Writing Advice – Craft & Process

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.

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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 that would make that clear. A subtext that would make a request of the reader: Understand that I’m not at my best, and take pity on my failings.

Which is, weirdly, why Hendrickson’s book proved useful in a writing context, because one of the core ideas she talks about is the fear of The Reveal that lies at the heart of social anxiety:

It’s the sense that something embarrassing, deficient, or flawed about us will become obvious to everyone…Social Anxiety isn’t just the fear of judgement, it’s the fear that the judgers are right. We think there’s something wrong with us, and we avoid it to conceal it. In our minds, if The Reveal comes to pass we’ll be rejected, humiliated, or exposed.

How To Be Yourself, pg 32

Writers exhibit this fear all the time. It’s right there in the questions new writers ask: how did you get published? Can you take a look at my work and tell me if I’m wasting my time? Can you really make a career out of this? It’s there in the way many of us promote our work, or the constant imposture syndrome that most writers seem to grapple with.

And I think this fear of the reveal comes part and parcel with trying to make a living as a writer. When delivering workshops to new writers, I will often talk about the bizarre binary of the way people talk about writing: you’re either a massive, phenomenal success, or you are a failure. A multi-time bestseller, or destined to die in the gutter, penniless and probably mad.

If we consider the questions referenced above, they’re a natural consequence of a dichotomy that leaves little space for development, growth, and a pluralistic definition of success.

If you tell most people that you want to be a writer, the subtext of conversations that follow will normally involve a level of how dare you, or you poor deluded fool, and that’s rich terrain for social anxiety to kick in. Couple that with an industry in which your work is constantly being evaluated and measured in terms of both its potential for generating social and financial capital, and its easy to understand how anxiety may kick in.

Every engagement with a publisher, ever agent, every critic and reader is a moment where you fear the reveal is going to happen. Is it any wonder that writers–particularly new writers for whom validation is rare–have a tendency to procrastinate? It’s the easiest form of avoidance we have, an easy way to delay the reveal when a work is actually finished.

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There’s a practice that Hendrickson recommends as a basic means of understanding the reveal. Hers runs something like this:

When (insert social situation here), it will become obvious that (what my inner critic says is wrong with me).

How to Be Yourself, pg 81

I’ve started doing something similar as part of my pre-writing process, particularly if there’s a project I’m specifically avoiding or that I’m stuck on:

When I finish (insert the project/scene that I’m working on), it will become obvious that (insert what my inner critique sees as a potential problem).

This is proving a really useful way of honing in on the things my inner critic is using to try and derail the forward progress.

• When I finish Warhol Sleeping, it will become obvious that it’s experimental wank rather than an engaging story.
• When I write this motorcycle chase scene through the city, it will become obvious that I don’t know how to block a good action scene in fiction.
• When I write this interrogation scene in a bar, it will become obvious that I’m riffing on genre conventions instead of a grounded setting.
• When I write this scene in which a character hides beneath the corpses of the dead in a battle, it will become really obvious that I don’t understand what it really means to be in that situation.

The useful part of this process is tapping into what my internal editor is actually worrying about, which isn’t always obvious when I get stuck on a project or start developing avoidance behaviours. Getting specific with the problem makes it easier to focus on what can be done in order to fix it–I have a specific thing I can research, or a particular weakness in the scene that needs to be fixed, rather than defaulting to “I need to rewrite everything from the ground up, and Gods, that’s so much work. Fuck it.”a useful thing when my default response is “rewrite everything from the ground up.”

My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day.

If I’m right in my estimates, this should be good for about 700,000 to 800,000 words over the course of the year, but I’m utterly unconcerned with the word count produced. My sole determinant of success in 2019 is pure hours spent with my but in the chair and my internet blocker turned on so I’m focused on drafting new words.

This is a pretty big departure for me–like most writers, I’ve tended to forward plan based around word count. My goals around this time of year would be focused on the number of words produced, or the number of things finished. I want to write 2,000 words a day, or I’d like to finish 20 short stories.

Switching over to an hour-based goal is an attempt to try and overcome the fundamental flaws of this approach: I cannot schedule 2,000 words a day or writing a story effectively, because I’ll only ever be using an estimate of how much time it will take to get those done.

It may be a pretty good estimate–I’ve been tracking my time pretty carefully over the last couple of years and know my average hourly pace while writing first drafts–but the moment I have a bad week my anxiety will kick in. Or I’ll find myself working eight hours to get 2,000 words, especially if I’m doing something tricky or trying to write something I’m not particularly good with.

The nice thing about setting a four-hour-per-day-goal? I always know how much time to schedule, and how much time to make up during those tricky periods where life gets in the way or I’m working slower than usual. It also means I have to throw consistent focus on creating new work, rather than obsessing about how previous work has been going.

On the other hand, this is an intentional cap that cuts things off–if I am having a rough writing day, I don’t need to push in order to hit my goal. I can just focus for the hours I need to focus, and get done what I need to get done. Given that I’m on a relatively free-form schedule until the PhD is done, those four hours of focus give me plenty of extra hours to handle research, work on redrafting things, and other stuff associated with writing that doesn’t involve first drafts.

With the Warhol Sleeping draft in the bag, I get to start a new project this week.

It’s not a NaNoWriMo project, despite being started on November 1, because my current process is spectacularly ill-suited to doing NaNo. In fact, it’s one of those batshit crazy approaches that works for me in my current situation, but would make me shake my head if someone suggested it in a writing class.

Basically, I’m trying to stay ahead of my anxiety and tendency to fret by treating drafting as a game of three card monte: three projects, three hours of writing time each day, and a timer that reminds me to swap between them at the end of every hour.

The whole thing is focused on short, sustained bursts of focus on multiple projects, rather than three hours of trying to batter my head against a single book. No word count goals, just a specific amount of time staying focused on each draft, usually packed into the space between lunch and my partner arriving home.

It’s unlikely that I’m going to make 50k on any particular project in the space of a month, but it’s possible I’ll clear that total. I did about 37,000 words in the last two weeks, courtesy of making short bursts of progress on multiple projects. It turns out that constant incremental advances add up really quickly, and packing the bulk of my drafting into a three-hour block leaves me a good chunk of day to devote to PhD research, editing, and other necessary tasks that I need to clear off the decks.

It’s not a permanent process–I doubt there will ever be a process that I stick with long-term, simply because process adapts to suit the reality of my current situation–but it’s working pretty well right now.

It will likely be less effective as I stack up drafts and need to devote more time to redrafting and revising, but that’s trading up to a better class of problems.