0 What makes you write, or stops you? - Linda Strachan

This is not really about writers' block, although perhaps in some cases it could be, but I was thinking about how often I hear my writer friends talking about all the things that come between us and getting the words written.

How difficult can it be?  You love writing and you desperately want to write that story that is buzzing in your head but for some reason other things get in the way and it is the writing that is often pushed to the end of the queue.

In the comments on a blog here recently Susan Price said ' I think many people see authors as something like hobbits, living cosy, stress-free, comfortable lives making up fun little stories. And getting paid!'
 
I wish!

I recall, before I was published and even in the first few years, I was scribbling away or tapping on my laptop whenever there was a spare moment  -  weekends, holidays, late at night and first thing in the morning. Writing was new, shiny and stress-free with no obligations.  After a few years of tight deadlines and starting to write full time, an expansion of the things that come with being published and part of the writing community meant that I needed some time to recharge, to do other things because writing had become my job. So I was less likely to write at weekends or on holiday, or at least not all the time.

While thinking about writing this blog I did a quick mindmap of some of the things that help and hinder my writing.

Many things help, like having a deadline, that is the one that works best for me.  I have very rarely, if ever, missed a deadline, even if it means very late nights; working on holiday or pretty much anywhere I can.

Personally I find that self-imposed deadlines don't work so well for me unless I declare them to family or even better, to a small group of writing friends who truly understand.  I am part of a small, closed and trusted group, who only meet over email, for support and encouragement but also commiseration when things are not going so well. All professional writers, we help each other keep writing and it is a real lifeline for a solitary writer.

Looking at the mindmap above I see things I have missed out such as -
Meetings - I am on a couple of committees related to writing because I feel that it is important to give something back to the writing community for all the support I have had over the years, but these do take time and energy. Also meeting up with friends, particularly writing friends, for the 'office' chat which is essential for self employed and solitary workers to fine out what is going on, and to share ideas and enthusiasm. Meeting with publishers, agents, others who are offering potential sources of writing work.

Networking - going to book launches and get-togethers with other people in the business. It is  so important to keep up to date with what is going on around and for opportunities that arise from chance encounters.

Preparation - for talks, school visits and writing workshops.  This can take up a lot of time.

Social Media -  is a very mixed blessing. It can be very useful for making contacts, getting to know other writers and readers, but it is also incredibly time consuming and addictive.

Having a space to write, uncluttered, if at all possible, but if you are like me it soon becomes a clutter!
Having a special place to write, whether in a coffee shop, library or a shed, a space that helps close out the world and allows time to concentrate on that thing we love - writing.

I don't think I am alone in this, it is one of the reasons why writing retreats are so much of a writer's dream. Somewhere that family, responsibilities and other day to day things cannot get between you and the story.

I wrote Block as sometimes a story can halt, or feel that writing is just impossible and that is when we all need some time away, space to think and find out why we are not pushing on past it. The reason might be physical or emotional stress.

I find it is often that the story has lost its way, taken a wrong turn, or not being true to the characters.
Distraction, such as going for a walk or doing some routine task, when the mind can wander without pressure often allows for that 'light bulb moment' and opens the flow of thought again.  After that all we need is to make time for the writing!

What is it that makes you write, or stops you from writing?

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Linda Strachan is the author of over 60 books for all ages from picture books to teenage novels and the writing handbook Writing For Children.

Linda's latest YA novel is Don't Judge Me . 
She is Patron of Reading to Liberton High School, Edinburgh.

Her best selling series Hamish McHaggis is illustrated by Sally J. Collins who also illustrated Linda's retelling of Greyfriars Bobby.

website:  www.lindastrachan.com
blog:  Bookwords 

Detail: What makes you write, or stops you? - Linda Strachan

0 WEIGHING THINGS UP by Penny Dolan

To my mind, February always ends suddenly, as if it decided to take a couple of days off without telling anybody. Two-headed January bumbles past but then - today! -  March is here and already and it's looking scarily busy. Not only do I have a couple of big family events, some World Book Day Week/Fortnight school visits to do - but I really, really need to get on with some writing.  

A little tense? Moi?

However, Eric Maisel, a creativity "guru", mentioned recently by Heather Dyer, offers an interesting concept. He believes artists have to face two kinds of anxieties.

On one hand, there are all the anxieties you suffer when you aren’t able to work for a variety of reasons. You’ll be anxious because you have no time to think, no time to turn the thoughts into words. You’ll feel the frustration of being caught by other demands, the sense of being suspended from what you should be doing, uncomfortable at a deep, gut level, even when you try to still the emotion. Recognise that feeling?

On the other hand, he says, are all the anxieties that come when you are working: all the self-doubt, the tangles in the working process, the crises of confidence, the feeling that the work is not going as it should, that it is no good, blah blah blah. Working is often uncomfortable too.

