I am pregnant with a story.
It’s overdue, but I can’t get myself into labour. It won’t crown. It’s kicking my belly but it doesn’t want to play. It’s a distraction; I feel it most of the time. It’ll be the third time. The first time it was diarrhea. The second was a textbook delivery — it was fun and flowing and fairly batshit in places, but I wrote it and it nearly made it to adulthood. Only it didn’t, and we already know that story.
I’m pregnant with a story I want to birth but can’t bring myself to.
I’m thinking too much about what people will think of it; whether it’ll stand up; whether it’ll be so good that I go and kill everything else I wrote just to concentrate on rearing it properly. I knew this kid who spoke about a ‘blinking cursor of doom’ over a white document. That’s fine, but it’s also another way to say you’re lazy — and another to say you’ve given up.
We overtake the ghost of winter floods on the motorway North – a lorry with Cockermouth written all over its flanks. Past Lancaster, and the digital boards start shouting about closed bridges. Later, while the night tips fully into black, we see a couple of dented road signs. And that’s all. We wind up staying about twenty minutes away from the high water itself, but actually the flooding stays a kind of miniature 9/11 – something your horrid little brain wants to see first-hand despite knowing it shouldn’t.
Nine ways to trick yourself into writing
After last week’s moan about writing anxiety, I spent the days since tricking myself back into writing. Has it worked?
Well, I’ve got myself 4,000 words for the trouble. Below, I’ve listed what I think I did better. It’s not a methodology. It’s not life-coaching for writers. But it’s something.
Use Microsoft Notepad, not Microsoft Word
Notepad looks like crap, which is the whole point. For one, you’re never distracted by fonts. You can just write. For two, you don’t care about formatting. You can just write. For three, you can get filthy. Disgust yourself with your writing — write as fast as you can, and spell everything wrong — because nobody’s ever going to see what you’re doing in that terrid little .txt file.
Copy and paste your notes in. Make a mess.
And can I promise something else? You’ll never find a better sentence by right-clicking for the thesaurus.
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