It’s a frightening prospect. A blank page, well a blank white rectangle on a computer screen. Waiting for words to arrive, as if by magic, but there is first some pain to be gone through. The dreaded Writer’s Block. Perhaps I should explain, I was never a “writer” but of course I wrote. I wrote for a living, mostly factual, legalese and with a fair degree of spin where persuasive to my argument, anything from a short memorandum to a multi-volume legal submission. Always achieved despite the almost insurmountable obstacle of the pristine unmarked page.
I saw a post on Twitter recently, which invited people to write a book in November, fifty thousand words to be written in thirty days. I investigated further and gradually came round to the idea that this was something I could do. I thought, this is an exercise in discipline that will get me back to doing something productive. It’s not that I have had a burning desire to be a writer, quite the opposite. Writing has always been an activity that has felt difficult, there is this sense of permanence about the written word, and setting thoughts down on paper to be read and subjected to analysis has always filled me with trepidation. What if the product of my mind is totally boring and derivative and demonstrates a failure to grasp even the fundamentals of English grammar? Well at my advanced age I have decided. So what? I’m going to give it a go.
The prospect beckons but lets not be hasty here. Fifty thousand words in thirty days is a lot of writing. One thousand, six hundred and sixty seven words a day for thirty days without a break. This is going to be an arduous task, I don’t even know if I can produce that many words in one day, let alone repeat it consistently over such a period of time. It was perhaps fortuitous that another post on Twitter impinged on my consciousness yesterday and led me to a piece of advice for writers, that writing less can be more productive. Obviously writing less than I have been doing would be impossible, so what use could this advice possibly be? The answer is quite simple, that by developing writing as a habit, through setting and achieving a modest target every day, productivity will become easier. Advice on how to achieve this goal was to choose either to write for a period of time or to produce a number of words in a session.
What about the writer’s block that was mentioned earlier? Well, it’s going to be a problem. It was worse when everything was in ink on paper, the first stupid line that couldn’t be changed. The agony and torture of that initial scrape of nib on paper which would set the entire piece off badly, the sheer waste of time trying to choose the first phrase. The utter terror caused by the blank page, the certainty of making a false start. The meaningless opening line that didn’t fit the rest of the piece. This problem didn’t occur when dealing in scientific facts but as soon as opinions or thoughts were required total and complete trepidation ensued. It peaked in spectacular fashion during the preparation of my thesis, I researched, visited installations, interviewed the managers, photographed, drew diagrams and planned and outlined everything. I started writing, revised and redrafted the introduction for many weeks. The deadline for submission of first drafts came and went, the deadline for final review was looming and still I was stuck at the introduction. With forty-eight hours to go I sat down and started from scratch and typed forty-five pages of coherent, informative prose complete with footnotes and references to all of my diagrams, photographs and tables. Unfortunately this was not the end of the block it was merely the trigger to further procrastination, now research and planning became the perfect excuse for not sitting down and trying to write anything because when I needed to achieve a deadline, I would be inspired to write well.
Things improved when I began working, now a typist would read through my messy second or third draft and suggest alterations before producing a competent letter or document. My method of coping was always to use the same introduction to get something onto the page and then redraft it to suit the tone of the rest of the document.
Technology was a mixed blessing. At one stage I was issued with a Dictaphone, which was wonderful in theory, however it always made me feel like a pompous ass, especially when trying to retain a calm professional attitude, so it was never used.
There have been many successful pieces written to a deadline, on one occasion a business document typed, printed, copied, bound and delivered overnight by me to achieve a 10:00 a.m. deadline.
There have also been failures, most recently, or should I say currently, a freelance piece on a show featuring Toros Bravos which has now failed to be written for two summer seasons, it probably needs to be re-researched to reflect two years development since the inception of the show. Although with the amount of background research and information that I have acquired from Spanish internet sites and translated, the problem was more a case of what I was not going to write rather than writing a review of a charmingly simple, yet exciting display.
So electing to write something as long as a novel is going to take a great deal more discipline than I have had to endure for many a year. I am going to have to accept that what I write will be mostly rubbish, however, I must resist the temptation to revise and redraft during this period of productive writing if I am to have any hope of reaching the target of fifty thousand words in thirty days. What I hope to achieve is to demonstrate to myself that I could write a novel and that I produce a draft which might with another few months work be developed into something worth reading. Whether I can do this in a manner that is either original or interesting or dare I hope for both, remains to be seen.
That is another great hurdle, at some time I need to develop a plan for this putative imaginary work.
