“A word after a word after a word is power.” —Margaret Atwood

I’m in the process of drafting a new book. This one isn’t going to be m/m, although it does have gay characters in the ‘cast’ and the heroine’s mother was in an f/f relationship when the heroine was born. To be honest, it’s proving to be a bit of a challenge.

I’m not sure why. I’m enjoying the worldbuilding (it’s my jam) of a fantasy set in the far future in a distant Earth colony that’s screwed with the colonists’ DNA so that the women (but only the women) have developed mage powers—except for my poor heroine, that is, who appears to be some kind of genetic sport. I’ve got all sorts of things lined up that interest me to death, including cloudy politics with soulless oligarchical corporations running everything and archaeology, both of which are different flavours of jam that I can never, ever resist. Despite this, actually getting the words written is proving to be a real effort.

It’s forced me to think a bit harder about the process of writing—which after several years and a dozen books, is a trifle belated. But still. Onward.

All the big-name writers have pontificated about writing at some point. Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Elmore Leonard, JK Rowling, Virginia Woolf… What I’m about to write next is a sweeping generalisation, of course, but what they say appears to boil down to about three main things (with lots of individual variants and approaches, obviously):

• Writers write because they have to because they can’t imagine not writing and they have something they really, really want to say and they’ll just burn if they can’t say it.
• Writers love writing.
• And even when they don’t love it, writers write every day.

Well, that’s me snookered. Because…

• I can imagine not writing, actually. I lived a lot of my adult life not doing it, and I only got into it fairly late, through fanfic. There are other things I do to satisfy the creative urge: I paint, embroider, and decoupage anything that stands still long enough. Would I miss writing? Boy, yes. Of course. But it’s not my only outlet.
• There are days when I most emphatically do not love writing. It’s work, and often it’s hard work. Sometimes I find it hard to grasp the power Atwood talks about. I know it’s there, whizzing about inside my head and leaving pretty trails of sparks, but sometimes I have to force myself to sit down and get those ruddy words onto the screen. Then I worry that they’re flat and boring. Good job that what I do love, is editing and revision. Having written, I do love polishing it up. Like my heroine, I must be a writerly genetic sport in that, unlike most writers I know, I can never wait for my editor to get back to me with comments.
• And I don’t write every day. I always think about it, mind. My writing working day starts after lunch, but some days I’d rather read, or watch people restoring old furniture on YouTube, or watch TV or give the dogs what they regard as the unexpected (but delightful) treat of another long walk. Yesterday, Kenneth Branagh’s film of “The Magic Flute” trumped any notion of opening up Scrivener. Some days, life outside the ‘office’ is overwhelming and kills any impulse to write. For me personally, the last six months have been hard because of carer duties to elderly relatives, and my own health’s been dicey this year. Add to that the fact that like every writer I live in the world, and the big issues facing all of us—the political climate, the real climate, economics, social instability all over the world—affect the writerly state of mind as much as they do the non-writerly. To paraphrase Merry Brandybuck’s challenge to Treebeard: writers live in this world, don’t they? They do, and the world can’t be shut out and ignored, and sometimes it crowds out everything else and kills creativity stone dead.
  So, some days I just don’t wanna, okay? Problem then, is that the longer I put it off, the harder it is to get going again.

So, having been sort of forced into thinking about this—and you’ll have all realised that that in itself was another way of my avoiding doing any writing!—I’m making the pitch that none of the tips and advice on writing really matter. There’s no right way to be a writer, any more than there’s a right way to be female or a right way to be grey-eyed. Even if the tenets of writing are broken, if you (generic you) can’t meet them, you can still be a writer. Even if you’ve never written anything before, or haven’t been on a creative writing course, or can’t write every day, or you aren’t burning up inside with that story to tell, or you don’t always love writing and you’d rather watch those YouTube vids, or you’re slower than treacle crawling over ice, or the world is pressing down on you…

Still a writer.

So, back to my heroine, I go. The words may take longer to come, but I tell myself that the sooner I get them down, the sooner I can get to polishing, which after all, is the best bit. It might work as an incentive. It might not. I’ll finish the book eventually, either way.

But yeah. Still a writer.

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside and is supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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