Gill Oliver

Author

Writing

On getting stuck in a shed

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Music to my ears from David Mitchell  at this year’s Sidmouth Literary Festival

Knowing neurosis from the inside ought to be really useful for a novelist, if only it didn’t make it so very hard to get yourself into the starting gate. 

If you don’t dare call yourself a writer, you can’t say you suffer from ‘writers’ block,’ can you?  I put it in inverted commas because in common usage, it’s generally a misnomer.  Most of the time, it’s a fancy way of saying you don’t know what to do; truly pathological inability to write is serious, but rare.  As a student, however, I was one of those people who needed to ‘catch the tide’ with any written task; if there was noise, or distraction, or a too-late start to the day, there would be major stress and a likelihood of procrastination. Of course, it was always somebody else’s fault.

I’m now a recovering neurotic, whose period of peak muddle collided with all the major life decisions.  Classic. School had been a place where my work had been valued and encouraged. But once I’d left, I didn’t have the guts to sustain myself as a writer, and in fact I buried myself in other business without sharing that deep-seated aspiration with anybody. Eventually a blessed conjunction of the right people and the right circumstances helped me sort my head out. When, after several false starts over the years, I completed a first, unpublished, novel, it was written largely in the middle of the night, and as a conscious act of defiance against the day job which was turning me into an insomniac.  I reasoned that if I woke at 3 am, whatever I did with that wakefulness was going to be my business and my business alone. (Interestingly, the brain is very tuned-in to fictional possibilities at that time of the night.) 

I’ve since lost count of the number of women who wrote their first book early in the morning before the kids were up; or in fifteen minutes grabbed here and there, in a parked car. If writing matters to you, you will. 

So I was very interested to hear David Mitchell, interviewed this week at the Sidmouth Literary Festival, say, in answer to a question, that he didn’t ever suffer from ‘writers’ block.’ With two teenage children, he doesn’t have set times to write; as he put it, ‘I just think, this is the hour I’ve got, I’ll use it.’ He’s no smug smarty-pants, either; what he does acknowledge is getting stuck. Hallelujah! Music to my ears. Not so much the language of the ivory tower, as the shed, or the workshop.

Like the craftsman we should all be, he has ways of dealing with getting stuck. He points out there are two main causes. The first is not knowing your character well enough. His answer? Get your character to compose a letter to you, the author, setting out how they think and feel about everything, from politics to sex.  The second reason is that the particular material you’re dealing with  – which may be very good – just doesn’t belong in the story you’re writing. He recommends putting it aside in a special file for future potential use; a welcome, positive spin on the idea that sometimes you just have to ‘kill your darlings.’ What I love about David Mitchell’s advice was its practical, down-to-earth nature. in order to get yourself un-stuck you either write, or shift segments you’ve written out of the way. You may, of course, end up with the authorial equivalent of a garage full of ill-assorted screws and bits of wood that  just might come in handy. But you haven’t wasted your time.

To hijack a phrase from Auden, about getting stuck they were never wrong, the Old Masters. There were always studies, cartoons, multiple versions before the masterpiece was finally painted. 

And yet, and yet… the problem, as you first embark on writing as a serious activity, is that it is personal, emotional, and you feel you’re putting yourself on the line, so it’s easy to be a bit jumpy and even precious about it. And how can you take material you’ve spent hours, maybe weeks, coaxing out of your head, and chuck it in the bin?

Cultivating writerly habits is important, but I’d argue that the mental habits are way more important than the circumstantial ones. Whether you sit down at the same time each day, and write in pencil or ink or on a laptop, is really a matter of personal choice and convenience. If you need your special Moleskine notebook, or insist on a turquoise pen, fine, just be honest that these have only ritual significance. (I adore buying stationery but it’s never a good sign.) What does matter is understanding that the five minutes it took to have a key realisation about your WIP equals a good day’s work; and that the material you pare away isn’t wasted, just evidence that a) you can create and b) you’re in control of your creations.

I’d much rather admit to being stuck than self-diagnose with an incurable condition…

You really shouldn’t do that…

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This article first appeared in My Weekly online, 26 January 2021.

“So,” asked my interviewer, “what are you working on now?” She smiled approvingly when I said I was writing a novel; a funny book about a serious subject.

The smile curdled when I told her it was about stroke rehab.

