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January 20, 2012

Creating your own practice

A common worry with practice is that it involves too many prompts and nudges from outside, and is therefore not legitimate Writing (see that capital W? Makes all the difference).

Firstly, it’s all legitimate. No one else is doing the writing, the idea generating, the sentence  construction. It’s all you.

Secondly, you can learn a lot from being pushed by something external to your own mind.

But, thirdly, if you generate your own ideas for practice you’ll quickly understand what interests you and where your preoccupations lie as a writer. It’s a shortcut to your unconscious.

So how do you go about it?

Well, the tutor who gave me the title for this blogsimply noted down things that interested her in a little notebook she carried around. Her practice was so advanced that she only needed a sentence or two to recreate a whole story about the trials of trying on clothes in a Marks & Spencer (a clothing store, for you non UK folk).

Image credit: Gary Hayes

But it could be anything – a building you like the look of. A person with luggage of unusual size. A row between serving staff in a restaurant. Anything that sets your writerly brain off with a train of questions – where is she going with that enormous case? To dispose of a body? Perhaps she’s stolen a grandmother clock that had been willed away from her by a vicious relative and she doesn’t have a car so she has to drag it across town, dismantled and crammed into a huge case which will obviously damage the clock beyond repair? But why does the clock mean so much to her?

Image Credit: cwgoodroe

You see, the best writing is simply paying really close attention and putting down into words what we all see, hear and feel, but let wash past us most of the time. This applies no matter what kind of writing you’re doing.

(Did you notice the bird? I didn’t at first.)

If you are always looking for things to note down for your practice, then you are always open to ideas, and you are always paying attention.

After you’ve started writing you might find that the mundane questions get replaced with something far more interesting. Or they might not. It doesn’t matter either way – you’ve paid attention. You’ve tried out the idea. Sometimes they have legs and sometimes they don’t.

Buy yourself a tiny notebook, or make notes on your electronic device of choice, and try this exercise next time you’re out:

Come Back with a Face

This is one of my own, and one I do most frequently. My preoccupation is people, obviously.

While you are out, make brief notes about the appearance of someone you find interesting.

For your practice, invent the life behind the face. This can be quite surprising, and lead you  a long way from where you started. Just remember not to tie the face to the place you see it, or you’ll be in too tight a corner.

(Indoor variation: search Flickr for ‘interesting face’.)

Image Credit: JakeBrewer

Happy Practicing!

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January 12, 2012

Serious Play: What is Practice?

Let’s have a closer look at what practice is, or perhaps I should come at it from a different direction and say what practice isn’t.

It’s not journalling.

It’s not stream of consciousness writing.

It’s not morning pages.

All of these things are useful tools for a writer’s toolkit, and they have their purposes, but practicing is more than simply turning up to the page and writing whatever comes into your head.

Writing freeform and undirected is a great way of warming up, but it doesn’t necessarily make you better at description or dialogue. Once your mind has got rid of its everyday clutter and chatter, then you have the space to focus on aspects of writing you find difficult, or just practise something you find enjoyable.

Photo credit: Willster K

Other art forms give us a good insight into what directed practice can be: singers do scales, or go over difficult pieces of music. A ballet dancer practices the basic steps, plies, and arabesques before they try a new choreography. Painters often learn to paint by copying the old masters. They warm up, in other words, but in ways that strengthen the basic knowledge of their art, and give them solid foundations to stand on when they create something new.

It’s the same with writing fiction.

You might worry that using prompts and practices will lead you to write in a certain way, or like everyone else, but it’s simply not possible. You always bring yourself to your writing, and you are unique, so your practice will be too.

Think about when we learn to write, physically, with a pen: we practise the letter forms over and over again. Over time, our confidence and skill grows, and we develop our own style of handwriting.

Practice is only ever a starting point. You might notice that certain themes or characters keep popping their heads up when you practise. They might be new to you, or old friends, but if this does happen, don’t feel the pressure to try and keep them out. You never know what your mind might be trying to tell you.

And what should you do with your practices? Nothing if you don’t want to. But – keep them. Somewhere safe, where you don’t have to look at them. You might want to later, say in six months, to see if there are ideas worth mining, but if you can’t bear the thought, then just know you have done the work, and that is valuable enough.

Later this week I’ll be posting about creating your own source of practices, but for now sharpen your pencils and keep writing.

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September 8, 2011

September comes and brings the promise of a new pencil case.

As a hangover from our school system we all get that feeling of September being a fresh start – like a bonus ‘new-year-turn-over-a-new-leaf ‘event. Right on cue the Autumn winds arrived, to start whipping the leaves off the trees, and driving rain into my face. Yes, I felt giddy with possibilities as I pulled on my Wolfskin and headed out of the door yesterday.

Conkers.

Crumble.

New pencil case.

Since my other occupation (sewing) is currently impossible (sewing machine buried under stuff that ought to be on eBay) and we have a new table (Ikea) and some functioning dining chairs (new obsession – upholstery), lately I often find myself at the kitchen table, sitting on a slightly rickety chair, with my laptop open and the kettle on.

Surprisingly this is a good place to write for me. I’ve experimented around the house, in all the rooms and all the chairs, and it seems that the place that makes me most productive is the one place you’d think I’d get distracted by all the jobs I ought to be doing. Luckily I’m enough of a domestic slut that I have no trouble ignoring the things I ought to be doing, in favour of things I’d rather be doing.

