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Course of every city

7/23/2021

Words spoken at the launch of City of Ruins, the re-publication of the book formerly known as Augury, at October Books Southampton, 22nd July 2021.

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Who will you be when the world ends?

What will you do with the time you have left? What will matter to you? Who will you stand with, even if it costs you everything? Who might you sell out, when you’ve got nothing left to lose?

And when the world ends, what will happen to the powerful, who’ve thrived in the old order? The liars hiding away in high towers - how long can they last when their foundations are shaken? The illusions we all held on to because they helped us live - can we survive letting them go?

And when a small voice, when someone powerless speaks out and tells us something we do not want to hear, will we listen? Or will we do what people have always done, and silence our prophets before they have a chance to change us?

I chose a strange time to write about the end of the world. In 2016 when I was creating this story, trying to say something about the toxic alliance of religion with patriarchy and power, I didn’t have to look far to see how these things play out in our own world, on the biggest possible stage.

Then by the time the book was first published, a story about what happens when the world is turned upside down, I was celebrating with champagne in my living room because none of us were allowed to leave our homes.

                                         *

City of Ruins starts with an earthquake. Like the people of the nameless city, we’ve all been forced to grapple with changes we never asked for. We’ve felt the ground shift under our feet, as things which seemed impossible yesterday become necessary, ordinary today. Our lives have been held up to a new light, showing us what’s precious and lasting, but casting long shadows too.

The earthquake cracks the land along the fault-lines, shows up corruption and injustice where they have been thriving in secret. The word ‘apocalypse’ means ‘revelation’, the laying bare of what has been there all along. We seem to be living in apocalyptic times.

But maybe we’re not so special. I think every generation has lived through an apocalypse or two. This story takes place in a nameless city, outside of real history, in part because I wanted it to feel timeless. All of these things have happened before and they will happen again. As one of the book’s characters, Felix, says, This is the course of every city.

It’s the course of every life, too, that loss and change will come and shake our foundations. I wanted this book to feel personal as well as mythic, the character’s hopes and fears raw and real as our own. There is a strangeness about these people because their world with its altars and sacrifices is so alien to us – but they should feel familiar, too.

They are trying to find safety for themselves and those they love. They are trying to find a meaning bigger than what their traumas and disappointments have shown them. They are clinging to the past or running from it; falling in love with the wrong person at the wrong time; trying their best to rise to the occasion when the times call for courage.

                                         *
Even their faith in a pantheon of gods should not feel too far from our own experience. We all hope on some level that we live in a universe which isn’t just meaningful, but merciful. This story turns around two different forms of faith – one which is aligned with power, the other which belongs to the powerless. One brings a crushing burden of shame: one brings mercy and renewal.

This is a cosmic version of something deeply personal, rooted in our most vulnerable selves: our need to be safe and loved. A fragile need in a world which can so often be chaotic, incomprehensible or downright cruel. As the poem which I picked for this book’s epigram has it, To be human is to be completely alien amid the galaxies/which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others/the temples of an unimaginable mercy.

The divine is both intimate and remote in City of Ruins because to be human is to be on a deeply paradoxical journey. We are all journeying between hope and despair, the transcendent and the mundane, afraid of being unloved, which is the same as being alone in the universe.

                               *

All of us live through the end of our own worlds, more than once in the course of a lifetime. I know I have. Redemption and regeneration sometimes feel too easy for this story. They’re like wild animals after a forest fire – they’ll come back in time, when the ground will sustain them. Even then we might only see them in glimpses.

I think of a word that’s used in the study of Native American stories, about a people who have endured the unendurable: survivance. Survival and endurance, or survival and resistance. It means that we survive by changing, by becoming something else. This truth is written at the level of our atoms, the particles of our bodies which are made completely new twice every decade. Biologically, atomically, we are not who we were.

So who will we be? What will grow from the ashes? We find ourselves still reeling from disaster, licking our wounds and counting our losses. This book ends, I think, on a note of hope – but also of ambiguity. Hope is needed when we can’t yet see, and don’t yet know.

