Continued from part 1...
A
danger to avoid
It
is not a good idea to slog away day and night for a weekend and then take
several weeks off to compensate for work done. This leads to mental slackness
and poor creativity. Better results are achieved by regular daily production.
You may object that you are not a factory worker to be constrained by regular
hours and continual production and that you can only work when the feeling of
inspiration occurs to you. That attitude is negative and unproductive.
So-called writers with that outlook
on the craft will write very little of publishable standard. Excellent fiction
and non-fiction has been produced by writers who sat down and dredged up ideas.
Any staff newspaper journalist who tells his editor that, he is waiting to be
visited by inspiration, would very quickly be told that he was in the wrong
job.
Arnold
Bennett (1867-1931), an enormously successful novelist and journalist, was a
great believer in steady work. He said, “Even mediocre talent, when combined
with fixity of purpose and regular industry will, infallibly, result in
gratifying success.” We can learn much from the life and work of Arnold
Bennett. When he was at the top of his creative form he could turn out about
6,000 words a day. All those words were written by hand with his famous stylo
pen – a forerunner of today’s ballpoint. In his attitude to work he resembled
Trollope, for he abhorred idleness and the artistic temperament which can
easily become an excuse for not writing. He maintained that nothing in life was humdrum
and often talked about the interestingness of existence. Enthusiasm like that
shines through a man’s work, for if a writer is bored his readers will be
equally bored because his writing will be boring. In other words, Bennett
emphasised the motto learnt by so many professional writers from their early
years, that the only sure way to write is to apply the seat of the pants to the
seat of the chair.
How
to start writing
The ideas and inspiration to write and
the motivation must, of course, come from within. The only way to start writing
is to sit down in your den and get on with it. If you have difficulty at first,
do not be put off. This is not at all uncommon. A good analogy is to compare
the human brain to a motor car engine. They both work best when warmed up. On a
cold morning the engine can be slow to start and then it chugs along a bit. The
warmer it becomes the better it works. In a similar way your mind will work
better when it is warmed up.
Therefore
the answer to your problem is to start writing. Anything will do at this stage
in order to get the brain functioning and words on paper. Later you may well
discard what you first wrote, but this does not matter if you have achieved
your primary objective. Soon you will find that the ideas flow better. You will
be able to express yourself more freely and put down your thoughts precisely as
you want them. No matter how silly or uninspired or rough your first thoughts
and way of expressing them might be, the important point is that you have
started writing. You can improve and polish your work later.
Writers make the
decision to write a certain amount of words each day/week or they dedicate a certain
amount of time to doing this. There has to be some element of discipline to
accompany that ambition. The novel won’t write itself. You have to do it, one
word, sentence, paragraph and page at a time. In the words of Louis L’Amour,
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is
turned on.”[1]
©Kieran
Beville
[1] Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) was an
American novelist and short story writer. His books consisted primarily of
Western novels; however, he also wrote historical fiction, science fiction,
non-fiction, as well as poetry and short-story collections.
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