Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Some days it sucks you in, the magic of this writing gig, even when you sit and work in a place patently unsuited to magic. Right now, I’m in the small food court underneath the Queens Plaza mall. It’s not yet ten o’clock and the vendors are still warming up for the day. The girl behind the Red Rooster counter looks bored when I order a coke. The woman at the noodle stand isn’t even at her counter. The whole room is an oval, vendors arrayed around the edge, brightly lit to encourage a swift move through as you circle, looking for something to eat.

There’s two young people the next table over, engaged in an animated discussion about language and syllables and people who do not articulate well. They war Doc Martins, hoodies, glasses. Backpacks in army camouflage colours, trading laughter in a way that makes me wonder if they’re flirting. Or, perhaps, not-yet-flirting, just the nervous feeling-out process where they wonder if there’s something there.

It’s not just the laughter that makes me think this: it’s the leaning, the smiles, the eagerness.

There’s other people working here: a young woman in a nylon sweater, headphones plugged into her laptop; an older guy in glasses and a greying goatee, sipping tea from a cardboard cup as he ponders the screen of his laptop; a woman in black, hair in a bun, writing notes as she flips through pages on her phone and frowns with an intensity.

I write to the sound of muzak, the sizzle of deep fryers and the clack of metal tools getting moved about in kitchens. I write to the burble of the young kids, five tables over, trying to get their mum’s attention as she answers a text on her phone. I pay attention to a woman in black, her white hair permed, her scarf a brilliant streak of scarlet against her thin neck.

You can recite the names of shops like a mantra, or a poem: Soul Origin; Footgear; Get Threaded; Professional Nail.

Or: Noodle Time; Vegeto; The Zeus Street Greek; that empty spot that used to be the Snag place that served obscenely priced hotdogs.

The magic is not that these details exist, nor that I’m sitting here noticing. The magic is in sifting through, discerning what would be included, what would be left out. The magic lies in picking your details, sifting out the unnecessary details and leaving those that build a certain effect. This person, if mentioned, becomes significant. They direct the reader’s attention towards something that matters to the piece. These people who exist in the reality around me–the cluster of guys in hats and fluro shirts, wearing Blundstones and eating burgers; the two young Chinese students eating noodles, wearing glasses—do not exist in the narrative until they are needed for effect.

Everything comes down to effect: what do I want the reader to think? What do I want them to feel? Two things that are forever beyond your control, so you do your best to narrow the field. Focus them on the thing that matter and hope they do the rest themselves, get somewhere close to the point you’re trying to make or the feeling you’re trying to evoke.

Everything comes down to effect, in the end, and the details you choose to evoke it.

The Muzak has shifted, a big brass number. Someone who might be Bublé singing. The young people in Docs and hoodies leave, threading through the tables before climbing aboard the escalator. Their closeness is gone, once they’re on foot. They laugh less, focus on the people around them. Avoiding collisions, dragged back into the world.

They’re leaving the food court behind them.

I’m bedding in some new routines at the moment, trying to figure out ways to work smarter rather than harder. This is a response to the way current life-events are affecting my perspective around my projects, asking me to redefine what can be construed as a success outcome for a project or “a good day’s progress” when I’m writing.

This is always a danger when part of your income is predicated on freelance, contract, or irregular income: as you look to the future and see lean weeks on the horizon, it’s tempting to start thinking bigger, doing more, and figuring you can work faster. I can often tell when I’m tipping into outright anxiety because I start planning huge projects that are designed to fit around my already packed-out schedule.

I’ve felt myself doing it over the last couple of weeks. Little whispers like it’s time to start blogging daily again and hey, lets try and write a six-part novella series in the space of two months. There are definite advantages to embracing both those projects, but they’re also a response to the fact that my partner is leaving her job and dealing with a pinched nerve, while I’m finishing up a teaching contract and preparing to release a new short story collection.

In short, I’m twitchy about money and putting more pressure on my writing to make up the shortfall. And since writing only tends to pay off when your’e finishing something and selling it, I’m looking to produce more more more. My thought process is 100% reactive thinking: the new book won’t sell enough to make up for the lack of income – WRITE MORE! I’m not generating as many leads for new work while focusing on novels – WRITE MORE!

