Hello loves! Happy Monday! I hope you’re really well. Soon, I’m going to be sharing my Pity Party tour dates, and I hope to see some of you this summer! Meanwhile, I am still beavering away at my new book, Read Yourself Happy, and we’re working on a new series of You’re Booked with some iconic guests.
I’m hoping to launch the next edition of Write Like A Reader soon - my five part, Zoom, creative fiction course, which is designed to be intimate, fun and confidence boosting! If you’d like to be the first to hear about new dates and details for that, email me! creativeconfidenceclinic@gmail.com. And hit the button above to take advantage of our Spring offer, and become a full CCC member for half price.
Now for this week’s letter!
I am writing a book at the moment and feeling very Groundhog Day about it. The process is always roughly the same. This is what happens.
At any given time, there are at least ten open Microsoft Word documents on my laptop. The one I’m writing on now is Document13.
Someone messages to ask if I want to meet for coffee next week, and I don’t reply. Well, I do, in my mind. I hiss, like Mugatu from Zoolander. How very dare they? Don’t they know the pressure I’m under? The relentless, crushing, ever present pressure?!
I manufacture a crisis. Typically, I break my laptop. Last week I unlocked a new level in which I went to A&E, having temporarily lost the vision in my left eye. (Don’t fix your own spectacles, kids.)
I’m overwhelmed by the urge to get every single thing out of my wardrobe and ‘sort it out’. Or to bake a full afternoon tea. Or to buy a professional grade hula hoop and learn how to use it.
I will not shut up about how stressed I am about work. ‘So stressful right now,’ I say, darkly. If the person I’m talking to does not know what I do for a living, they would not guess novelist. They might assume that I’m an A&E doctor, or a hostage negotiator.
I write my own, horrible reviews in my head. ‘Facile.’ ‘Pointless.’ ‘Great big dummy dumberson.’ I compare myself with every other writer who has ever lived and conclude that I am the worst.
I compare myself with myself. I look at the book before this book - the fresh, finished, shiny book – and I look at the ten open Microsoft Word documents – and I suspect that I used to be so much smarter, and funnier, and I must have been abducted. The real me has been stolen and replaced by this great big dummy dumberson.
And yet I write. I think, and write, and think, and write, and crawl back on the bucking broncho that has just thrown me to the floor, no matter how many cigarette butts are stuck to me. Every day, I try. Every day, the word count goes up a little bit. Every day, the first fifteen minutes are hell, and then I can usually come up with something. Every day I feel grateful to have made something visible and measurable.
There will always be a string of days in which the work seems completely pointless. When my brain feels so tired and so slow that I’d have more luck if I set my laptop in front of a bowl of cold porridge. Days when I can’t remember my why. I’m getting better at resting and realising what’s up with me. If a third bad day follows a second, I need a break. The next day is always better. And I live like this, in cycles of frustration and elation, getting stuck, and getting free, and then, and then, and then…I have the earliest version of a book.
Every single time, I think ‘This one will be different! This one will be easy! This will be fun!’ And every single time I’m shocked by the fact that writing is hard, that there’s only so much mental energy and concentration I can sustain, and that it takes as long as it takes – I can do it fast, or I can do it right. There’s no clever hack that means you sit down after breakfast, and you’re typing ‘THE END’ by dinnertime.
But every single time, I learn something new. This time, I’ve discovered that my brain is like my body, and it doesn’t like working at maximum capacity every single day. I need to build in some recovery time. I’ve also learned that I get lonely, when I work alone for days on end – and I’ve started to catch myself before my tired brain starts to spiral into scary places. And my lonely brain thinks it wants to look at Instagram, but what it really needs and craves can be delivered by the Taskmaster podcast, or a coffee date, or Rylan on Radio Two.
Other useful things I’ve learned, through trial and error, are as follows: If you’ve got a looming deadline, and you decide to write what you can, as well as you can, in the time allowed, and not worry too much about anything else, you’ll write pretty well. If you then decide your next project needs to be a work of transcendent, powerful prose that will prove your literary prowess and ‘show them all’, you’ll be having a breakdown within about three weeks. You will look at something you wrote a year ago and think ‘That’s good! How did I do that? It’s so much better than what I’m writing now! I’m getting worse!’ You will not be able to remember the fact that a year ago, you sighed and had exactly the same despairing thought.
Because every time we sit down and try, we’re getting better. Every time we’re building up the muscles, the resistance and the resilience that is required to make this worthwhile work. I loved
’s words on the subject – ‘Books matter and are magical — because you can’t just churn them out. Books take time. They take dedication. I have a theory that writing a novel in this current climate is the hardest it’s ever been because there are a bazillion things trying to capture our attention.’ The process is always and never the same. But as long as we keep bringing our whole selves to it – which also means budgeting for the selves that get tired and cranky and need regular refuelling – it’s worth doing.I look at my shelf of books. I see How To Be A Grown Up, and remember taking a long, furious walk through Greenwich park, in the rain, feeling horribly stuck, and furious with my agent’s feedback, and wishing she could just say ‘I love it!’ and send it out. I see The Sisterhood and remember writing in cafes and on trains, and how astonishing it is that the other day I had an Instagram message from a reader who loved a particular passage which I wrote when stuck outside Ramsgate station on Good Friday, 2018.
I see Insatiable and remember thinking how badly I longed to tell the story, to write a proper novel, with an ending – and how it’s made of countless Sunday afternoons, with me sitting on the sofa, thinking ‘I can’t do this! Why am I doing this?’ I look at Careering, and wish I’d celebrated more when it was published, instead of worrying and worrying about Limelight. I look at Limelight, and think that like Scarlet O’Hara, with God as my witness, I should never go hungry for validation again. That book was my Marathon Des Sables. It took so much work to get it right, and I didn’t give up.
And I can see the Future Books on my shelf – Pity Party, and Read Yourself Happy, and the New Novel I’m Really Excited About, and the Idea That Keeps Poking Me, and the Memoir I’m Dreaming About. And I can see my Future Self, sighing, baking, wishing she hadn’t just checked Instagram, taking her laptop to the repair shop, buying a massive hula hoop, and wondering whether she’s getting worse. Wondering if it’s worth it. And knowing that she will meet despair, and boredom, and frustration – but she has shining days to come. She will be nourished. She will be exhilarated. And I want to tell her yes. Of course it’s worth it.
Wishing you all an exhilarating week of writing!
Love
Daisy X
I read this to the sound of the first draft of my memoir printing on my Canon. I just ran the text through Pro Writing Aid to discover they give it a readability grade of 5 which I took to mean I write like a ten-year-old, and a style score of 67%. “Your writing can have no spelling or grammar mistakes but still be awkward, clumsy, and hard to read.” Do you think they make the editing software with the real purpose of crushing our spirits?
While I enjoyed reading this, I was thinking that you have such a better command of commas than me and that the image of the bowl of cold porridge in front of the laptop was brilliant. Also, I cried at the end because I’m so proud of you and me and all of us who refuse to be crushed.
The hula hoop urge is real! Thank you once again for always sharing so honestly your process. It makes writing feel easier in a way, to know that even published authors find it extremely hard! And I love the reminder to not worry about the pressure of writing the most amazing book in the world. But just to write!