What we build next is up to us.

World Without Pip

10/30/2020

I don’t say to people, my cat was killed, I say, my little cat. My lovely little cat.

Pip was diminutive, particularly in the summer, when he’d moult his cold-weather fur and take on the proportions of a pitiful stray in a Disney film. A scrap of a thing with enormous lantern eyes.

Little cat, also, because his littleness was a comedic punchline. Everything about Pip was outsized, from his insistent gobbiness to his insatiable appetite for food, for company, attention, affection. Everything about him always seemed ready to burst out of his tiny frame. Being a cat made Pip impatient. There was so much life to live, and our slowness to accept him as a fully-fledged person wasn’t his problem.

He swaggered into the world every day just as he swaggered out of the box on the day that I brought him home. I had been warned that kittens were always shy at first and would spend the first few days hiding. Nobody had told Pip and his brother, Sam, who entered the unfamiliar room with the unassailable confidence of gap year lads getting off the plane. When my housemate came home Pip immediately clawed up the inside of her leg and had to be birthed, still clinging on, from out of her skirt.

I often joked that I felt less like Pip’s owner and more like his agent, conducting business on his behalf, fielding compliments from his many admirers, trying to keep up with his busy social life. And what a life it was. Sometimes he would disappear for months at a time and the news would filter back to me – Pip had been hanging around at a laundrette, a student house, a primary school. Pip had been climbing into baby’s buggies, following gangs of teenagers, demanding belly rubs at the bus stop. Strangers would text me pictures of themselves holding and fussing him. I made a Facebook group to help track him down during these periods of absence, and people shared their Pip photos though they were celebrity sightings.

Pip made trouble. He worried me endlessly with his long disappearances. I got countless phone calls – sometimes more than once a week – from local vets’ surgeries, to whom Pip had been handed, mistaken for a stray. I grieved his loss many times before his actual death. He burned through approximately 39 lives. The size of his ego was such that he could not bear the limitations of one household’s love: he demanded everybody’s, and all for himself.

He declined to share our love with Sam, who was muscled out until he gradually, quietly, sweetly went to live with a family a few doors down the road. Their own cat had been lost, and Sam seemed to know what they needed. He’s patient and unassuming. They call him an angel. His new owner tells me that he sleeps on her little boy’s bed every night. After I had the call about Pip’s death and was waiting, tearfully, for my boyfriend to arrive from London, there was a click of the cat flap and Sam came in. He rarely ever comes into this house these days. But he came upstairs and curled up on the bed with me, purring, until I wasn’t alone anymore.

Sam is an angel. Pip was a gorgeous, glorious fiend.

Pip squirmed with joyous smugness when you scratched his head. He oozed frankly offensive levels of contentment when you buried your hands in his impossibly soft belly. He was a lesson in laziness, a gremlin of shameless greed, an egotist, a drama queen, a diva, and - if you caught him in the right mood – an adoring, sweet-hearted baby.

He would let you cradle him in your arms and dance with him around the kitchen. When he was sleepy enough he could be slung around your shoulders and worn like a fur scarf. He loved to be carried – in fact often needed to be, as he would follow people further than his paws could carry him. On the day of the Brexit vote Pip followed me all the way to the polling station and had to be handed to the politely baffled stewards while I went into the booth. (He would have voted Remain, of course: he was a Romanian cat.) He didn’t like the idea of people going anywhere he couldn’t. As a kitten he once climbed onto the bonnet of my car as I started the engine and yelled at me pitifully through the windscreen, paws splayed.

He believed, against evidence to the contrary, that his vocalisations were always understood. As an intelligent cat he had a wide range of noises, which included the insistent yell (I want food, but not the food that’s already there), a pitiful wail (I want you to stop the rain so that I can go outside), a perky chirp (I’m here! I’ve arrived! Attend to me!), and best of all, the little chirruping noises that signalled a level of content beyond ordinary purrs. The yells and the wails would be deployed repeatedly (frequently at four in the morning) until you had got him what he wanted. Pip didn’t always know what that was, exactly, but that was never the point.

