Ten things I know about writing

1. Stories come from a different place from technical writing. Tech. writing is all brain; fiction writing comes from deep in your guts. Your brain has some input, but it’s best if it only lightly monitors what’s coming up from below.

2. Anxiety is not a good thing to bring to fiction writing. It’s okay to be anxious about something else besides the writing, but being anxious about the story itself is the surest way to send it off on the wrong path.

3. Storytellers are word people, but not in the same way as academics are, and not quite in the same way as poets are; we have to earn our ornamental words, not use them as common currency.

4. There is very little that’s more satisfying than 10 pages of draft hand-written quickly. Pick them up, shake them, listen to them crackle.

5. When you want to revise, the longer you can leave the story between finishing the draft and returning to look at it again, the better. You need to at least partly forget it, so that you can read it from a distance that’s unobtainable when you’re drafting.

6. You can get too precious about pens, paper, notebooks. You can also ignore pens, paper and notebooks completely, and do everything on-screen, but I’m not a great composer at the keyboard. For a start, it’s too much like tech. writing (see point 1). And then, there’s point 4. I like to see and feel the number of pages I’ve completed. I like to feel, when I’m revising, the weight of where I am in the story.

7. Long car and train trips are good for cooking stories—long plane trips, not so much. I think it’s a personal-space thing.

8. Problems with stories often need to be resolved by backing off and going for a quick walk for some practical reason. Any kind of scrubby or sweepy housework is a good block-breaker too.

9. If you get too decided about your theme too early in the drafting, it can turn your story very linear, plain and ‘so what?’ It’s better to concentrate on holding your own interest with the story itself, exploring the characters and watching what they do, and let theme(s) bubble up of their own accord. Once they’ve fully announced themselves to you, with all their reverberations and sub-themes hanging off them, you can go back and decide how much of them will sensibly fit in your story, and trim as needed.

10. You should always be trying to write a story that’s slightly bigger than your own head.

*This doesn’t mean these things are true for anyone besides me, even though some of them do sound like commands. When I say ‘you’, I mean ‘one’, but one can only keep ‘one’-ing for so long before one sounds like a tosser.