Like most amateur writers, I ordinarily get very little of it done. Way back when, in the halcyon days of university life resembling something close to normality, my love for creative writing was often left to simmer on the back burner while I flapped frenziedly at my seething academic work with a tea towel. Then, of course, came lockdown. After the initial frenzy of getting home and drawing up plans for self-improvement I knew would come to nothing (we all had to get it out of our systems, didn't we?), and the relief that I was no longer doomed to hunt for toilet roll by myself in the ransacked wastes of the central-Edinburgh supermarkets, it didn't take me long to run out of excuses not to break out the pen and paper. Here are a few tips I have accumulated which all predate lockdown, but which have been particularly useful during the past few months whenever writers' block has reared its ugly head.
1. This first one is more of an attitude tip. I don't know about you, but studying literature at university and having access to so many creative writing resources, like writing groups and workshops, can sometimes make writing feel a little overwhelming. We study wonderful books and meet talented writers at varying stages of becoming 'established', and while this is mostly an inspirational experience, the formidable status of the authors we study combined with the current economic situation means it is not hard to let the pessimism take over. Why bother, when so many other people, including so many other students, are better than you? I'll tell you why. At the risk of this turning into a rousing harangue against the system, put the notions of perfection and economic productivity out of your head. Immediately. The most important thing to remember is that if you love what you're writing, if it feels comfy and fun, you're doing something right, and everyone else be damned.
2. Everyone else be damned – except when you need them. Show somebody your writing. This can be a nerve-wracking step (it always is for me, no matter how many times I do it), but it offers a fresh perspective and can really help develop your ideas. Find somebody you know won't laugh at your writing no matter how ... first-draft-y it is. There will almost certainly be some hidden gems in there.
3. Whenever you’ve written something, wait at least a week before looking at it again. No matter how tempting it is to get editing immediately, give yourself time to forget what you’ve written. Reading it again will be like reading something written by somebody else, and you’ll get an objectivity you won’t get if you edit it day after day. And hopefully your reaction to your own work will consist mostly of exclaiming ‘Who’s this genius worthy of a philosophical meal with Kazuo Ishiguro?’, rather than ‘Wow, I thought I was Dickens last week, but this looks like a drunken fanfiction of the Mr. Men series’. Feel free, of course, to ignore this tip if you are submitting your writing to a deadline; sometimes seven days are a luxury we can't afford.
4. If you’re after a more concrete exercise to get you started, I was taught this by Scottish writer Kirsty Logan and it’s always served me well. Pick five words, at random, from a dictionary. Assign each word the letters A, B, C, D, and E. For this exercise, you will write six paragraphs, with each one containing five sentences. Each sentence will contain one of the five words you have chosen. You don’t get to choose which words occur where, however. There is a formula. Paragraph 1: Sentence one will contain A. Sentence two: B. Sentence three: C. Sentence four: D. Sentence five: E. Paragraph 2: EADBC Paragraph 3: CEBAD Paragraph 4: DCAEB Paragraph 5: BDECA Paragraph 6: ABCDE
Don’t look at this as a sort of ‘Pen your own Ulysses’ recipe book: the result will be a series of fairly repetitive paragraphs, but hopefully it will give you some good material for later.
5. One writing instructor I had in the past had an exercise she called ‘hot writing’. No, I wasn’t attending an erotic fiction workshop; this was merely an introductory exercise for which I had to write down anything that came into my head, however trivial and ‘un-literary’, for ten minutes straight. It sounds very simple but is surprisingly effective; most of what you write will just be background noise (I remember using the time to write a shopping list during one workshop) but again, channel your inner magpie and sift through the dross for the gems.
6. 1. Keep a diary, if only for the hilarity of reading it in future. Diaries are wonderful ways of keeping you in the habit of writing regularly, and are particularly important during these troubled times. Keeping a diary through lockdown has resulted, for me, in some interesting reading a few months down the line. Diaries are, of course, strictly for the eyes of the writer only, but there’s nothing to stop you harvesting them for ideas and changing all the names!
Happy writing! Here are some resources with an abundance of exercises, competitions, and the like to keep you going:
https://nws.submittable.com/submit (New Writing Scotland competition)
https://www.guttermag.co.uk/submit (Magazine which accepts poetry and prose submissions)
https://owlcation.com/academia/Try-Oulipo-and-No-More-Writers-Block (concerning the fascinating French literary movement Oulipo)
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