He liked to be heard. He liked to be involved. Parties were not a time to hide under the sofa but to sprawl across three laps at once. He liked to be close. He liked to be scratched under the chin and kissed in the warm spot where his ear joined his head. He was not ashamed of asking for love, or taking it, or giving it. He was not afraid that he wouldn’t be loved, because he was utterly and perfectly himself, the most perfect creature alive.

I hope that I am not too sentimental. I know that Pip would probably have eaten my face if I’d died first. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Pip could love, and that he loved people. Loved me. He sought people out not just through some robotic need for warmth or survival, but for friendship. I couldn’t sit down in the house for three seconds without him getting onto my lap. All day while I worked at my desk he would stretch out on the bed nearby and snooze companionably, snuffling in his sleep, paws twitching as he dreamed. When I had a lie-in he would sometimes crawl under the duvet and tuck himself next to me, stretching out and insisting on being cuddled close, like a little spoon. He was romantic like that.

The love he gave was every bit as fierce and extravagant as the love he demanded: and when you are loved by this loveliest of creatures, this force of nature, this wild thing, when he has chosen to come in from the night and curl on your lap to let you love him too – how bad can the world possibly be?

Writing talk: A conversation with JG Murray, part 2

5/24/2019

J.G Murray was my university classmate, and he's just published his thriller The Bridal Party. Read part 1 of our conversation here.

JGM: So what happened after university for you? How did Hideous Creatures come to be?

SEL: I don’t really remember if I left university wanting to write novels. I was a bit crushed because that childhood excitement about writing had been dampened by reality. I started dabbling again and wrote some short stories – I’d been looking for a way back into writing as an adult that didn’t feel stupid. I knew I didn’t want to write fantasy or Sci-Fi, but also that I didn’t have enough life experience to write something that was contemporary and set in the real world. So that left me with nowhere to go. Then I found magical realism and that absolutely opened up possibilities for me again.

I wrote a collection of magical realist fairytales, and imagined in my bubble of denial that this was the right way to get published as a first-time writer. In fact when I first sent them out to agents I was so dumb I didn’t even put enough postage on the envelopes and half of them got sent back to me. But one of the envelopes that did make it got to the agency where Bryony Woods was working at the time, and though I got rejected there, a year or two later she decided to start her own agency.

She remembered me and sent me an email! I’d written Hideous Creatures at that point, and up until then I’d had no idea if I was even in the right ballpark of good enough. I was just about to start looking for agents when Bryony got in touch.

JGM: You got an agent off magical realist short stories? That’s…unusual.

SEL: I hadn’t realised then that what I was writing was weird and hard to categorise, and also kind of messed up… all that stuff I would later be told by a lot of people. Finding a publisher took quite a long time.

Had you submitted stuff prior to getting your book deal?

"I told myself: go get published in, say, six different places."

JGM: I came out of university and thought, heck yeah, I’m unemployed, I’m going to try and write a novel! That post-English degree slump. So I did, and it… wasn’t that great. It didn’t get anywhere, so I told myself, go do short stories, get published in, say, six different places. Then you’ll have developed enough to try writing a novel again.

SEL That is SO strategic.

JGM: I know, I’m impressed with 22-year-old Julian. That’s how I ended up doing the short stories. I looked at what competitions there were and adapted my style for different writing prompts.

I had a story published in an anthology called 24 Stories, edited by Kathy Burke, about Grenfell Tower. There were some big names in it, like Irvine Welsh, and the money went to the Grenfell community which is where I work. I knew a lot of people affected by it, including some of the kids in my school.

So when that came out, it felt like, I’ve made my mark, I’m good to go now. I’d hit my target of 6 short stories.

SEL: You were working part-time through all this, presumably.

