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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Half a thought on new writing

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.

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Manchester snow

Manchester’s had more snow than anyone remembers. We woke to drifts a foot deep in places, and transport that scarcely worked. But there’s no meaningful way to write about snow without cliche — no point, even — not least when so many pictures have already coloured our day. The south’s next. Here’s hoping they have people who’ll smile and push the cars of strangers without being asked.

Dad took this early — it’s a bench back home. Says more than I’ll try to.

Snowy bench at home | (c) my dad, so watch it

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Flying

I’m on fences about aeroplanes. You know the cold physics add up, but it’s one of the few occasions you really fear gravity for what it is; for what it will do.

My throat lumps every time the wheels leave tarmac. The lurch as the tail section dips, the engines screaming, you wondering if the last metre of the plane will scrape the hard top, pull the plane back, the wheels off, the rear section open.

I sit on planes and see my death in so many ways. I fall and burn and break and splash. I tear and wheel and split and burst.

All of these things because I’ve paid for another human to take me up where humans shouldn’t go, and then to land safely at the other side. That isn’t a fear of flying. It’s being afraid of ineptitude. It’s being terrified of fallibility: the one bad habit we’ll always excuse.

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New flat

I’ve moved in with a girl whose legs I fancied in school. It’s a kind of deferred success.

Back then, 13 years old and sprouting limbs, I asked her out. She wouldn’t mind me saying her hair was kind of weird. It went all up and out — a hair-sprayed mushroom cloud – but she had breasts and tight blouses and spoke nine languages; wore a tightish navy skirt that framed her thighs.

That isn’t porny. I didn’t even know what a willy was for.

We were standing in the cold corridor — a brown plate-glass tunnel connecting old buildings. I fairly invited her to kiss me. She said no, but said I was sweet. I just don’t see you in that way, Matt, she said — a cliché as old as the chestnut. Then she and went off with all the popular boys; the boys who get their beards early.

As a geek, the breasts sure helped her transcend genres. I resented it quietly. I didn’t have breasts as leverage, and I played drums for the choir. In the last year of school, my face pocked with the ravages of underage smoking, I called her cocky.
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Somewhere-in-Furness

BAE Sub Shed | c/o Tom Bullock @ FlickrWe 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.

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Getting unpublished

Let’s get dramatic. In July, my book was unpublished.

It fell from the pre-order listings of a dozen online book shops, was deleted from Nielsen Bookscan. The galley proofs were unbound, de-covered and bleached back to white.

Reps got in their cars after really successful meetings with booksellers — who liked and loved and wanted to see more — and went home, tore up their AI sheets, and forgot the ISBN.

The book cover fell to bits and became Photoshop layers again, deleted in turn, by turns. The final draft sprouted mistakes; my editor grew concerned.

I went back through the third and second and first draft, adding long, clumsy sentences, plot holes, spelling errors, weird syntax and padding. I rewrote the best sentences into poor ones, and added about 20,000 words back in.

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Suit fitting

Look, me and suits go like penis and blenders. It seems foolish and feels worse.

Suits, they’re for real men – men running for trains with cummerbunds flapping behind like some kind of heterosexual vapour trail.

Half the problem is they’re far too hard to get right. You see all these men in suits and you know they’re in the club. They’re the bonus you wear – a massive cotton-rich condom, designed to sheath six feet of dick. And like the rank banana jonnies you bought that time, lobbing sweaty quids in the machine and praying nobody came in the bogs behind you, they never fit right.

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Science fiction, technology and Twitter

Raygun

If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared fluid identities before AOL chat rooms, and we’re not worried about black holes now we’ve made a big machine to create little ones. Possibly we got bored of science fiction when reality caught up – and now, given to romance and nostalgia, we’ve got steampunk and a million remakes.

But for all the debate about what SF is and isn’t, the best stuff is still based around big ideas. A big idea; a mirror to our present fears, advances, social structures, institutions and other big words.

With Twitter, and all the web stuff that’s growing with and around it, I reckon there’s a lot for new genre fiction writers looking for new, big, original ideas in science fiction. And that’s because I think Twitter is an excellent parallel for fictional technology – the fictional technology around which the very best SF writers build their worlds.

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Canterbury tale

Canterbury cathedral

Canterbury is Hollyoaks with more church. It’s walled on all sides and powered in turns by attractive students, Christian pilgrims and publoads of locals who pine for the old days, the older ways. Groaning with guest ales and strung with flags, it’s also handsome city – though if you whisper, you can easily argue it’s a town.

I get into Canterbury East early evening, half expecting to find nothing but flower gardens, Chaucer graffiti and giddy vicars. Actually I don’t see a wrinkle for half an hour, surprised by the amount of road traffic, the number of fringes, and how green stuff is.

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