On Not Writing or Reading
Or how a day of research can be addictive too
Hello, I’m Amrita and in anxiety-ridden stupors I write about writing in this space (which I am now calling my personal column). There is no paywall. There never will be. Sometimes there’s food in here and occasionally I’m funny. Please subscribe.
It is Monday and I have taken a blessed day off work. I am going to write. At half past eight I am a woman with a plan and a clean tumbler for my iced coffee, bread in toaster. But by about ten, my plans have flown out the window and I have stopped pretending.
I do not believe writing every day is the right thing to do, and I have stopped saying so apologetically. The case for it is strong, though. There is power in showing up at the same place at the same time every day, performing the same rituals, with that same chipped-edge coffee mug, inspired or uninspired, not waiting for creativity to hit, aggressively side-eyeing the muse, forcing the sentences out. I’ve done that, in and out of routine, many many times.
One of my favourite TED talks is Elizabeth Gilbert’s, in which she talks about separating your creative genius from yourself and showing up to write irrespective of whether your muse is in the mood to spit some lazy words at you or not, and it will forever be a good one for me, because writing while being thoroughly uninspired is also skill-building. Refusing to negotiate with your own mood is one of the strongest moves available to a writer, and the people who can do it tend to finish things. These people are also people that I find mildly annoying, but for now I’m trying to be more like them.
I am fully and willingly part of both a demanding day job and a family life, and even on my day off my mental bandwidth is quickly tipping over the writing-every-day thing from discipline to punishment, and I realise that no amount of park walking is going to help (people do love to recommend walks in the park, as if my novel pages are waiting outside, hanging off a tree), so I will avoid writing today and do some research instead.
I want to make it clear that if you find me lying on the straw carpet in the garden with a book on my chest, eyes half or fully closed, being sunlit and literary while a wasp investigates my drink, that is me doing research. I will not be taking questions on that.
Authors profiles at noon
I scour the annual catalogues of indie presses, noting forthcoming releases and authors I want to interview for the podcast, so this is, technically, admin. It does not feel like admin. I feel the liveliest doing this now. Because indie catalogues are where the strange, fresh blood, unhinged take, bitterly delicious, cackling alive stuff lives. A novella told in autopsy reports. A press in Norwich putting out three books a year and getting every single one of them right. A debut described in two lines that makes me sit up straight on my straw carpet.
Within twenty minutes my TBR has grown by nine (my TBR is no longer a list, it is evidence of financial irresponsibility and one day somebody is going to have to deal with it and it will not be me because I will be dead) and I want to email every one of these authors and ask them about everything they have ever written, and everything they’re writing now, and what they’re planning to write next, which nobody asks a debut author because everyone is too busy asking about the book that already exists.
By lunch time I have pitched one author, sometimes two, and added the rest to a list to be approached later.
Books after lunch
It feels absurd to list this on a writing blog, where I write books and read books and you, reader, are almost certainly involved in the world of books in some capacity yourself. But reading for pleasure and reading for research are not the same instrument.
Reading for pleasure is relaxing and undemanding. Reading for research is by turns less pleasurable and mostly irritating.
I have a book open in front of me with sticky notes at the ready and I think of that one piece of advice I can offer to you. Think of the books you love. Now promise yourself that you will never dissect them under the guise of research, or studying structure, or sentences, or plot, or character, or anything of the sort. Unless, of course, you would like to stop loving them.
Nothing survives the scalpel. You will find the expansion joint (little construction joke there from this former architect), and you will never again be able to unsee it, and a book that once did something magical to you at nineteen will become a competent arrangement of parts.
I have done this to many a book I loved. I would like to undo it.
I do it in two passes. First I read the book as a book—no pen, no notes, no cleverness—then I go back and read it to dissection. This late afternoon it’s the second pass, which means the pen is out and I am ruining this book for myself.
Most of what I’m reading these days are ARCs and unpublished copies handed over by authors and publishers ahead of publication, which I love, partly because it keeps my finger on the pulse of what’s being considered publishable and who is being invested in, and partly because there is no feeling on earth quite like being trusted with something before the world has had a chance to form opinions about it.
Evening: rewriting old work
Can this be considered research? It can, because I have decided it can, and this is my blog.
When evening hits and I have some ice tea next to me. I rework old work. I do this often, but not always because I think it can be published in its new avatar, or because I’m turning it into something else for submission, but because sometimes it isn’t for anyone’s eyes but my own. The practice of it—taking a piece of an old novel, a chapter or two, a scene I never really liked, and hallucinating something new out of it, in the same genre or a completely different one—is research, and it’s essential.
Because old work is the only material I have that I can be genuinely brutal with. There’s no stake in it. Nobody’s waiting for it. I can take a chapter and put it in present tense to see what happens. I can take a scene that never worked and rewrite it as a letter, or a list, or from the point of view of the person in the room who wasn’t talking.
The other unadvertised benefit of doing this is the humbling. I open a document from 2015 expecting to find a diamond in need of a polish and instead I find a woman who thought the word willowy was doing something great. Adverbs everywhere, like skittering ants. A semicolon used with the confidence of someone who had only recently learned what a semicolon was. Nothing cures my precious feelings about my current draft faster than fifteen minutes with my old ones.
I recently had a conversation with Joanne Merriam whose debut novel Aether & Ego will be out soon and she talks about hacking a previous novel to pieces and building new things out of it. Have a listen on The Deep List or on Spotify.
The process of writing when night falls
This is meta. I am nosy about how other writers write. Every writer is nosy about this, I find. Process is half of writing and no account exists without it. And because the act of writing itself is so mind-fryingly solitary, I think the curiosity about process is a way of checking that other writers are also down here in the dark, doing something equally undignified.
It is also addictive. I can vanish for three hours into other writers’ routines, word counts, index-card systems, spreadsheets, how I wrote my novel in eleven months, how I wrote my novel in eleven years, to the point of entirely forgetting to have a practice of my own. There is a specific, ridiculous kind of evening when you ignore dinner (or just golf it down in front of the laptop) while you finish reading about six writers’ morning routines.
But it’s fun and nobody can deny that.
My Monday lies over. Nothing to show in terms of new pages or increase in word count or sentence construction that is too fancy to be comprehensible. And that’s fine.
Happy writing!
Amrita
Love it! Many different kinds of productivity out there, including none at all :)