JGM: There was a point when I was pretty worn down by full-time teaching, and getting no writing done – I said to myself, if nothing happens in two years I’ll go back to full time - and the Deviant Minds prize came just within that window.

SEL: That’s such a challenge. We’ve been lucky in that we’ve got somewhere before that time ran out, but there’s no knowing how long you do this for before you start thinking, it’s not going to happen. I’m ten years into working part-time in order to try and make this happen. And even though I’m published it doesn’t feel like I’ve arrived, or like this is necessarily the best idea in the world.

I don’t want to say this to you as someone who’s just been published, but I don’t think there’s a finish line, Julian!

JGM: Do you find that affects your writing? The idea that it’s always going to be a struggle?

SEL: It affects the will I have to sit down at my desk when I could go have coffee with a friend or potter round the house or watch Netflix instead of writing. There are days allocated for writing on which I do all of those things, but I’m sufficiently driven by my ideas that I couldn’t not do it. I feel uncomfortable when I don’t write.

JGM: The greatest feeling in the world is having written, but I seem to forget that daily.

Can I ask you about process? Do you give yourself word-count deadlines?

SEL: It’s purely about my motivation and energy levels that day. I think of myself as being quite slow – I’m a low word-count person because I obsess over every word in every sentence. Constructing a sentence can take hours for me, so it’s (hopefully) quality rather than quantity.

"It's not just the distraction, but the comparison. You end up being exposed to the loudest voices all the time."

JGM: I need to have a word-count to work towards. Otherwise I would just torture myself with the feeling that I hadn’t done enough.

If I don’t have momentum on a project I get distracted, so I need the word count to push me forward. And there’s so much distraction out there.

SEL: If it wasn’t for Twitter I think I would be rich and famous by now. Twitter has ruined my attention span.
I’m kind of joking but I really need to do something about. When you’re someone with a butterfly mind who’s trying to write a novel, and every three seconds there’s something new to distract you….

JGM: Writing is THE most difficult thing. But to scroll through twitter is the easiest, brain-numbing thing. So which are you going to go for?!

For The Bridal Party it’s definitely helped to be part of the online community and I’ve definitely made sales that way, but on the other hand, it is the worst thing to do to writers! Not just the distraction but the comparison. You end up being exposed to the loudest voices all the time. I find writer envy really difficult – look how many books there are in the world! Do I even have a place in publishing?

SEL: I think it’s just about being really single minded about what you’re doing. You have to believe you’re the only person in the world doing it, because otherwise you’d just give up, wouldn’t you?

JGM: What I’m trying to do is remind myself what my barrier for success was a year ago, two years ago. It shifts so quickly. Look back, tell your younger self what’s happening – he’d smack you for complaining.

SEL: So give me a potted summary of the story you're working on next.

JGM: A couple move into a wealthy, middle-class block of flats in North London, only to find themselves part of a suspicious community. During a New Year's Eve party, they suddenly have to defend themselves against accusations of murder from their increasingly hostile neighbours. It should have a Rosemary's Baby and Agatha Christie vibe, and examine some of the extreme class tensions that are so rife in this country.

Do you mind telling me about your next book?

SEL: I’ve not really talked about this with anyone except my agent yet so it’s still really awkward. Also, though the book now feels weirdly timely, I feel like I wrote it forever ago! The wheels of the publishing world turn slowly.

It’s set in a fictional classical civilization, and it’s about what happens when there is a prophecy that the city’s going to be destroyed. It sets a lot of things in motion for a collection of characters who have various reasons for wanting the status quo to be upended or wanting things to stay as they are. It’s a look at what happens when it feels like the world is about to end. And whether we want to believe people who are bringing us bad news, the way it causes people to assess what’s important to them.

JGM: When you say it’s timely, because the world feels apocalyptic at the moment?

SEL: Definitely - it’s been interesting to have written that book at this time. All being well, it’ll be out next year.

JGM: And we’ll still be in this world of nightmares.

