Does the tree fall in the wood if nobody hears it? Have you actually written anything if nobody reads it?

I remember as a student watching a friend hunched over the kitchen table, dashing off the final scenes of a play while the rest of us sat around eating chips and ketchup and pestering him to come to the pub. I remember thinking that his play couldn’t be up to much given the circumstances of its conception. I remember in particular that, in contrast to him, I was arrogant and lazy and unwilling to test myself against an audience.

Within two years he was a sell-out on the Edinburgh Fringe. He’s made his living from writing ever since and – look – he even has a page on Wikipedia. I would have a page too, but my son informs me that it’s against the rules to write your own entry.

Looking back, that vignette – the tiny kitchen in my brother’s flat, the cluttered table, the pools of ketchup, the incessant voices, the moving pen – all of it encapsulates a lesson that it took me a decade to learn.

The lesson can be summed up as, “Don’t be precious”.

Don’t be precious about your circumstances

Don’t make excuses. Plays can be written on ketchup-stained tables in raucous kitchens. Books can be written with toddlers throwing tantrums in the next room and coming in every ten minutes because you’re the soft touch. Books can be written while sharing a house with teenagers that won’t let you into their rooms, but don’t even knock when they slam into yours and snap your oh-so-precious chain of thought. Books can be written when you come home deadbeat from work because, after all, the book is your escape from the drudgery that enslaves you. Your book is your world, and you get to make the rules. Surely that’s more fun than East Enders?

Twenty years ago, if anyone had told me, “Mij, books can be written if you insist on writing them – it is your choice,” I’d have spat out my gum. “But-But-But you don’t understand the particular, peculiar and pressing circumstances that make it impossible for me to write!” Twenty years ago I wasn’t a published writer. When I stopped being precious about my circumstances I became one.

But wait. Was Franz Kafka being precious when he wrote in 1911,

“I finish nothing, because I have no time, and it presses so within me.”

Do I have the temerity to suggest that Franz Kafka was making excuses? Of course not. Kafka died just short of his 41st birthday and look at what he achieved: more than 20 short stories, one play, a novella (Metamorphosis), and three novels, unfinished but concrete enough to sit on bookshelves all over the world. Yes, he complained. Of course, he complained. It’s difficult having to work and wanting to write. But Kafka wrote, despite the distraction of his worklife. To me, the words “it presses so within me” say it all. If you want to write, you must cook up that pressure. You must make it press, so then you’ll do it.

Take all those idle minutes that you spend feeling frustrated with your lot and convert them into time spent imagining every aspect of your story. Ask yourself “what if” until the answers your subconscious comes up with satisfy you. Let your characters talk out loud in your head. Feed your story in your mind. Clothe it. Cosset it. Feed it again. Eventually it will grow so big – it will press so much – that you’ll have to write it whatever your circumstances.

I’ll say it again another way.

We’re taught in our society that daydreaming is unproductive, that obsession and addiction are two things we definitely want to avoid. And yet Stephen King likens starting a new novel to setting off, solo, across the Atlantic in a bathtub. Surely only an obsessive, only a dreamer, would do such a thing. How do you find the courage to step into the bathtub (which I think King stipulates is leaking) and push off from the shingle? Only, I think, by making your novel your obsession, by repeatedly focusing on it, worrying at it, fantasising about it. If you cultivate an addiction to the story you want to tell, at some point you’ll stop being precious about your circumstances and start to write despite them.

This is a work in progress (I’ve made many mistakes). Will add more soon.

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