How to not give up on writing.

An attempt to condense a few years of experience.

I hope you will permit the occassional outburst in this one. Writing about something I care about so much whilst sat perfectly still in my office means there is a pressure inside my head that needs to come out as ranting. Otherwise it will crystallise and become a migraine.

There’s me, floating through space as usual.

For me, the main things that have made me want to quit writing have been

1. Depression

2. [insert sob story here]

3. Taking migraine tablets that made me stupid

4. Being broke

Notice how ‘Writing Blocks’ aren’t on that list. I’ll get this out of the way quickly.

I do not believe in ‘Writing Blocks’

THEY ARE NOT REAL!!!

I think that, rather than a broad barrier in the artist’s mind, there usually exists some other issue that is conceptualised as an imaginative failing¹ rather than what it actually is. I think the term ‘Writing Block’ is a far too convenient concept to grab at, rather than dealing with the actual issue.

I’ve had people tell me they have a ‘Writing Block’ because they can’t figure out how to finish a scene according to their ancient plans for the novel, but at the same time they have nine other ideas for it which are brand new.

Some of these people are bestselling novelists.

So what the hell is going on?

USE THE OTHER NINE IDEAS!!!

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Branding?

Bonus point stolen from a future article. I think creating an image or ‘brand’ for yourself as a writer could help keep you motivated. I have a grumpy persona on social media, and it inspires me to look at life from a weird angle, which helps my standup comedy poems.

Something to do with tracks

It probably comes down to tracks. Writing, timelines, and people can all get stuck on tracks. It’s not bad to have a plan and stick to it, but a little deviation prevents boredom and burnout.

When I was studying Creative Writing at uni (look at me, very fancy) I read a poetry collection that had a few references to 1980s music. I got a few of those references, which set my reading of each poem down a different track. I saw the lighter, jokey side of the poem whilst my classmates saw the more serious side. Later in the poem this was reversed. The references added depth to an image and anyone who missed out on them was oblviious to what felt like a ‘hidden ending’ to the poem.

It was like a game, and it made me realise the tracks in my own work were working too. In WBTH for example, Lax Morales appears in more stories than you might think. Reading the Furukawa universe twice, or reading its chapters in reverse order, will reveal to you a secret Lax Morales timeline. There are other tricks and secrets too, but I won’t spoil them.

It’s a lot of fun. And Lax shows up again as the protagonist in the Earthloop trilogy (13 days left on that Kickstarter, by the way) and again near the end of The Stephanie Glitch, which is now looking more like a series of novellas than a massive hardback book. It could be both.

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And we are back to my point, thankfully. Basically, tracks are fine. It’s not bad to have a plan and stick to it, but a little deviation prevents boredom and burnout. If you know where you want your book to be, have some fun getting there. You might call yourself a plotter or an improviser of stories, but these labels are limiting. It makes more sense to see things on a project-by-project basis. Does your novel require planning? Does the planning process remove any spice from the spontaneity of creating? Do you enjoy planning this story, or are your old plans holding you back?

Do you need to practice writing a bit more before tackling the hard subject you have picked as a plot device? (this one happened to me).

Or on the other end of things. Is your poetry collection lacking a coherent structure?² Is your short story loose and confused? Does your stage play have a reason to be a stage play? Could you rewrite it as a novella? Could you rewrite a novella as a stage play?

I find that if you swap your processes over, or consciously and critically look at your creative decisions, you might be able to wriggle free of their restrictions. For me, that meant allowing the short stories in my debut book to connect, even if it meant making the book into something harder to sell.

It meant mixing Sci-Fi with my own dark brand of comedy.

What could it mean for you?

Can you become unstuck by writing an old thing in a new way?

I think you can.

This week I am testing paid content, but you do not need to sign up to get access this week.

If you want to see what’s behind it, just comment and I’ll give you a week’s free trial.

I hope you are enjoying these writing advice posts. I spend a lot of time writing them, cutting my knowledge down into something that I hope is friendly and conversational. I used to teach an extracurricular writing society at Edge Hill uni back in 2016/2017, and I miss it. I have been looking for a way to do that again since, and I think this might work.

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Content for paid subscribers will look like this.

Writing advice - Additional ideas, inspiration, and advice that complements the material presented in the free part. Will eventually be compiled into a paperback book and used as teaching materials in real-world workshops.

Short stories/chapters - Exclusive stories, or behind-the-scenes breakdowns of how I put the free stories together, what inspired me, and where I think the story is going (this will sometimes include major spoilers).

I have about 30,000 words of the Creative Writing stuff to chisel down at the moment, and have almost completed my next comedic Sci-Fi anthology, Hologram Kebab. I’ll also be posting more behind-the-scenes stuff from other books here, such as The Stephanie Glitch and WBTH2.

Being a premium subscriber here or on the Podcast Patreon will entitle you to discounts on not just my books, but the entire Halfplanet Press vintage bookstore, as well as some other cool stuff I haven’t thought of yet. I’m working on discount codes as we speak.