Eric Maisel suggests that the artist -  in this case, the writer -  is better off learning to accept that both states of anxiety constantly exist, rather than wasting energy over the conflict between the two states of mind. 

Maybe that's why the use of an outside device, such as the famous timer, acts as release from that transfixed "blank page" state?

In addition, I also heard – while busy with my tax returns - someone on the radio explaining that each time we spy an email, go to Facebook, play a quick game, tweet and so on, we get a buzz, a small dopamine reward. 

She said that the danger of those small social media "rewards" is that they help you procrastinate, and deter you from the harder and longer work where the rewards aren’t so quick. Oh bother!

Hmm. On one hand, some things to think about . . .

On the other hand, stop wasting time looking for "rewarding" answers.

Memo to self more than to others: GO DO THE WORDS!

Have a great World Book Day!

Penny Dolan

Detail: WEIGHING THINGS UP by Penny Dolan

0 Bring Me The Teenagers - Liz Kessler

Last month, I wrote about how overly attached we can get to our phones and to the desire to share everything we experience – instead ofjust experiencing it. (How did you get on, by the way? Did you cut down at all? I…um…well, I tried!)

I guess this blog might be continuing that theme in a way. It’s about social networking. Only, this time, I want to pick your brains.

Next May, I make my YA debut with my novel Read Me Like A Book (which, incidentally, I just received the bound proofs for, and I am completely IN LOVE with this cover, designed and painted by my very talented artist friend Joe Greenaway.

This book is HUGELY important to me and I want to do everything I can to give it a good send off into the world. Because this is a brand new tack for me, I’ll be doing a lot of things differently. I’m already fairly active on Twitter and Facebook – and I do my monthly blog here – but there are all sorts on online hangouts that I know almost nothing about – and I think it’s time to get educated.

Currently, I use my author page on Facebook to write about my books, post lots of photos of sunrises and my dog and the sea, and have lovely chitchat about mermaids and faires and time travel, mainly with my readers, their parents, a few librarians and a bunch of supportive friends. On Twitter, it feels much more about chatting with my writing peers – other writers, bloggers, bookshop people etc. Think publishing party, only without getting drunk on free champagne and making a fool of yourself in front of the MD.

So that’s all well and good, and I enjoy it. But I want to spread my writerly wings. In particular, I want to talk to teenagers – and I don’t know where to find them!

So this is a question aimed mainly at teenagers, parents of teenagers, writers of books for teenagers who interact online…

Where are you? Where do you hang out? Which are your favourite online haunts? And what do look for or expect from in the different places you frequent?

I take a LOT of photos, and should probably be on Instagram. (In fact, I kind of am but I don’t really use it.) I have been told I should get onto Tumblr – and would love to go for it, but every time I glance at it, I feel overwhelmed and bewildered. I’m also kind of half-heartedly on Pinterest, but only so I can look for desks for my new office. And I have got a few videos on Youtube.

The thing is, though, when we try to keep up to date with ALL the places, there’s no time left to, well, you know, write the books. Which I kind of need to keep doing. So I don’t want to join them all. But I’d like to pick the best one (or at most, two) new social networking sites and give them a good go.

So, help me out here. What should I pick? What do you use? Where are my potential new teenage audience most likely to look for me? Any and all opinions on these questions will be gratefully received.

Thank you! :)

Follow Liz on Twitter
Join Liz's Facebook page

Detail: Bring Me The Teenagers - Liz Kessler

0 Invisible boundaries and social media - C.J. Busby

A few weeks ago, a young American first-time author, Kathleen Hale, unleashed a bit of a social media storm by publishing a piece in The Guardian about the increasingly vexed online relationship between authors and bloggers. The article (here) which ran in the Saturday magazine, detailed how she became obsessed by one of her online critics, a blogger called Blythe Harris. When Hale engaged with Blythe's criticism's of her book (despite the many, many warnings she received that authors should not answer back to bad reviews), Blythe and many of her fellow bloggers apparently turned on her and Hale found herself labelled a BBA - a badly behaved author. For Hale (and I should emphasise that we only get Hale's perspective on what happened here), Blythe was wilfully malicious, ruining the reception of her book, and using her clique of friends and fellow bloggers to trash Hale's reputation. In return, Hale details her own increasing obsession with Blythe - an obsession which rapidly moved from what she termed 'light stalking' (gathering any and every detail she could from Blythe's online presence) to what by any standards is just plain stalking - using subterfuge to gain access to Blythe's real-life identity, workplace address and home address.