Read The Bridal Party or 24 Storeys

Writing talk: A conversation with JG Murray

5/24/2019

What feels like a lifetime ago, I studied Creative Writing at Warwick alongside some very talented people – and I’m lucky enough to still be in touch with some of them.

My friend JG Murray recently won the Deviant Minds competition with his thriller The Bridal Party, the deliciously fun and spooky tale of a hen party gone nightmarishly wrong. The book is published by Corvus and you can get it here.

It’s not a genre I’d normally go for, but from the very first pages of The Bridal Party you know you’re in good hands. The characters are vividly drawn, the pace is gripping. And best of all, it’s given me a great excuse never to go to a hen party ever again.

To celebrate Julian’s first book coming out, we caught up and cast an eye back over the last ten years – what we've learned, how we’ve kept writing, and the bumpy road to publication.

"That’s how a lot of thrillers come about. Take a normal situation and then go, ‘But what if… murder?’"

J. G Murray

S.E. Lister: So I’ve nearly finished The Bridal Party – it’s an absolute page turner, and I’m genuinely spooked. Tell me a bit about where the book came from.

J.G. Murray: I’d been slaving away at a novel off and on for maybe a decade - pouring my heart and soul into it – and I needed some light relief. I used to do murder mystery weekends with my friends, and I started thinking, wouldn’t it be weird if somebody actually died, and we all started suspecting each other?

SEL: That is such a writer thought.

JGM: Turns out, that’s how a lot of thrillers come about. Take a normal situation and then go, ‘But what if… murder?’
There was this competition, Deviant Minds – I had fun with the first few chapters, and sent them in thinking I’d forget about it and go back to my main project. And still now I’m absolutely shocked that I won. Part of the prize was to get a one-book deal with Corvus, and to be set up with an agency.

SEL: Is The Bridal Party really different from the thing you’d been pouring your heart into for ten years? Do you think of yourself as a thriller writer?

JGM: I’d been working on a detective series for younger readers about a folklore detective, so some of the local legends and superstitions I’d been researching came in useful for The Bridal Party.

And no, not really! I think our university experience encouraged me to be less of a pretentious emo kid and try my hand at everything. My road into publishing has been like, ‘I don’t know what I am, I’m just going to try it out.’ So I’ve written poetry, a ghost story, science fiction, a thriller…

SEL: What for you is the common thread when you’re writing these different kinds of stories? Is there a central thing you’re trying to do, common themes you find yourself returning to?

JGM: It tends to be linked to identity, and how it’s fixed. Locality, community, our loved ones – how healthy or unhealthy that can be.

SEL: I won’t try and psychoanalyse you too closely. You mentioned our university days – you described yourself as an emo kid – what was your main takeaway as a writer from that experience?

JGM: It loosened me up. It was a necessary thing to go from being a big fish in a small pond, to being surrounded by people who reflect you in all sorts of ways. It’s a wake-up call for your ego, and it freed me up.

"However much we learned at university, we would return to a childish way of approaching writing."

SEL: It’s funny that you say that because I think it had the opposite effect on me. It made me really anxious and paranoid. That lack of uniqueness, trying to find your voice amongst these strong personalities – maybe it’s to do with not knowing who you are at that age.

That’s what I remember from that time, not anything I learned, but the panic and the terror.

JGM: Could that have been formative for the crushing process of actually trying to get published?

SEL: Maybe!

What happened after university was that the strategy I developed was being absolutely blinkered to reality, and that is the only way I’ve found to work. It’s done with a bit of a wink at myself. I’m not actually deluded, but the only I’ve found to write books and get them published is to be in denial about how hard it is, about when it’s disappointing, about what it means for me practically. Because for me the only way to do the work is to be in a safe bubble where there’s only me and the work.

JGM: One of the things I remember China Mieville saying when he taught us was that however much we learned at university, we would return to a childish way of approaching writing. I definitely identify with that.

Can I ask, there was a lack of guidance about the industry on our course – do you think that would have been useful?

