INTRO: How to get your head right so you can write.
We are a strange tribe, us writers. Misfit, nerd, neurotic, quirky, eccentric, introvert, voyeur, neuro divergent, genius, whatever you want to label yourself, the literary pursuit has many comforts and highs, but oft comes with anxiety, neuroses, stress, chronic procrastination, avoidance issues… I could go on. We angst. We are angsters.
It occurred to me that there is a plethora of helpful advice concerning the techniques and processes of being a writer, but not so much on how to cope with being inside the head of a writer.
I can only share what has helped me along the way — signposting you to cleverer people than me. I will try to take you on the same journey I took. You, of course, are free to take it or leave it.
So — how am I qualified to be offering such words of wisdom? I have been there and back, my angster friends. I too spent many years knotted like a pretzel at the thought of someone else reading my work, vomiting with fear at any suggestion of participating on a writer’s forum, questioning my own audacity to suggest, even to myself, I might be capable of writing anything worth reading.
And now? I class myself as a recovering angster… an angster with attitude, if you will. More to the point, I now have an agent, am editing my first novel and feel certain it will make it to publication.
From Angster to Angster with Attitude
OK. So…yes, even thinking about writing this blog made me sick up in my own mouth. But, you know what, I am going to write it anyway (thanks Susan ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’ Jeffers for that pithy maxim). BTW, not good advice if you are thinking about plunging your arm into a waste disposal unit, or contemplating a dip in shark infested waters, with a weeping shaving cut… you get the idea. However, if you are experiencing a familiarity with sweaty palms, shortness of breath, light-headedness, discomfort at the thought of doing something that others seem to be doing OK at, then, in the words of the great God of sport, Nike, JUST DO IT, swallow that fear down and do whatever it is you want. That is my advice to anyone, not just writers.
May I just say that it has taken me more decades than I care to admit to get to the point where I can smugly advise you to bravely rebel against every negative inner voice that is currently urging you to run away and save yourself. I listened to those voices most of my adult life. But, as I was about to hit a big 0, I decided that I had had enough of being that person, ruled by the fear voices, petrified of the unknown, who found the idea I might fail at something, or be judged negatively by others somewhat vomit inducing. If you’re still with me, come out from behind that pillow, stop biting the inside of your cheek, unclench those buttocks and strap yourself in. I can’t promise you won’t gag or sweat in the process, but maybe I can offer a few pointers to help you bypass that path of sick and finally say a big FU to the fear voices.
So let’s start at the beginning. Hey… I’ve just discovered the joy of a blog — I can ramble and I don’t have to bother with edits. Anyway, I have been writing as long as I can remember. I recently found ‘Davinia the Great — a novel in 9 chapters’, written around the age of 8, onto pages torn from an old exercise book. My Mum had saved it and stored it in an old sewing box, along with my collection of medieval songs sheets for the recorder and some results of an experiment I had conducted on the density of irregular solids (I hear you cough ‘nerd’ as you spit your tea out). And do you know what? Embarrassed as I was, that novel wasn’t bad for a scruffy, nerdy 8 year old dragged up on a council estate. Writing has always been a compulsion for me. A school’s press published a novello I wrote when I was 13, ‘The Diary of a Nuclear Survivor’, written when I spent 2 weeks in bed with bronchitis, watching the Greenham Common Women glue themselves to nuclear silos on the news, whilst drinking lucozade. I co-wrote my first complete novel with my then husband, at 27, whilst working as a programmer in Athens. I completed my first solo novel at 43 (snatching moments to write in between teaching and marking). I completed the second at 48. There were gaps (mostly in my 30s) when I was very, very poorly, gaps to recover from being abandoned in my sick bed by my husband, gaps to recover and go through a painful divorce, gaps to re-train as a teacher, gaps for multiple operations, another gap more recently to grieve for my Mum. You get the idea, I know you will all have had those moments too, when writing is just not something you can contemplate, when your WIP might as well be filed on the moon, it is so remote from you. But, throughout, when my head was in the game, I scribbled novels, poems, short stories, articles, journals (alright, nothing so romantic as scribbling… I tapped them out on a keyboard) and nothing stopped me for long.
So, what I am saying is, I had the potential to be a good writer. And yet, it took until very recently to even contemplate the idea I could be a writer professionally, to finish that novel, to put my work out to agents and secure an offer.
Why did it take so long? Keep up, didn’t you read the first two paragraphs FFS?
I suppose I could blah on about why I suffered such crippling anxiety and lack of belief in myself (there could have been any number of reasons: my parents were emotionally unavailable, trauma, chemical imbalance, physical illness, Asperger’s, etc.) Sometimes there are moments you can pinpoint, like the times I have seared in my memory of being laughed at, sneered at even, for suggesting I wanted to be a writer for a living. I was told I did not have the temperament, I was never going to be good enough, even that it was ridiculous to suggest someone like me, from my background, would even think of it. It was drummed into me that people from my kind of family (blue collar council house dwellers) did not go to university, let alone think of such fancy careers. It was suggested, when I was 15, by a careers advisor, that I should forget A Levels, since I didn’t need those to be a bank clerk or insurance administrator (which were the dizzy heights he suggested someone as ‘academic’ as myself should be gunning for). I expect you have those moments you remember, too, when outside voices, the naysayers cut you down. And, like me, there will have been far worse voices, from within, telling you, you are not good enough, you are not worthy, you are nobody. You don’t remember when they first knocked on the door, you certainly don’t recall letting them in, but they have taken their shoes off, helped themselves to the fridge contents and made themselves real comfy on your mind sofa.
So — how did I get from there to here, an agented writer with a real chance of publication? Well — this is the very journey I shall blog about…