Which is, honestly, a way to make myself frustrated, produce work that I’m not particularly happy with, and ultimately cut my business plan off at the knees by operating in very panicked, reactive way (I know this because I’ve been here before, recognise that tree, and have tired these very tactics).

The routine I’m bedding in is a reaction to all of that, forcing myself to slow down and think things through instead of mindless hammering a keyboard while chasing word count. It’s building upon the success I’ve had using the Pomodoro technique when things are getting crazy, some notes in Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife and Wonderbook (also, this blog post), some notes (and further reading) from this post from Tobias Buckell, and a whole bunch of notes I took while researching the routines of writers I admire.

Roughly, I’m aiming for something like this:

• 7:30 – 8:30. Do all the morning things: waking up, showering, breakfast, a little cleaning before I set up the day.
• 8:30 – 10:30. First work block of the day. This one’s largely focused on thinking and planning in the bullet journal or a project notebook. Mapping out scenes, working through plot or character development, asking myself questions about stuff I got stuck on yesterday.
• 10:30 – 11:00. Take a quick walk. Usually this will be continued thinking time about a particular problem.
• 11:00 – 12:30. Second work block of the day. This one’s where I actually start writing a scene (or thesis chunk), handwriting to keep myself off the computer for as long as possible.
• 12:30 – 2:00. Time out for lunch, any chores that are pressing, my first email check, and any other busy work that’s on my to-do list. I’ll generally add a bit to my weekly newsletter in this block, or draft a blog post for later in the day.
• 2:00 – 3:30. Third work block. This one’s dedicated to revision or typing up existing scenes into the project du jour and represents the first dedicated computer time of the day.
• 3:30 – 7:00. This is reading/research time and admin, leading into chores, a walk, dinner and hanging out with my partner as she comes home from work.
• 7:00 – 8:30. The reserve work block. If I feel like a day is going poorly, have research I’m really excited about, or I’ve got pressing deadlines that need to be covered (hello marking), I’ll negotiate a final block of work in the evenings with my partner.

Ideally, I’d like to keep that final block from being used, but I know myself and my reaction to stress – if I don’t have an overspill with limitations in place, I will end up falling into the habit of working throughout the evening or getting frustrated that I’m not working. Having something that I will use occasionally, with finish time, will hopefully keep me from disappearing into the realm of diminishing returns. Negotiating it with my partner is necessary because our flat is small, and it means I have to be real clear about why I want to use this block.

On a good day, this largely involves three hours of writing time split between first drafts and revision, and around 90 minutes of forward planning and/or PhD thinking. This is separated out by some dedicated rest time where I give my brain a break from deep work, which has the useful side effect of allowing new connections to form and ideas to spring up. The surprisingly useful thing, as suggested by Buckell’s post, is forcing myself to stop mid-task when the time is up, as leaving the ragged edge keeps me looking for new connections.

The upside of the plan is that it gives me more ongoing focus than I’m getting during a 25 minute pomodoro burst while retaining the work/rest pattern, although I’m noticing that my attention starts to flag after about an 70 minutes of a 90 minute block. If that doesn’t improve over time, I’ll look at reviewing this to focus on shorter periods of focus and shorter breaks.

The goal with the schedule is to push my attention away from word count in terms of judging how successful my day has been. For one thing, word count tends to be variable depending on the stage of a project. On top of that, it prefaces a certain kind of work (drafting) over other aspects of writing.

My overall goal is to slow down my writing process in order to speed up – producing more finished, strong final work instead of the surfeit of rough drafts that’s being generated by my current process.

The interesting thing about writing is the sheer amount of craft that goes into a single moment.

Stories tend to climax when a major character makes an important decision – Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and uses the force, or Katniss Everdeen refuses to play by the rules of the Hunger Game and refuses to kill the final competitor – and everything else in the story tends to focus on making that decision as meaningful as possible. Character arcs, themes and conflict. Narrative voice and carefully developed metaphors. All just an elaborate construction to contextualise a single difficult decision and imbue it with meaning.

We aren’t built to make hard decisions. Even something as simple as “I should start getting some exercise,” is met with considerable resistance as we delay and make excuses. Watching fictional characters make those hard decisions is a promise that one day, if it really mattered, we could overcome that resistance and make the hard call.

It’s also a promise that hard decisions do mean something, in a world where it can feel like no decision really matters.