One day Goethe called on his fellow-writer, Friedrich Schiller, only to find that he had gone out. Informed that he would return shortly, he went to Schiller’s writing-table to jot down a few notes and was sickened, almost to the point of fainting, by the smell coming from one of the table-drawers, which he discovered to be full of rotten apples. ‘I immediately went to the window,’ Goethe later recalled, ‘and inhaled the fresh air, by which I felt myself instantly restored. In the meantime his wife had re-entered, and told me that the drawer was always filled with rotten apples, because the scent was beneficial to Schiller, and he could not live or work without it.’
One person’s aid to writing may be another’s poison, and anyone offering practical hints for writers would do well to remember this. Even so, a few suggestions may be helpful.
Set aside a dedicated working space, preferably one that allows you to leave your writing materials in place when you’ve finished a session: ideally, you need to be able to get straight down to work the minute you decide to write. If domestic distractions make working at home impossible, don’t give up. Find somewhere else: perhaps a library, a cafe – that worked for J. K. Rowling – or a friend’s house. The shed at the bottom of the garden shouldn’t be despised – garden sheds worked for both Roald Dahl and Philip Pullman. You don’t need to be comfortable as much as you need to be writing.
If you can realistically allocate two hours a day to your writing, that’s fantastic. But you probably can’t: you may well be snatching odd hours or moments here and there. The problem with this is that almost everything else will be clamouring for your attention more noisily than your writing does, and the writing will repeatedly get pushed to the end of the queue. So you may find it helpful, or even necessary, to prioritise and regularise your writing time: allot specific hours and then be prepared to defend that time. Make it a date in your diary. If circumstances compel you to postpone, schedule a new date to make up for the one you’ve missed.
Once you’re in your writing space, try to avoid delay. If your delaying tactics include such activities as the sharpening of pencils, the filling of fountain pens and the organising of notes, it’s worth bearing in mind that these largely mechanical tasks can usually be done in advance, in odd moments not dedicated to the central business of writing. And, while you might reasonably take a moment to settle to your task, it’s not advisable to spend long periods waiting for inspiration. Start writing – something, anything – and inspiration will often follow. As E. L. Doctorow has sensibly said: ‘Planning to write is not writing.... Writing is writing.’
Remember that the sequence of your plot needn’t determine the sequence of composition. If you’re stuck, overleap the sticking point and start writing a section which presents itself more clearly or more excitingly. You can return later to the problem area, by which time some of the new material you’ve written may have given you ideas for the passage you’ve temporarily set aside.
Ernest Hemingway said that he had learned ‘never to empty the well’ – that is, he learned to stop a session of writing before the ideas ran out. ‘I always worked,’ he said, ‘until I had something done, and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.’ It’s a strategy that presupposes that the writer has considerable choice as to when to stop, and it may not work for writers who are temperamentally inclined to strike while the iron is hot, or who worry that they may have forgotten their brilliant ideas by the following morning, but the implied advice is worth considering.
Any piece of advice may be debatable, but the important question is: ‘Does this work for me?’ If it doesn’t, it can simply be ignored; if it does, we should make sure that we integrate it fully into our writing practice.
Jem Poster and Sarah Burton’s new handbook for fiction writers will be released on 17 March 2022 and is available to pre-order now from the Guardian Bookshop.