SEL: The jury’s out as to whether it would have helped or scared me away – but I think yes?

Our former tutor, the author China Mieville

I’m increasingly convinced that one of the best ways to equip someone to be a writer is to equip them for the practical side of that – things like how to make a living while you write, how to find a balance between the creative and the commercial.

This probably says more about me than the course, but I don’t remember a single thing that we actually learned. Do you…?!

JGM: I get this more now that I’m an English teacher myself: being taught writing, it’s not about knowledge - it’s a skill. And at the end of our three years I could definitely see the improvement in other people even if I couldn’t see it in myself. I remember there being a process, something in the room that was building.

"My writing group bruises the ego, but it soothes as well."

SEL: All my memories of those classes are of being so sweaty and so anxious. Now I think, what a waste of time, to have spent it in abject terror rather than being open to what was happening!

JGM: I take it you’re not in a writing group now, then.

SEL: No, that might puncture the bubble of denial. Are you?

JGM: Yes, and I really do find it beneficial. It’s almost purely technical – we don’t just read out chapters to each other and clap. People give you detailed notes, and sometimes it’s soul-crushing. But it prepared me for getting line edits from my publisher. And everyone goes through the same thing, from the experienced professionals downwards! So though it really bruises the ego, it soothes it as well.

Keep an eye out for part 2 - finding a publisher, hitting your word-count, and how Twitter (sort of) ruined our lives.

Ruins at the end of the world

4/25/2018

Here's something that happened in a parallel universe, a lifetime ago: I walked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. (Two weeks ago actually, but normal life is a rude awakening.)

It was hard, and spectacular, and moving. The air was thin, the views dizzying. We saw hummingbirds and iridescent butterflies. In a ruin engulfed by cloud I stood looking over the edge and saw nothing but whiteness for miles below. The Inca must have thought that they lived at the end of the world.

When you walk with people in a place like this you are more open, somehow. Afterwards on the train back to Cusco we found a carriage where musicians had a whole excited crowd on their feet. We clustered around, half of us helpless with laughter, strangers dancing wildly while the mountains rolled by outside.

Most Days

2/21/2018

There will be days, she said. Something in her voice, as though spilling the secret of life. In this fellowship of those who suffer you are warmly welcome. Take this comfort, take this warning. There will be days.

Either this freed me or I was already free. Breathe easy: pain will come. Let it pass over you like labour. What you are birthing is yourself, every last atom made new inside you. You will survive this.

For a while I left the door ajar for whatever would come in. But it seems that we're done with one another for a while, my pain and I. We're taking time apart. I move my fingers and my feet, and they do not feel like mine. I walk for miles, pound the treadmill in praise at the miracle of myself. I stand wrapped in my winter coat to watch lights move across the old city walls and gasp along with the children. Was the world always full of things like this?

I have arrived so late. I wish I had learned faster, lived braver. Maybe it takes even longer, for some, carrying their decades strewn with confusion and loss. Thirty years to see myself and like myself, most days.

Light Box

11/24/2017

When we met I wanted to tell him, if you ever leave me, don't do it in the winter. But it turns out I had as little choice in that as in the rest of it. The night came in all at once.

I love something about this haunted time of year. These crow and pumpkin months. The poltergeist winds and fingernail moons. I glove my hands and go into the hedgerow to cut nettles, stem after stem until I have a bag full. A spine breaches through to my fingertip and the pain buzzes there for hours. I boil the leaves in saltwater, bake them into bread.

These days the afternoons rise around my neck like a tide. I drive in the dark and come in the evening to a house which needs kneading through, pressing and rearranging until it feels like home again. I put things away in the kitchen and sweep the floors. I try to make space in rooms where the night is just outside the windows. I am medieval, huddled in an age where fire and home are arrayed to keep devils away.

I am Neolithic. I want to know what they sang to the earth to make it turn again. For my sun I have a light box. A cube the shade of a white-sky day.

