Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process

I’ve been re-reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. This is one of those things that happens every couple of years. If you don’t understand the appeal of Barthes, go read Matt Ortile’s Why I ended A Perfectly Fine Relationship, which is cogent and gorgeous and perfectly captures the comfort that settles over me every time I read this book. This post is more a half-formed set of thoughts, as tends to happen every time I engage with a text on semiotics and literary theory. Especially this book. But god, I love it. Adore it. And it fucks me up every time I read it. In a good way. And a bad way. Look, it’s complicated. But I dog-ear the fuck out of my copy every time I read the book, tagging new favourite passages, and yet there’s always something new to be drawn from the experience.There is no book I’ve ever come across that quite captures the feeling of infatuation

Some days I reach for words and they’re just…not there. That’s it, I think, no writing today. But generally, that’s just a lie I tell myself in an effort to feel better. What I really mean by there are no words is that I do not have it in me to deliver words the way that I think they should be delivered. That there’s something I want to say that I cannot render adequately. There is something I want to say that is at odds with what I’m trying to say. Often, it is because I am scared of a scene, of a sequence, of a sentence. And that’s cool. When that happens, I don’t need to write a sentence. I can start with a word. Just one goddamn word. And, most days, if I’m willing to risk that much, everything else follows along. Not perfect, and not in the way I was thinking in the beginning, but there are words.

I have sixty minutes to write and edit this blog post. Fifty-nine minutes and twenty-seconds now. Even less, by the time you hit this sentence. I have sixty minutes because today is unexpected clear of distractions. The farewell I was meant to be attending this evening has been rescheduled. My usual Friday write-club buddy is currently interstate. I am on my own, in my apartment, trying to get shit done with no distractions, and that is bad for me. If there’s one thing I’m generally pretty good at, it’s getting shit done around other obligations. Give me an eight hour work day followed by three hours of gaming at a friend’s place, and I will bust out my minimum daily pages in record time then squeeze in a blog post for good measure. Give me twelve uninterrupted hours, and I will binge-watch shit on Netflix and watch interviews with wrestlers on Youtube. I can hold to schedules built around social obligation, but

I’m in bad shape today. The details are unimportant – insert a huge paragraph about sleep issues and head-colds here, if you must – the important part is that I am very tired and very listless. That feeling you get where you lie awkwardly and cut off circulation to your arm, leaving it feeling numb and faintly foreign as you try to get blood to return? That is my entire body. Right now, I do a good line in staring absently into the middle distance. Not thinking, just…lost. Tired to the point where the very thought of doing something causes my brain to misfire. I bump into things when I walk around. I drop things: butter knives, coffee mugs, laundry baskets, pens. And yet, somewhere amid the haze and chaos that is today’s thought process, there was this singular idea: make sure you blog today, even though you don’t feel like it. Not because I have anything particularly useful to

If you take a quick gander at my Instagram feed, it should be pretty obvious that I am now an unapologetic notebook guy these days. A good 90% of my posts are basically me doing the pictorial equivalent of posting word-counts in a blog – tracking progress through a project by photographing page numbers. I do it there because, quite honestly, I have a pretty minimal number of Instagram followers and it’s less likely to piss people off, but also because I’ve come to appreciate the value of focusing on my process, rather than my goals. Occasionally I feel bad about doing this, but over the last week I’ve talked to a handful of people who have been inspired to the rock the analogue approach to their writing. And, since this wasn’t exactly a natural progression for me, I figured I’d put down a little advice. First, some background: I spent about fifteen years failing to write in notebooks prior to

I had breakfast at my local cafe this morning. It’s a habit I’m cultivating this year, on Write Club days, after realising that breakfast at my local cafe makes me extraordinarily happy and it becomes affordable within my budget if I stop buying Coke Zero. Giving up Coke Zero for something that makes me extraordinary happy is an easy trade, and so, twice a week, I trot down to the Low Road Cafe and order their avocado on toast for breakfast. There are two things I love about the Low Road’s avocado breakfast. The first is that it’s a production. It’s thick slices of doorstop toast, avocado, three different types of nuts, little slices of radish and radish flowers. Lemon juice. Freshly chopped herbs laid over the whole thing like a winter blanket. The kind of food put together by a chef who isn’t regarding their vegetarian menu as an afterthought, and enjoys the process of making tasty things. Avocado on

I went back to writing first drafts on the computer, then came back to notebooks after Christmas. The computer didn’t work for me the way it once did. It’s become the place for editing work, for doing the day-to-day stuff. It divides focus in a way that the notebooks don’t. My natural inclination is to write in short bursts: four minutes, then a pause. Five minutes, then a pause. On a computer there are more words in each burst, but longer pauses. On a notebook, I’ll frequently stop to contemplate the next step, and I’ll be back at work within a minute. I can write faster and harder on a computer, but I’ll get two or three bursts into a one-hour block. I can write for longer, on a notebook. The stops are shorter, my brain less prone to wondering. This is the effect of tracking different data, getting things more fine-tuned. Though I burn through pens like nobodies business. The graveyard

I’m not a consistent writer. Not in terms of my work habits, not in terms of my approach, and not in terms of the genres that I’m interested in or my long-term goals. There is something inherently mercurial about my approach to all this, despite my best efforts to try and constrain my natural tendency to rapidly change my mind about things in response to external stimuli. I spend a lot of time trying to figure how to get the hell out of my own way. The days where I’m successful are roughly equal to the days where I fail. I am distractable, and fallible, and often lazier than I feel comfortable with. Frequently, when I post here, I’m engaging in a pep-talk that I need to hear above all else. Right now, that pep talk is this: for the love of god, slow down. Pay attention to what you’re doing now, not what you want in give years time. Partially this