First published by The Times on 7 January 2020
When I set out to make a podcast interviewing writers about the way they work, I approached not just novelists, but screenwriters, memoirists, poets and journalists too. I didn’t necessarily want ten hours on how to plot fiction; a bit of that, yes, but also what makes so many of us want to sit down and string words together, and what we can learn about doing it better. What I found is that, while a magazine feature may have little in common with a TV script, when it comes to getting the work done, most writers face the same challenges of morale and motivation.
Approaches vary. Some successful writers plot their work painstakingly in advance, while others work on instinct and only sharpen the structure later. Many of my interviewees told me they need total quiet to concentrate, but the Times journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera listens to hip-hop while he works (“Maybe it’s because I grew up in a very, very loud house,” he told me).
I was unnerved to find that several of my interviewees were so clear-headed about their vocation that they had paid writing jobs before they even left school, often at local newspapers. At primary school, the humourist and Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker would produce his own bleak comics and put them in the reading box for other children; The Times feature writer Andrew Billen recalls his first proud scoop at age five, when he ran to tell his mother that President Kennedy had been shot. But precociousness is not a rule across the board: David Nicholls, the novelist and Bafta-winning screenwriter, wanted to be an actor. He only fell in love with writing when he was studying drama in New York in his twenties, composing long, funny letters to send home.
Despite these variations, there were pieces of wisdom that came up in interview after interview. These, I think, can’t fail to be useful to anyone who is striving to write — or to write more effectively.
You don’t have to do it dawn till dusk
Creative work — while not being on a par with, say, mining — can be a hard slog from morning to night. Many of those I spoke to write in short bursts. “It’s like Ribena — it’s always better when it’s stronger and less diluted,” said the novelist and memoirist Elizabeth Day, who works two hours in a sitting. Similarly, the poet Wendy Cope told me that she does two or three sessions of 40 minutes each; that’s as much as she can write in a day.
Sanghera recalled that when he was facing a book deadline, he had found he could extend his productivity slightly into the evening by having a gin and tonic. What’s achieved is more important than the time spent at the task. “I have a daily word count when I’m in a first draft, which is 2,000 words,” explained Holly Bourne, who as well as publishing the novel How Do You Like Me Now? last year also writes popular books for teenagers. “I tend to do that in about three chunks of 25 minutes.”
A failure doesn’t have to be final
It’s a truism that even talented writers face rejection, but this is hard to remember when you’re bristling at your setbacks. Anna Hope wrote her debut novel in an attempt to move away from her first career as an actress; despite interest from publishers, it failed to get a deal.
“Obviously in retrospect I can see what was wrong with it, but at the time I was really living in it and I felt like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ ” she told me. She was reliving the rejection that demoralised her as an actress. In despair, she considered retraining. Then the seed of an idea appeared, and her husband offered to pay their rent so that she could reduce her shifts at a call centre and focus on writing. That second idea became Wake, a novel that sold fast in a seven-way auction; Hope has published two acclaimed books since.
Nicholls told me how he came to write his first book, Starter for Ten, after two other careers had gone nowhere. He had written a sitcom that had flopped and the phone had gone quiet. “Often the steps you take professionally don’t come out of success, they come out of failure, and if I’d done at all well as an actor — I mean, even if I’d had a very small break — I’d have kept on acting,” he said. “If I’d had a more consistent career as a screenwriter, I’d have kept on screenwriting, but in both professions I came to a dead end, and that’s when I took up the next thing. Which isn’t to say it was a kind of concession; I mean I just didn’t have the confidence to write a novel — until I was forced to.”
Don’t resist feedback
One of the agonies of writing is handing it to other people to be judged. André Aciman, the author of Call Me By Your Name, believes that his insecurity works in his favour because he trusts other opinions more than his own, particularly when they’re critical. “Bad editors will like what you do — they will love it,” he warned. “That’s a terrible editor.”
“I used to hate it — I still hate it,” said Brooker, who was a newspaper columnist for many years. “But it’s probably more than half the job, getting feedback from people, and being annoyed and defensive, and then having to go away and simmer for a bit, and then think, ‘Ah f***, they’re right.’ ” Our natural reaction is fear and shame, he added. “But you have to go through all of that. It doesn’t mean that you have to do what they’re saying, but a lot of the time they’re on to something.”
Don’t stop until you reach the end
If there’s one thing that sets professional writers apart from amateurs, it might be this. Almost all of my interviewees spoke about forcing themselves to get words on the page with the knowledge that they can be rewritten later. “Get it out, get it done — it’s a disaster, but it’s a disaster that exists,” Bourne advised. Emma Jane Unsworth, who wrote the novel Animals and its film adaptation, argued that you couldn’t fully grasp what your book would even be until you had a complete draft of it.
“A writer is someone who survives the horror of the first draft,” Sanghera said. “I think a lot of people write their first thing and think, ‘Oh my God that’s terrible — I’m not a writer.’ A writer is someone who goes back to it and makes it better, and then goes back again and again and again.”
The podcast In Writing with Hattie Crisell is available to download now