Writing Talk: Non-Stop

3/28/2016

This is part two of my series with my friend Jennifer McLean, looking at our writing habits. This week: so many ideas, so little time...

Jennifer McLean: The perennial question for writers is the where-do-your-ideas-come-from one. And (while I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like to find out how some authors made their Faustian deal and get in on the room where it happens) I think it’s the wrong question on a number of fronts. At least at this stage of my life, I have hundreds of ideas. It’s non-stop. I always worried about that, but it turns out that the real problem is knowing what to do with them. We’ll probably talk another time about the issue of deciding which ideas are good ones (answer: certainly not the recurring ones I have about musicals), but our topic for today is what we in our chats have been calling Too Many Projects, Not Enough Time.

It feels pretty appropriate, this week, for both of us. Certainly, I’ve been in one of those phases where I almost need to leap out of the shower to find a pen because yet another thing occurred to me. Cry me a river, right? It sounds brilliant, but between all the different projects we have on the go, and the necessity of occasionally getting dressed and earning some money, and all the Improving Practices I like to fix upon… Well, without a bit of prioritising, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of helpless, anxious unproductivity.

I don’t think I’m in a position to pronounce on a solution, so I’ll be interested in what you’ve got to say on this. I’m just going to throw in a couple of things I’ve been pondering.

Without a bit of prioritising, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of helpless, anxious unproductivity.

Firstly, I think I like having different projects at different stages. If something’s being planned, and something else written, and another thing being researched, and a further musical being imagined, then I can be productive in a range of ways, which is good for my soul. There’s an extent to which I’ll never be satisfied - that is, that any fresh idea will have the shine of the new, making the current project feel like a slog. Giving myself permission to address some of these ideas by researching, or writing a Edgar Allan Poe rap mashup, means that I’m more likely to finish a few of them. Or take a break, as necessary; I’m prone to doing everything at once and therefore never feeling like I have downtime, when in fact so much time is unproductively wasted. I have to remind myself to wait for it - to let an idea rest, and take the time to address it properly, rather than always looking to what comes next.

Maybe I’ll come to some of the other points, but what do you think? Should one project be enough, or is there value in the many-pronged approach? How do we avoid burnout? How many of the Hamilton references in the above did you spot, and will we ever be as productive as Lin-Manuel Miranda?

Patience is the name of the game, and being patient sucks.

S.E Lister: As you know, on an average day I am a jumpy bundle of nerves and manic, unsustainable creativity. I am also at that stage (which, yes, it seems churlish to complain about) of having too many ideas. The biggest challenge in my writing life at the moment is holding these ideas in tension with the amount of time and energy I have to pursue them - which, unfortunately, not very much.

I work three days a week in a job which is quite intense and draining, and by the time I get to the tail end of the week, which is designated as my writing time, my head’s already spinning. Becoming easily overwhelmed can be part and parcel of being a creative type, because you’re always noticing small stimuli and processing things deeply. I’ve learned that it’s important to respect your own limits and not overload yourself, which can be kind of excruciating when you’re in love with six different novels in your head and you want to write them all today. Patience is the name of the game, and being patient sucks.

The way I get through is to tell myself that projects can wait - and in fact will be better for the waiting. For me, the process which follows the initial idea for a book is effectively years of daydreaming about it while I’m getting on with other things. The longer you do that daydreaming for, the richer the story becomes, so that by the time you sit down to write it you’ve got layers and layers of stuff to draw on from your subconscious.

Currently I have around three different projects living in my head, making demands of me, aside from the thing I’m currently working on. In terms of sticking with things and finishing them, when you’re tempted to jump ship for the new shiny thing, my best advice would be to treat it like a worthwhile relationship: you won’t always feel the romance and sometimes other prospects will look more appealing, but if you commit and put in the work, good things will happen. Does that make sense?

