Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process

In the early days of my newsletter I posted a link to Maggie Steifvater’s journaling approach, designed to manage uneven energy levels after she contracted a long-term illness that kept her from writing. The original post is gone now—along with the rest of Steifvater’s Tumblr—but the lesson from it has lived with me on-and-off in four bullet journals now. The basic theory is this: before you plan the day, imagine the idealised version of you that’s operating at 100%. The perfect, focused, utterly ready to do all the things version of yourself. Then check in with how you’re feeling right now, and rate your current state as a percentage of that ideal. Or, to put it another way, acknowledge your limits and work with the energy you’ve got, not the energy you wish you had. It’s really easy to resent work when things are off-kilter with your health, whether its physical or mental. Resentment quickly leads to procrastination, which only

I wrote a rough plan for February, because January has been one of those months where I’ve been reacting to deadlines and my brain is doing a very bad job of figuring where my focus needs to be. I love a good whiteboard that takes that decision away from me and says, “Here. Your focus needs to be here.”

There’s a really good post about process, goals, and identity over on LitReactor at the moment. It’s worth taking a gander at the entire thing, but I’ve grabbed the key take-away here: You can never take the process away, but once you attach your identity to goals and results you can’t control, it’s a recipe for disaster. Dying on the Mountain: How Goals Will Kill You and How to Focus on the Process, Fred Venturini @ LitReactor Or, to phrase it as one of my writing mentors did: you have no control over whether you get published or read. You do have control over how much you write and how much you submit. I keep circling around that particular idea, because it’s so similar to the key takeaway when I was seeing my psychiatrist about anxiety: don’t focus on what you think or feel, focus on what you do. So much of my anxiety is predicated on what Ellen Hendrickson

Where do ideas come from? It’s the question that you’re not meant to ask writers and other creative people, because the mythology of creativity is so fucking bizarre that providing a real answer is seen as a diminishment of the art produced. Or it’s disregarded because people assume the idea is the important part, rather than the work to flesh it out and build it into something. One of the best answers I’ve ever seen to the question actually comes from the perennially underrated Neil Gaiman novellette The Goldfish Pool & Other Stories, available in his first short story collection Smoke & Mirrors. In it, Gaiman’s novelist-turned-screenwriter protagonist reaches for an answer as he grapples with art and storytelling and the weirdness of Hollywood: People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more works than you’d believe. Except for Sons

There are weeks when my writing process feels like a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut, powered by a creaky engine and beholden to its own momentum. When everything is running correctly, I get an extraordinary amount of work done and quickly stack up pages. When things go wrong, momentum will carry me for a while even though the engine is blowing pistons and and leaking fluids. Then the momentum will falter and the fires of the engine will go dark, and the act of getting the whole thing moving once more feels impossible. Sometimes, the thing that goes wrong is needing to turn and head in a new direction. Or stop for a while, to focus on something else, then restart after a short break. Sometimes the thing that goes wrong is a problem in the engine itself–a loose screw nobody noticed that gradually rattles free. Either way, once the momentum is gone, it feels like getting the engine started

Yesterday was a weird writing day. I’m working on a short story at the moment, scribbling a couple of pages in a notebook every day, locking down the details as I go. Yesterday the rough draft hit forty-odd pages, rolling through the first major gear change in the plot, and my momentum ground to a halt in the space of a page. For the first time since I started, I’d written less than a page. Now, yesterday was a not-terribly-good day, but other writing still got done on other projects. I did the usual self-recrimination and doubt that comes when you stall out on a project–the inner monologue of lo, it has finally been revealed, I am rubbish and the ideas are gone and I will never do good work again–and then put my writing away at 6:00 PM and went out to eat tea and watch Netflix. This morning I’m pondering the issue with a clearer head. Less angst,

I’ve been tutoring creative writing at UQ for the last few months, going back to some early principles and trying to explain them in different ways. Sometimes it takes a particular example or way of phrasing a technique for it to click with a particular student, but you can always see the epiphany and the excitement when the see how stories work. I know a few things about writing, but I read how-to books voraciously because I want other people’s phrasing and techniques in my toolkit for things like this. One of the winners, this time around, was this description of how scenes/stories work from Robin Laws Beating the Story: More importantly, the important thing to keep in mind that he drops a little later in the chapter: We don’t just want to know what happens next. We’re rooting for an outcome. I don’t often do this kind of planning up front, but it’s the first thing I turn to

My favourite function in Scrivener isn’t any of the fancy layout options, the scratch-pad that exists for eery scene, nor the ability to set up a useful list of metadata attached to any particular slice of a story. I make use of many of those things, but the thing that keeps me coming back to the program is the function that tracks the daily word count needed to reach a particular deadline (and automatically re-calculates it, when a day goes better or worse than expected). Which means, most mornings, I boot up my computer and load two trackers: one for my thesis, and one for the current creative project. Generally, speaking, whatever number is on the session target is what needs to get written in order to tick off my “have written” log on a given day. My actual target is usually slightly higher, because I crave consistency in the hard-edges to my process: generally speaking, the first time I

In the final weeks of 2018 I sat down and read Ellen Hendrickson’s How To Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. As someone who deals with anxiety on the reg, this was a pretty good book for exploring how and why anxiety occurs, and using that to frame why already familiar techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are used. This was, by and large, an expected and hoped-for effect when I picked up the book. What I wasn’t expecting when I read it was the sheer number of times I would sit down and start making notes that were associated to writing and building a writing career. …. I spent a good chunk of last Thursday trying to write this blog post and failing. I was just back from an academic conference–an event that is really high on the list of things that trigger my own social anxiety–and my brain kept trying to put together a frame