My defence is that when my husband had a life-changing brain haemorrhage, professionals told us that the people who made the best recovery had two things in common: grit, and humour. Knowing that, first-hand, is quite a different thing from selling the idea to strangers, however. It was only in the cocoon of a writing retreat that I read out my first sketch – a scene about hoarding urinals and the difficulty of peeing uphill, one-handed. The person who laughed longest and loudest made a pronouncement: this book must someday be published, so that she could read it to her sister, who’d had a stroke. That was all the permission I needed.

Talking about this project, I’ve sometimes met with an awkward coolness, because making comedy out of sickness and disability is in poor taste. The more experience a person has of stroke recovery, however, the more likely they are to break into a broad smile, because they know how bonkers that world is. From the Catch 22 of the Blue Badge (a 6 month wait even to apply for one, so when you most need it, you’re least entitled – and you have to promise not to get better), to the psychological assessment which asks a hemiplegic in a hospital bed whether he still enjoys gardening. You couldn’t make it up.

The stroke has left Terry disabled and robbed him of both his career and his hobbies. But he’s lost neither grit nor humour. And he survived, which outweighs everything. It taught us both to live for the day, and perhaps, paradoxically, that’s the essence of optimism: to deal with what’s in front of you, without fear. In the long process of writing and editing this novel, we’ve both processed our experiences and yes, it’s been cathartic.

In Joe Faber and the Optimists, I shamelessly exploited our first six months of serial incompetence as care giver and care grabber (we were often swapping roles).

Now, my husband’s biggest gripe with the finished book is the laughs I missed out. The cognitive test where he had to think of as many words as possible beginning with the letter F (it culminated in a very loud F-F-FORNICATION and giggles all round). A near-disastrous outing to a shopping mall, where borrowed and mechanically unreliable mobility scooter met similarly unreliable hand. Instead of coming to a gentle halt as Terry parked neatly at the edge of the Parisian terrasse of Café Rouge, it edged slowly forward and we watched as one set of table and chairs collapsed neatly onto another, threatening to impale the single diner by the wall.

Joe Faber and the Optimists has a largish cast of invented characters and a made-up story. But the stroke details are pretty faithful to Terry’s experience and will be familiar to many.

Did he really stash urinals so as not to have to call nurses at night? He did.

Did he really take 3 steps from sofa to the mantelpiece before realising he couldn’t get back? He did.

Did he really board the plane to Sumburgh on an evac chair, for lack of an Ambilift at Glasgow? Oh, bumpitty, bumpitty, crunch, crack, yes.

Honestly, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

Paperback Writer

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I’ve spent most of lockdown locked down with IT.  Which has little to do with writing, but a lot to do with books.

The priority was getting Joe Faber and the Optimists out, first as an eBook, and soon in paperback. The last few days were the worst, spent troubleshooting and tracking down missing but essential information that the tech giants don’t see the need to tell you. It was like fighting Grendel’s mother whilst doing a cryptic crossword, but I wasn’t going to be beaten. By the time we finally uploaded, last Friday night, the wail went up, ‘Why on earth am I doing this?’ After two seconds of intensely satisfying self-pity, I remembered. 

  1. I have to get this story out there.
  2. A lot of my readers like paperbacks.
  3. Nobody else is going to do it for me.
  4. And even if they did, I’d still have to market it.

As an independent author, you can take as much control as you like, which suits a serial obsessive like me. I want to be the one who dictates where to compromise, when faced with commercial and technical constraints. I decide the look of chapter titles, running heads and page numbers. I get to choose the cover and to control the metadata. There’s plenty of opportunity for error, but they’re my errors to make. Hands up anyone who’s ever bought a book from a big publishing house which has been scrappily edited.

Truism: it has never been easier to publish a book than it is today, which means it’s easy to do it quickly and rather badly. If you care about the product, though, there are decent people out there who will help you with any of the editorial or technical aspects. I rely on a skilled graphic designer for my covers. The technology to go DIY is there, both for a cover and even for the book interior with all that faff about margins and print areas. I’d spent hours painstakingly designing and setting my text before I noticed that IngramSpark now have a book building tool for your print book which takes all the stress of measurements out of the equation. (Nerd that I am, I didn’t use it because I had a feeling there’d be things I couldn’t tweak.) If your target readership is family and friends, marketing considerations simply don’t apply – you just want something that looks like a book, with a cover you like. The most amateur watercolourist in the world puts a frame round their paintings, and nowadays it’s just as natural to put your writing between covers. I’m trying to promote literary fiction, though, so I have to take the whole process more seriously than that.

