing – there’s the
creative fiction (novels, novellas and short stories), and there’s also commission
work (copywriting, games design, and, to a lesser degree, editing and proofreading). The former
does not respect office hours. The latter absolutely does. When I’m not doing
something else with my brain, I’m thinking about books. I have approximately
seven series and novel pitches on the go right now, in no concrete state, along
with four ‘going concerns’ (projects that are started or almost done, and in
the hands of an agent or editor). On top of that there are always side projects
– those pesky things that I’ll do one day if I ever have free time. That basically
means that my head is always buzzing with something.
That brings me around to the related
question of motivation. The creative process is what drives me. Like many
writers, I think the start and end of projects are really exciting, while the
middle bits – the actual job of work – can become more of a grind. The
motivation comes from the almost pathological need to create ‘new stuff’, and
the knowledge that I won’t be able to do that until I finish the current
project and earn some cash. The crux of it is that writing is a proper job,
because it pays the bills. Much as I’d love to sit in my pants all day reading internet clickbait, or playing Skyrim, I’d very quickly discover that the
mortgage lenders don’t take kindly to those sort of shenanigans. Yes, it is
hard to get motivated when you’re left to your own devices, and I’m really not
the most organized and process-driven chap in the world; but I’d ask the
question: how does anyone get motivated to work? It helps that I love what I
do, of course – that someone is willing to pay me for it never ceases to amaze
me.
The old cliché of ‘Do a job you love and never
work a day in your life’ is almost true of the writing life. Almost.
