What if there's no twelve step program?

I think it's time that I admitted that I'm addicted to buying how-to-write books...

Shameful and disappointing I know, but I find honesty is the best policy and the first step to recovery is to admit that there's a problem.

I blame Natalie Goldberg.  Her book Writing Down the Bones, (ISBN 9781590302613), was one of the first books on writing that I bought as a student, way, way back when my hair was it's natural colour.  I love her style, the influence Buddhism has on her writing and advice, the way the sand of the desert around her home creeps into the pages, her location inspiring both her and her readers.  It's a book I return to frequently for encouragement and writing exercise prompts and no other author of said books has equalled.

But that doesn't stop me from buying them...

My top five books on writing:

1.  Writing Down the Bones - Natalie Goldberg

2.  Wild Mind - Natalie Goldberg

3.  A Writer's Book of Days - Judy Reeves

4.  Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

5.  The Creative Writing Coursebook - Andrew Motion and Julia Bell

As you can tell by the list, I tend to prefer the books that try to get you impassioned, inspired and writing often.  I find the books that try to improve your writing can be cold, formulaic and uninspiring - they don't make me want to write, let alone write better.

The downside of this addiction: sometimes I read books on writing as displacement from writing...  I keep telling myself reading is important, but I know in my heart that an essential part of writing is...writing.

So, I guess I should do some.

Write she said...

So, I wrote...  Just over 600 words of...something.  Usually, I use hot pen or writing practice exercises to warm up before I start working on ongoing projects.  But as I'm out of practice and generally warming up to writing again, I'm really just trying to get those muscles working again.

Most of the time the writing that comes out is...meh.  It's usually ragged and uninspired, but sometimes there's something in there worth keeping - a phrase or description.  Something true.  Sometimes.  Not always.

I'm hoping to start putting some of these ragged and uninspired exercises on here soon, just as a window into my writing style, subject obsessions and so that you can see the progression of work, if anything turns out to be worth progressing with.

Promise you'll be gentle with me...

Write or the Mocha gets it...

I'm sitting on the first floor of Nero's, over-looking Norwich market.  The sun is warm through the window and the tops of the market stalls look like striped sea defences, protecting the City Hall from attack by marauding pirates or a moaning of zombies...

I'm sitting here realising that in the space of a week, I have become addicted to writing in coffee shops during my lunch break.  I don't know if it's the coffee - regular mocha with a hazelnut shot - or if it's the occasional chocolate brownie, or just the warmth of the sun luring me out, but at the moment I can't bear to stay at work during lunch.  And despite the expense and the un-credit-crunch of it, I'm prepared to let myself be addicted.  Because right now I'm sitting here with the laptop open and I'm writing.

I figure anything that gets me here, regularly, without the bitchin and moaning, whilst I'm working full time, has to be a good thing.  If I can get back into the habit of writing every day, the writing will start to happen on its own - without the need of bribes.  Or at least with the aid of cheaper bribes...

So, I've got about twenty minutes left before I have to go back to work, half a brownie and about four gulps of coffee...  I think that's enough to get me through a writing exercise or two...

Things are starting to sprout...

What is it about the change of seasons, particularly the blossom scattered, chlorophyll fuelled shift from winter to spring that suddenly gets the creative parts of my brain working again?  After months of dry, bone-dead ideas, I'm having obscure ideas at awkward times - usually when I'm walking, computer-less, without paper or pen - having to rely on saving ideas in txt spk on my mobile.

I think walking and listening to the pod helps.  Music has always been an almost integral part of my writing - to the extent that usually I keep a record of what I'm listening to while I'm writing.  I love the idea of giving someone a track list to listen to whilst they read...

I'm trying not to think that it might actually be the exercise sending more blood to my brain and making the squishy thing work better...  If I thought that, I'd have to do more exercise...

The ideas from today:  using a song to trigger a character's memory flashback; and mermaids...  I'll let you know how things progress.

And so it begins...

Well, this evening could be considered productive: I took a look at the book-that-died and despite the nagging certainty that I'm flogging a dead horse, polishing a turd etc, I can't seem to let it go. I just had too much damn fun writing it in the first place... Besides, I did get 15,000 words into the sequel over a year ago and that one was even more fun to write - that one is love triangles and dead bodies all over the place...

So, for the time being I'll persevere with the re-read and tightening, in the hope that maybe I'll have something ready to go up here within the next month.

You ever have one of those moments when you wonder if you should have done it in first person instead of third? When you hate the start and you know that at some point you thought it kicked ass...

Did some hot-penning too; something that felt like the start of an urban fantasy, about being on automatic pilot and unknowingly walking your way out of this world... I love hot pen exercises, sometimes you just come up with something unexpected that you can craft. However, most of the time it's just wordsmith stretches. Warming the muscles so you don't pull something when the real dance begins. Not sure if it should be called hot-penning when you're on the tweet deck...

