I Can't Write Under These Conditions

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Like many authors, Roald Dahl had a special space in which he did his writing. Dahl's cluttered and dilapidated hut bears all the hallmarks of such spaces: privacy, comfort and focus.

One problem with a creative mind, to put it diplomatically, is that it is a problem-solving machine which is very difficult to selectively turn off. Many of the interruptions we suffer while writing occur when we encounter unrelated problems that require attention. Another, more significant problem with a creative mind is that it requires a certain levity and chaos, making us easily distracted.

For both these reasons there's a lot to be said in favor of a special, personal space, if your living situation allows it. The other members of your household should ideally respect your ownership of your Hut and agree not to disturb you when you're in it, and you in turn should only go there if you truly intend to write, rather than abusing the privilege of privacy simply to avoid dealing with the monstrous people in your hizzouse. Not meaning to be sexist, males in particular seem to benefit from this practice, no doubt an evolutionary spandrel related to territoriality.

Even without a physical space, many writers still create virtual ones that offer similar clarity and focus. A separate user account on your computer which has no shortcuts to instant messaging software, no bookmarks and no files cluttering your desktop, for instance, is a good way to differentiate your 'writing time' from your 'my life is a disheartening maelstrom of desperate chaos' time.

For all the benefits of having a real or virtual writing space, there's a commensurate drawback: you can't always use your Hut when you really, really want to write.

While a Hut can certainly help you be a Writer while you have access to it, you might inadvertently create another opportunity to be a Not Writer whenever you're away from it, and for understandable reasons. You have an idea you're dying to deploy, but it'd be so much easier and better to deploy it when you're back in your Hut. Your notes and drafts are there, after all.

Up with this we shall not put!

You'll do yourself a service by using your creative, problem-solving brain to consider, truthfully, whether you'd really benefit much from a Hut. How many hours a week could you realistically use it? How much time do you spend in your home? How much of that time can you really spend on yourself without impacting your domestic responsibilities? How much time do you spend traveling or visiting friends?

The 20th century saw the greatest increase of individual mobility in our species' history, and much of our technological evolution in the last two decades can be described as an effort to compensate for that. Web-based e-mail and messaging services, cell phones and myriad other innovations all try to bring to life the dream of doing anything "anytime, anywhere", and they don't cost an arm and a leg any more.

Brooklyn novelist Peter Brett wrote 100 000 words of his novel over two years' daily commute on the F line. If your phone supports e-mail (and has a reasonable data plan) you can write chunks of a story in e-mails to yourself, or if it has a proper data connection and web browser you could use Google Docs, both of which you can access from any computer with an internet connection.

Evernote is a massively useful weapon in the modern e-writer's arsenal as it offers powerful and flexible note-taking and editing software on a range of platforms, including cell phones and the web. The iPhone app, for instance, allows you to create text or voice notes, take pictures, and sync them directly with your account -- even with your GPS co-ordinates recorded, if you so choose.

For the old-school among us, the Moleskine notebook continues to enjoy love and loyalty from its adherents and, while the fanaticism is sometimes quite excessive, it's not entirely misplaced. Sturdy hard covers, rounded corners, an elastic band to keep it closed and small-signature binding so that when the notebook is opened it lays flat -- these are details that make the Moleskine a very practical 'device' for writing away from home.

Your Hut doesn't have to be a place, it can be a device, a system, a workflow. A sturdy notebook that fits comfortably in your pocket (be sure to ask the store clerk's permission before 'trying out' any of the notebooks they're selling, or you'll be in trouble). A cheap second-hand PDA or a smartphone with a good data plan and software that lets you keep your in-progress projects up to date everywhere with the least possible manual intervention.

Build a Hut you can take with you, and most importantly, develop a routine that makes your Hut work for you!

next up: Parting is such sweet sorrow...

I had it destroyed

I'm a New Media guy, and as such I'm heavily biased in matters digital. I feel that in the 21st century, in which a common telephone can have enough storage capacity to contain all the text in even the greatest public libraries on Earth, when you can have Internet access every moment of the day, when you can search through the totality of the datasphere in seconds, there's no reason at all why any text should ever be deleted.

When someone tells me "I couldn't make this story work, so I deleted it," I see fucking RED. Well, a little red. Carmine, I think, or somewhere between scarlet and vermilion.

This rage isn't even aimed at the Not Writer specifically, I know plenty of Writers who do it, and they shouldn't. Modern word-processing software, on the desktop and on-line, offers 'versioning' technology that allow easy roll-back of changes so that any section you removed can still be retrieved. With that in mind, it's actually more effort to permanently erase something than to simply store it somewhere out of sight and mind. So why do so many still insist on erasing material that doesn't please them?<!--more-->

The habit, I believe, stems from a desire for purity, a loathing of pollution. The Not Writer feels this more keenly than a Writer -- in fact, the Not Writer believes that this very trait, this particular brand of perfectionism, is what makes him a writer.

Not so, says I.

We would all love for our every written word to be a work of genius, for our every keystroke to contribute toward le mot juste, and the Writer, often, takes pains to maintain this illusion outwardly at least. But he knows, in his heart, that he's a liar. He knows that his studio isn't a pristine collection of magnificent canvases in a clean, airy space, but rather a dingy attic crammed with splotched and ruined scraps of sketchbook paper and cardboard and spiders.

There are no shortcuts, there is no straight path from a blank page to a brilliant story. There's an explosion of prose (an 'exprosion', as the Yellow Menace call it), after which the Writer steels his nerves and hacks away at this jungle with a blunt machete and a bloodthirsty rage. The Writer rinses and repeats.

This is another crucial difference between a Writer and a Not Writer: the Writer knows that he'll have to write ten words for every one that finally goes out. Outlines, notes, revisions, excisements -- none of these increase the word count, some of them actually diminish it, but all of them contribute, ultimately, to the quality of the work.

And what do you do with the offal? The machete-clippings and other trash? Into the furnace, say some, so you can keep your workspace clean -- bollocks to that, says I! Keep it. Tuck it away somewhere out of sight, sweep it under the carpet, just be sure you can find it if you need it.

I used to keep a folder on my computer (now synced online, natch) that I called the Mortuary. All my unfinished, hopeless story snippets, excised chapters, rejected character outlines and sci-fi tech ideas went in there. No organization, no systematic filenames, just a big roughly chronological jumble of files that I could, if needed, search through to remind myself of one idea I'd once had that I might actually be able to use now.

Stupendous is the number of plot points, characters, names and even whole paragraphs that I cannibalized from previously-discarded 'waste'. It's magnificent! Free creativity, and nobody can accuse me of plagiarism -- unless a vengeful Past Alex travels forward through time to sue me, of course. But his passport would be out of date, and under Dutch law I could therefore have him executed, so that's not too big a deal either.

So there's your contradictory perspective on words, to Not Writers and Writers alike. Like the Cybermen, the credo must be 'delete-delete-delete' to pare down your sprawling exprosion to a decent, tight little story -- but the definition of 'delete' must include 'save somewhere'. There's no such thing as writing too much, you can always revise and remove, and the waste stands a good chance of being usefully recycled some day.

next up: sometimes you wanna go...