Writing When Tired

It's January. The house is cold and looks a shambles. I'm commuting 200 miles between Bath and St Ives. I've just started teaching again. I got a flat tyre yesterday. Am I writing? Er....No.

What I want to do in the evenings and at weekends is grab a cup of tea and snuggle down in front of the fire with a re-run of Wycliffe. The last thing I want to do is write. Creativity and tiredness are not easy companions. But. But. But. Tiredness can also be an excuse. Most of us are tired, but if you want to write you have to find the hours when you can.

I had two young children when I wrote my my first novel and to be honest I don't know how I did it. I remember getting up early, staying up late, writing while dishing up supper (watching out for spag bol on the keyboard). I wrote that first draft while my busy life carried on around me. Tired? Yes, of course, but the motivation to write kept me going.

It's always the first ten minutes that are the hardest. Once you're underway, the writing warms up and soon an hour has gone by without you realising it. And by the end of that hour it strikes you that a) you don't feel so tired and b) you feel proud of what you've achieved. You pushed through the tiredness and now have something to show for it. Hooray!

So forget the tiredness: you'll never get anything done if you wait until you feel fully refreshed. Just get on with it - even if it's only for ten minutes - and enjoy the glow of achievement when you've done some writing.

JMW Turner Has Advice For Writers

One day the artist JMW Turner was out sketching.  An admirer offered to buy his sketch which Turner agreed to, saying the price was 60 guineas. 

    '60 Guineas! But it only took you 10 minutes.' 

    'Ah yes,' JMW Turner is supposed to have replied.  '10 minutes, and 40 years of experience.'

I'm dredging my memory of my Art History degree for this anecdote, so it may not be 100% accurate, but it came to mind when I was giving feedback to those 40 first pages a couple of weekends ago.  I've given feedback to so many writers over the past 15 years that it doesn't take much time for me to analyse a text and spot what may be holding the author back.  People sometimes are amazed that it only takes a few minutes for me to see something that they haven't despite hours of slaving away at their work. Well, a) I'm an outsider and b) I've done it before.  10 minutes, and 15 years experience in my case. 

As well as reading other people's work, I've written quite a few words of my own - well over a million I think, given my prediliction for cutting vast chunks out of my early drafts.  The more I write, the easier and quicker it is to write.  Similarly writing this blog.  Posts took ages at the beginning.  Now ideas come often, and take less time to write up.

People sometimes ask me for a possible timescale to publication, and the immediate answer has to be: no one knows.  A deal could turn up tomorrow, or never.  

But I think JMW Turner suggests another answer.  The time it takes will be directly related to the amount of time - writing, reading, giving and getting critiques, researching the publishing business, promoting yourself etc - that you put into it.

Time Passing, Passing Time

One of the most quoted bits of advice is to Show not Tell. It's good advice, but there are times when you need to Tell not Show and one of them is when you have to cover a lot of rather unimportant ground quickly.

After the first kiss, all thoughts of going back were abandoned. They decided to eat at the pub, and spent the evening talking about everything and anything: pets they'd had when children, their favourite things to eat, their families - his mad mother, her dodgy brother - favourite films, bands, books. Everything Bertram said Arabella thought was incredibly interesting, and by the time they were walking home hand in hand she was half way to being in love.

In other words, the conversation would have very dull to anyone who wasn't involved, readers included, but we needed to know they enjoyed that first evening together talking about inconsequential stuff. As you do on the first date with someone you like.

Try this exercise. The situation is an interrogation. It goes on for at least ten hours (could be longer) and at the end the interrogated person finally lets slip some useful information.

Write the scene in a maximum of 20 words. Then try 100, then 250. Which is easier?