Three Things I have Learnt about Writing

To this day I don’t know where my books come from, nor why they sometimes work and sometimes don’t. My study is full of piles of paper (I come out of the paper era), representing books that were anywhere from one tenth to one quarter written before I gave them up because I knew they wouldn’t work. On the other hand I have written some that made it through to publication day, and of these I am very proud.

From all these piles of paper this is what I have learnt about writing (or may be that should be ‘what I have learnt about myself’?)

Write from the heart

Don’t overthink the first few drafts (I write many drafts). On the contrary, open yourself up and let it all come up from the subconscious. Whether you are writing fiction, non-fiction or memoir, it needs the power of truth. Don’t worry if it’s incoherent. Later on you can shape it. As it happens I am a big fan of shape - in fact I might write a few Substacks on the subject - but truth must come first. All of which is one reason why I write early in the mornings when the words flood out and before my judgemental ego has woken up and is criticising what I write.

Don’t try to write like other people

You have to work with the way you naturally write. I don’t write dense prose, though I am sometimes a big fan of people who do. The words come out the way they choose, and in my case that’s with a speed and a lightness that sometimes (on a good day) combines with lyricism and a sharpness (when I manage to hit a truth).

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I used to think my writing style was a failing, until I read the Italian writer Italo Calvino. I don’t always like Calvino’s writing, but he was the author of ‘Invisible Cities’, for which I will forgive him anything - and in another of his books (a set of essays called ‘Six Memos for the Next Millenium’) Calvino discusses exactly those qualities of swiftness and lightness in prose, qualities that he enormously admires.

As it happens I have just finished writing my book, ‘The Years of the Wizard’, which is largely non-fiction though studded with short stories, on the history of Renaissance magic - and if there is one subject that requires to be written with a beautiful speed and lightness it is Magic. Because Speed is one of its essential qualities.

By chance I had hit upon a subject that matches the way I naturally write. Phew.

And on the subject of trying to write like other people, I once - way back in my thirties - had a novel published by Hodder called ‘Ella and the Mothers’. I was young and I wanted to write literary fiction and so I was taken aback and a bit disappointed when the reviewers described it as a ‘page-turning read’. I know. I was ridiculous. What on earth was I complaining about? I should be so lucky. But back then I was very, very earnest.

All of which could be summed up by my second revelation, Know Yourself.

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So here is my third - and possibly most irritating - piece of Advice: Never Force It.

You know those days - alas not very often - when the writing comes out of you with such force and beauty that you feel that you could fly. It’s what I think of as the magic of creativity (or what my friend, the jeweller, Vicky Ambery Smith, calls the Flow). In a perfect world my advice would be, never force it, always wait for the Flow. Except of course, if you have a mortgage and childcare to pay for, who can afford to wait for that? So here my advice would be, Write what you have to write when you have to write it, but if you have a chance to revisit it on a Flow day, well, you may yet be able to make it fly.

But this is enough of me telling you how to write. I have been quite bossy enough for one day. I am off to make a cup of coffee. I will see you next time. Happy writing.

Rachel

And by the way, look at that picture (above) of the bound proofs. It’s just when you are in despair about something writerly that the proofs always turn up, saying, Stop worrying. Look what you did.