The physical production of a book holds a romantic allure for many writers. A John Bull printing set first captured my imagination as a child. In the sixth form, the boys’ school had a print shop with a couple of Arab presses (patented 1872), where I learnt to set moveable type, right to left and upside down, minding my p’s and q’s – not to mention b’s and d’s.  The scent of printers’ ink, metal, oil and coffee is unforgettable, unmistakeable, and to me intoxicating. Another heady experience, more recently, was a visit to IngramSpark in Milton Keynes; we had to sign their own official secrets act, so I’ve no photos to share. Suffice to say, their technology is unbelievably wizzy, with books of different sizes and shapes and in different quantities all trundling through the production process together. A thing of joy, if more prosaic than letterpress in terms of aroma.

Well, the world might still have had Canterbury Tales without Caxton, but it certainly wouldn’t have Joe Faber without the eBook and Print on Demand.

Books can be very desirable objects. Take for example Nigel Slater’s Tender, a great favourite of mine in 2 luscious volumes. Nothing is more pleasing to view, hold, read and use.  Colour, texture, weight; content, fonts, photographic prints and every aspect of interior design form the perfect container for an accomplished piece of writing which is very much more than a cook book. But I write fiction. It’s mostly in your head. Give me cream paper and a margin and I’m happy. I’m not producing coffee table books, or demonstrating what something ought to look like,  or trying to make any statement other than read this.  I may dream of a crafted letterpress edition of Joe, but it can’t be and it isn’t the point. More than anything else I want lots of people to meet Joe Faber and love him, and view the world somewhat differently for having known him. A paperback makes that easy. An eBook invites another set of readers, which includes not only commuters and phone-addicts, but also people like my husband who finds a tablet easier to hold than a physical book, or my mum whose eyesight is poor, and who read Joe on her laptop.

It is surprising how far you can get with fairly simple tools. Microsoft Word can do a lot more than most of us ever ask it to. It’s four years since I uploaded my first novel; in that time, every platform has become easier to use, and there is just so much more technology to help an author. And whereas software used to be designed for administrators, apps are now designed for children. It’s worth persevering.  Most people are happy to share what skills they have, aren’t they? Same goes for IT. Ask a friend to show you the basics, and decide what skills you’re ready to acquire for yourself. (But don’t ask them to do the job for you. Remember where this blog post started? Designing your book thoughtfully is more than an afternoon’s work.)

Novelists are curious about the world. They like to know how things and people work, and find other people’s lives more interesting than their own. They are willing to disappear down rabbit holes, writing, discovering, worrying about the connections between ideas and characters and places and events and paragraphs. If I didn’t enjoy puzzles and that dizzying feeling of endlessly commuting between detail and big picture, I wouldn’t be a novelist – or I’d be a very two-dimensional one.  So the hands-on business of producing an edition is maybe just another of these rabbit holes. As an indie, I’m able to indulge my inner nerd.

There’s one thing that’s very difficult to do well independently, and that’s to write. 

After decades of solipsism, this was a revelation to me.  Finding a class or a writing group, sharing hearing other people’s work and reading your own out, is the single most liberating thing you can do. It makes your endeavour real, and makes your work real too. As a writer you may be the world’s greatest authority on your own intention – but you’re a complete klutz when it comes to the output. Only a real live reader will laugh or snigger or weep, which may or may not be in the place you wanted or expected them to.  Only other people can tell you what you’re actually doing.

So to anybody who’s embarking on this widely held ambition of holding their own book in their hands: start by finding other writers. Enrol on a course. Real people are best, but there are online communities too. Start where you are and work outwards.

 The nitty-gritty of producing a book …

 

IngramSpark Academy offers free online courses which will help you scope out the task ahead.

The Alliance of Independent Authors has an outreach service which provides self-publishing advice. If you are serious about publishing as an independent author, ALLi is well worth the subscription. The member site offers a useful directory of approved services, sometimes with worthwhile discounts.

Whatever stage you’re at Jericho Writers  provides a supportive community plus shedloads of advice on writing, producing and selling books. You don’t have to be a member to subscribe to  Harry Bingham’s weekly newsletter, which has been a  good friend to me.