I know that Virginia says we need a room of one’s own, and that’s all very well, but how many of us can really have that luxury? Better to amend the exhortation to a place of one’s own, because I think this is necessary. In conjunction with the notebook you like, and the special pen, sitting down in the place where you write best helps your brain take shortcuts to the bit you want to get to. And we are all creatures of habit, even if you think you’re not: we run in little grooves, and make routines for ourselves that let us function on autopilot to get things done – imagine the horror of having to think everything through from scratch every day! It would be like starting a new job all the time.

But this is a great time of year to forge a new routine, and breathe some life back into your writing habits. Experiment around the house, and out of the house, until it feels right, until you have a great writing session that makes you feel giddy, and by October, you’ll be back on autopilot again.

So rejoice in the season changing, in children going back to school, in new shoes, winter coats, and rib-sticking stews. More than anything the promise of the new pencil case is that we antisocial creatures are freed from the pressure to go outside and enjoy the sunshine, making terrible small talk at barbeques, and can hole up with books and pens and as much of our own company as we can stand. Bliss.

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June 1, 2011

All You Need is Five Minutes

My favourite way in to writing is the five minute exercise. I was introduced to a version of it by a tutor (Anna Burns) I had at my first Arvon, and can still picture her neat frame standing in front of us explaining how it worked for her. My remembering it so clearly suggests that it was one of those moments when you recognise that something might work for you. A chord was struck.

Here’s the basic exercise:

  • find a writing prompt
  • write from it for five minutes straight

When you’ve done five minutes you can stop, or carry on with what you were writing, or pick up another and plough into that. (My tutor did an hour’s worth of practice. Yes, an hour.)

Now some people can get sniffy about prompts, but personally I like them. I like them even more when I do what Anna did, and that’s collect my own.

You know how it happens. When you’re out and about, doing stuff like ‘living’, you see the most interesting face, hear snippets of conversation, have confusing encounters with shop people and think ‘oh I could write about that’. Or maybe you do what I do and start writing in your head, because words are the way you make sense of things, and by the time you get home it’s already pretty much gone. You could instead jot down a note or two in your notebook, or on your phone or whatever, and use it as a prompt for your practice. You’d be surprised at what you can remember, and the rest… well, the rest you just make up.

If you want to see what you can get done in five minutes then I am stupidly selflessly sharing some of my practice writings at Five Minute Fictions. Feel free to use my prompt for your own use.

If you want to go public with your five minutes then Leah Petersen has a weekly contest for Glory and Kudos. I was nudged in Leah’s direction when the contest was only in its 11th week, but have still yet to enter, because the Earth turns and 1.30EST directly translates into bath & bedtime for toddlers in London. Rats. I’m there in spirit though, and the vibrancy of the contest proves how valuable and productive five minutes of writing time can be.

And before you ask, no, I haven’t done mine today. I’m tired, the builders are in, the doorframes are wrong, the cats are driving me crazy…

Hey look at that. My reasons sound like excuses.

Five minutes. That’s all.

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May 31, 2011

How To Begin

Back when I was writing enough to tell people about it in real life, for instance when I wanted to sound terribly interesting to someone I’d just met and felt a touch inferior to, there were generally two responses. The first was ‘oh my friend/mad uncle/cat is writing a novel too. I just don’t have the time.’ The barely concealed undertone is that a) anyone could do what you’re doing and b) people who have more important stuff to fill their lives with do not write.

The second response, which was preferable, but still stirred feelings of guilt at having trotted out the ‘Writing as interesting fact about self’ card, was simply, ‘oh I wouldn’t know where to start.’

Now I’m coming at writing again like a beginner, the start is at once terrifying, and liberating, for exactly the same reason: if I’m at the beginning I haven’t made any mistakes. And the truth is I don’t know where to start either.

I have run through the usual things.

  • Perhaps I need a new notebook – no, the opposite is true. A pristine notebook is something I can only ruin with my inane thoughts.
  • Perhaps I need to find my special pen -not really. As long as you get your ideas down you can scrawl them in blood. Or take a note on your phone if desperate. Most of your writing is done on a keyboard these days anyway.
  • Perhaps I need to empty the desk of collected detritis. Well, it’s tidy, but it doesn’t really help generate any actual words.
  • Perhaps I should just pop to the shops for tonight’s supper/fold the laundry/brush the cat/do any chore that comes to mind just to make sure there’s nothing holding me back. Oh no, now I’ve done all that there’s no time left for writing.

And the usual things as what the usual things have always been – diversionary tactics to keep me away from the horror of the blank page. It’s a difficult thing to try to overcome the blank page if you never even sit in front of it.

This is why practice writing, a form of wordsmith limbering up, is a common tactic among writers. If you know that the first thing you sit down to write is just practice, means nothing, and doesn’t have to be shared or broadcast or read, it becomes so much easier to sit down and type. Nothing rests on it. You are just exercising your fingers, writing out the cliches and clumsiness, and connecting with your senses.

So there really is only one way to begin, and that is to sit down and start writing something, anything. It’s such an unsatisfactory answer, isn’t it? We still need prodding, a little hint, some guidance. That’s why I’ll be sharing with you some of my favourite practice methods, books and other writerly distractions while I climb back into my writing life.

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