It's a sorry tale, and I'm not going to rehash the Hale case here, but it did make me think about the business of social media, writers, bloggers and boundaries. Authors, as Hale notes, are encouraged to get online and have a social media presence, but their natural audience, book bloggers and fans, seem quite often to resent authors turning up on their turf and, as they see it, throwing their weight around. A while ago, as a bit of a newbie author, I brushed up against a similar controversy when I noticed an online discussion on a book blogger's site about one of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.

I'm a bit of a fan of this series, and was interested to see that the author had stopped by and commented, explaining where some of the features the blogger was discussing had come from in the writing process. It was (I thought) a perfectly polite contribution, and not in the least critical of her analysis, simply adding a bit of background information. But it caused an immediate storm, in which I was very slightly caught up, having added a comment of my own about the strange ways the writing process worked. For some of the following commentators, writers were simply not welcome on a book blogging site - they were guilty of abusing the power they had as authors to dominate a space that was not for them. Book blogs and fan sites should be considered a space for fans and book lovers to freely express themselves and not somewhere authors should feel free to gatecrash.

It was all resolved fairly amicably - Ben Aaronovitch backed down with a bit of grumbling, and I apologised profusely for being new to all this and not understanding the rules of the game. But the Hale article did bring this experience back to me.

What both examples make clear, I think, is that engaging in discussion with other people on social media is now the easiest thing in the world to do, but that it's also potentially perilous - what seems to be a simple opening gambit in a conversation can quickly become a reason for several people you've never met to decide they hate you. And thinking about why this is, made me realise that it's partly about the lack of social clues we have online.

Picture this: an author walks into a cafe, orders a coffee, and then realises that at the table next to him are six women, clearly friends, all discussing why they don't really like his new book. He would have to be completely mad or utterly self-obsessed to lean across and say, "Excuse me, ladies, that point you've just made is very interesting, but as the author, I'd have to say you've misunderstood my intention...." More likely, he'd hide behind a newspaper, or slink out. It's not his place to push into a group which is clearly bounded by longstanding interactions and mutual exchange of opinions. On the web, though, it's hard to see those boundaries, easier to think this is a discussion open to anyone who happens to wander past.

We've probably all had the experience of adding comments on a forum discussion, only to have what we've said utterly ignored as the next commentator simply replies to the one before you, and the next one carries on as if you never said anything. It feels like a snub (it is a snub) - but if this were real life, the group discussing this burning issue would be that bunch of students who always occupy the table in the corner of the canteen, looking daggers at anyone who even thinks about sitting next to them - and we wouldn't be in the least surprised if they ignored our comment. (We'd almost certainly never make it in the first place.)

Would you interrupt the conversation?

As social animals, we have built up over generations the ability to detect the smallest social clues about other people and groups around us. The kinds of interaction we engage in with other people are largely determined by our previous interactions with them, their status as friends or family or work colleagues. Even with total strangers we can use visible clues like dress, body language, expression, context, to judge what is or isn't appropriate. All these help us to 'see' the boundaries that we would be transgressing and the trouble we could be causing if we were to be, for example, inappropriately intimate or aggressive or opinionated.

The trouble with social media is these clues are just not there. We've only had access to this multitude of potential conversations with strangers  for a very short time, and people appear on it as little more than speech. Speech which is devoid of accents, of voice, of clues about who this person is. It's like wandering in a dark fog, listening to many voices all talking at random - but the people behind the voices are invisible. So we have to make guesses about what kinds of people they are, and whether we are gatecrashing through an invisible boundary, or striking up a conversation with someone genuinely interested in talking to us.

Those speaking to each other on a forum, a blog, on Goodreads, can appear as simply a bunch of individuals interested in the same topic, a bunch of reasonable, open individuals who would welcome a newcomer to their midst. Sometimes that is exactly what they are. But sometimes, the invisible boundaries are as fierce as barbed wire, and we cross them at our peril.

The way invisible boundaries are so difficult to negotiate sometimes makes me want to give up on all forms of online interaction. Like Liz Kessler, who posted recently about social media on ABBA (here), I have considered just ditching all of it in favour of interactions in real life only. But, in the end, I don't, because so far I've managed to negotiate those boundaries more or less unscathed, and in the process I've 'met' some really brilliant people (some of whom I've gone on to really meet).

The fact is, most people on social media ARE open, engaged, reasonable and friendly, and, if you transgress an invisible boundary, they are usually polite enough to just inform you gently that you're in the wrong place. But I do think it's important to be aware that just because those boundaries are invisible, doesn't mean they are not there - and when you find a clear notice that says "Authors (or whoever) are Not Welcome Beyond this Point", it probably pays to respect it.

C.J. Busby writes funny, fast-paced fantasy for children aged 7-12. Her latest books, Dragon Amber, is published by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

Detail: Invisible boundaries and social media - C.J. Busby