How to ‘just write’ in the real world

Last night I had the absolute privilege of speaking alongside my agent, Lucy Morris, with the current cohort of Curtis Brown Creative’s Three Month Novel Writing Course. I was completed the Six Month course with CBC back in 2014 so it felt like not just an opportunity to connect with other writers, but to close the circle that was started all those years ago.  

One of the questions I had was if I write every day, and if I don’t what was my writing routine. I gave what I felt in hindsight was a fairly glib answer, no help to man nor beast, and this bothered me. So I sat down this morning and thought about how I really do make time for writing.

The sticking point with ‘just write’

Stephen King’s book On Writing is based around the principle of ‘Just Write’. It’s a great book for aspiring writers, but I took super-umbrage at him making this statement like it was THE solution. Because OF COURSE if you want to write, you should just write. But you know how Stephen King could ‘Just Write’? Because, even in those very early days when he was working as a teacher with a young family, he had someone (a wife) who was managing everything else so he COULD come home from work, stow himself away and JUST WRITE. 

In the real world, and I think this is why women are more likely to only feel able to focus on their writing later on in life, there are other things that have to come first. And those aren’t small things. No matter how balanced a household, if you have any kind of dependent such as a child, an aging parent or a partner who works long hours or away, there are unavoidable priorities that are time-consuming, mind-consuming and, ultimately, life-consuming. 

Why I struggled to ‘just write’

When I was writing in my twenties, I wrote when I wanted to: all night, all day in an unimportant job where no-one noticed/cared. But this changed when I had children. My need to write hadn’t, but the world around me had. In fact, my need had increased because being a writer was all I had ever wanted. It was ingrained in my identity. It was my identity. When I had children, I felt like my life had imploded and reclaiming that identity became almost desperate.

But while I wanted it so much, actually getting down to the writing felt like a mountain I couldn’t climb.

By the time I set myself the task of writing what would eventually become my first published novel (my sixth or seventh actually completed), The Other Side of Mrs Wood, I had two children under three and was working full time. No matter how noble or how much I wanted it, the reality was this: the last thing I ever wanted to do after a broken night’s sleep, sparrow-fart morning, wrestling two wild children into nursery, doing a full day at work, collecting screaming kids from nursery, dragging them through supper and the bedtime routine, cooking dinner for me and my husband/eating it if my husband had made it, and finally sitting down at 9pm was write. I didn’t even want to read. I wanted to stare at the TV until I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep and it all started again. 

Because, unlike Stephen King, I didn’t have someone doing all of the STUFF for me to enable me to prioritise my passion. My husband did what he could but he worked long hours and when the kids were tired or ill or sad or being kids it was me they wanted. I just didn’t have the option of coming home from work and opening the laptop knowing without having to ask that a meal would appear and the laundry would be done and the house wouldn’t look like it had been occupied by an army of rodents.

Writing isn’t easy. It’s hard work. And if the rest of your life is hard work, it becomes an albatross, always taunting you that YOU SHOULD BE WRITING when you’re plain exhausted.

But writing was all I wanted to do. Argh! The eternal bloody conflict of the creative mind!

How I made it work

How does any writer fit writing into real life?

Obviously, by writing. But how did I prioritise my writing, or at least make it part of my life? Because there came a point when I had to face the fact that if I didn’t sort it out, I never would. I could bang on about wanting to be a writer as much as I wanted, but that didn’t words on the page.

My family weren’t going anywhere. My need to earn money wasn’t either. So what helped me to knuckle down and make the time so I could. Need isn’t enough. Want isn’t either. You need a mindshift and a strategy to carve out that space within your world – it may just be a teeny tiny space but sometimes that’s all you need to cross over.

These were mine:

1. Took my writing seriously. How could I be a writer if even I didn’t consider myself one? You. Are. A. Writer. 
2. Connected with my writing friends. I met these on the CBC course and they have always spurred me on by talking about writing, holding me accountable and being my biggest cheerleaders at every tiny milestone.
3. Sneaking up on my writing by doing it when I was supposed to be doing something else. Some people are great with rules and routines get up at 5am to do an hour. Some people get into work earlier to do an hour. I am not one of those people. If I’m supposed to do something, I become a teenager and willfully rebel against it. So I played that rebel at her own game by sneaking up on it. I have always dreaded the battle of getting my kids to bed so I’d treat myself by coordinating with my husband nights I could stay late – ostensibly to write but really so I didn’t have to go home and face it. But guess what. I wrote. I’d also write instead of doing a boring work task. Or when I was supposed to be asleep (because sleep is for the weak, right?) or making wholesome dinners (because my kids prefer a nugget over anything homemade any day). Or I’d say to myself: I’ll just have a quick look at what I did the other day and BAM! I’d without FAIL end up noodling around with it and writing even more. I may be a rebel, but I am a dumbass rebel who ALWAYS falls for that one.
4. Conversely, making a big deal of writing I made writing a special event for me. I’d meet my writing friends at the British Library for the day and spend a thousand pounds on lunch in the restaurant there. I’d also go away with my writing friends for a weekend every six months or so where I couldn’t do anything but JUST WRITE. A’la King. Sometimes I’d sneak off and sleep or scroll. But mostly I wrote solidly for hours at a time.

None of that removed the hard graft, or stopped the inner critic during periods when I didn’t write, but it did shift how I saw writing and how it fitted into my world.

By telling myself that I AM A WRITER and making it feel special it stopped being something I wanted to be and became something I was.