Colds, hot penning and new tweet decks...

Yesterday was my birthday and as twitter would put it #birthday success!  I may not have done any writing but I got some fine gifts and some touching well wishes and got to stare at Vin Deisel in Fast and Furious.  As far as the film goes, it was as good as the first, probably aided by the character history and it was great to see Vin take a bullet and just shrug it off.  Lots of shiny things moving very fast if you like that kind of thing.  7 out of 10.

More importantly, my dearest husband has bought me a web book, a mini lap top half the size of the lump of Apple gorgeousness that I currently use.  This means I should be able to write, blog and tweet on the move - once my good friend Castellan has finished potty training its wifi.  We're feeding him Chinese food in exchange for his excellent IT services.

In case you're wondering, I did write today - a hot pen exercise too dreadful to allow you to read.  If I do any warm ups good enough for human eyes, they'll be here.

Oh btw, I have a cold.  It is annoying.  End of line.

The trick was...

This blog title was inspired initially from The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, a Garbage single from their 1998 album, Version 2.0. A great soulful song, full of echos of Portishead and the Twin Peaks soundtrack - a song that sounds like a moment of reflection, remorse and self-loathing but with a sweet offer of forgiveness - all wrapped up with that sexy Manson voice and a scratchy orchestral lilt. (I can't believe that Version 2.0 came out over 10 years ago... There are rumours of a fifth studio album this year, but I don't how Manson's acting gig in the Sarah Connor Chronicles is going to effect that).



But Garbage in turn borrowed the title from the 1989 novel The Trick Is To Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway, (ISBN 9780749391737, published by Minerva). Considered to be a contemporary Scottish classic, this book is an achingly beautiful tale of grief, the descent into depression, anorexia and the breaking of a heart.

Both of these creations are works of art.

This blog is not. But I love the sentiment - just focus on each breath, each word, and just keep going until it gets easier. Or until you get stronger. Or better.

It’s a good trick to learn.

The trick is...

Kinda the whole point of this is to get myself writing again.  I've been writing off and on, but pretty much on since...well, since I had words.  Admittedly the early works were derivative, 'The Further Adventures of Peter Bunny' leaps to mind and admittedly I was a co-author of that illustrated piece, (acknowledgment to R. Hockey Esq.  Elder sibling).  But it's always been something I've been unable to stop doing.  Mostly...

I have found that in times of stress, depression, melancholy and ennui, the words are either bad, in bad sentences, in bad paragraphs and largely unhelpful for one's state of mind or they've been quiet words, muffled by emotion and a desire to avoid the world and the horse she rode in on.  Last year I was writing a lot, doing a course that actually seemed to be helping me improve and life, as it tends to, interrupted.

So, apart from some writing practice and some journaling, it's been pretty quiet on the creative front and finally, and I mean FINALLY, I'm starting to get that itch again...  No, not the one that needs cream, the one that can only be soothed by stringing words together into other worlds, other lives.  And I have some characters who won't let me go.  Their shadows fall over me every time I turn on the computer and if I listen very carefully, I can hear one of them grinding his teeth impatiently...

I suspect that if I had the balls to turn and look at them, they'd be standing like a storm front at the head of a queue of people who are sick of waiting to have their stories told.  I think I few may be smiling and waving, they haven't been there so long...  But they may be flailing beneath the fists of the others, the smiles just pain clenched teeth.

sigh...

I'm here, right?  The trick is to get writing.  To keep writing.  And hopefully, through these words, this blog, I'll trick myself into the words before the characters turn on me.

Oh, for blogs sake...

I don't think I can take it anymore, I've been talking about blogging for so long that I feel like I've already started writing about the damn thing and yet there's no blog...

There's no entry a week, for an undisclosed time period, listed backwards chronologically, expressing creativity and emotion into a private forum that no one reads.  There's no blog to encourage me to write, to actually get something down on paper/screen even if it is just blog bumpf and nothing of any consequence. 

No blog to use as an excuse to not work on something that I'm actually mean't to be doing.

No blog.

Reading everyone's Twitter updates linking to blog updates, it suddenly struck me...  So what if I have nothing to say, nothing to promote - only an unedited-half-finished novel that I ignore like an elephant in the room.  So what if I'm not funny, interesting, co-herant or lucid.  So what if no one reads it...  So what if I'm only doing this for myself as a self-motivational tool in order to encourage myself to do the editing, to do some writing, to do SOMETHING.

There could be a blog...  There could very easily be a blog...

What's to stop me?

What's to stop you?

Why are you still reading this?  Go do your effing blog.