JM: It makes complete sense, and leads neatly to something which we’ve been talking about a lot: that this isn’t an issue confined simply to writing. It’s the essence of privilege to worry about having too many exciting things to cope with, but it goes a little deeper than that, for me - we’ve talked a lot about this, but part of my experience of living with chronic pain (which I’ll probably go into, some time) is that I need distraction to cope. I agree that being overwhelmed is something of an occupational hazard, but for me it’s also necessary to walk that tightrope in order to get anything done. Nonetheless, I do have a massive problem (and again, we’ve talked about this a lot) with becoming deeply, temporarily obsessed with things, and I think that carries over into the writing issue; just as I have several projects on the go, I’ll be waking up with a particular song in my head for weeks, and obsessing over it, then move just as intensely into something else.

All that said, I was talking to a couple of other friends (what? I know!) about The Zone - you know, that thing that happens maybe once in a blue moon, where you’re so focused and everything’s coming out just right, and the minute you notice, it all falls apart. Like suddenly thinking about your tongue. I still haven’t decided what the ideal conditions for that state are. Is having a number of projects on the go preventing that kind of laser focus, or does the deliberate cultivation of productive distractions actually create space for it?

The first rule of productivity for me is consistency - do it, do it again, finish it.

I haven’t got the answer to that, yet, but I do know that the first rule of productivity for me is consistency - do it, do it again, finish it. I’ve always been very good at dealing with tasks as they arise (inbox zero represent), but that kind of reactive discipline is exactly what leads me astray in terms of rounding things off. You’re definitely at a different stage to me, in that sense, and what you say about committing is very wise. Did you have similar feelings about finishing things? Or did it always come naturally to you? Do you have any hard-won wisdom about focus and commitment?

S.E: In some ways, yes, finishing things does come naturally to me. I really relate to what George Orwell said about writing being a sickness: the closest I can come to a cure is just getting the entire thing out of my system. My vice is impatience, really, the temptation to finish something slapdash and fast rather than slowly and thoroughly. I’m about 2/5ths of the way through the book I’m currently writing, and though I’m enjoying it, the thought that I’m not yet halfway there is terrifying. It feels like there’s a marathon ahead, and summoning the mental tenacity to stick with it feels beyond daunting.

Magical things happen when you lift away the burden of duty and expectation in writing.

Conversely, the best way I’ve found to get the job done is not to double-down on the discipline, to make demands of yourself or push yourself to breaking point: it’s to take a breath, relax, and reintroduce the element of play. When I sat down to write Hideous Creatures it had been years since I’d last finished a story of any length, and the constant terror of the distance left to travel seemed to loom over every page. But when I told myself that I was here to play, here to enjoy it, something clicked. I made it fun for myself. I wrote in my favourite cafes and gave myself afternoons off. I told myself that all I had to do was finish this paragraph, this page, this chapter.

Magical things happen when you lift away the burden of duty and expectation in writing. To bring this full circle and quote our current creative icon Lin-Manuel Miranda, ‘I try not to think of writing as a burden at all. My job is to fall in love.’

Writing Talk: On Sharing

3/5/2016

I've not posted anything here for ages as I've been busy with work and with novel #3, two activities which between them manage to be pretty all-consuming. But what I have been doing is talking incessantly with my friend Jennifer McLean, who is my sounding-board when it comes both to writing and to life.

Jenny is a poet and short story writer with a Masters degree in creative writing (you can read her blog here), and has also worked as an English and Drama teacher. We often spend time dissecting the fiction we love, as well as our own writing habits and bugbears. In this Writing Talk series we thought we'd share some of those conversations.

This first post is about sharing work: from our experiences of writing as a taught subject, to the reasons why we're still both so cagey about our work in progress.

Why I Do This

9/18/2015

There’s nothing like the prospect of imminent publication to send me into a fit of soul-searching, and I’ve been thinking a lot, in the last few weeks, about why I do this. I’ve had a tough year – tough enough for me to have questioned whether at this point in my life I can simultaneously earn a living, write books, and remain healthy and sane. There’ve been times when it’s seemed that one of these three things will have to go, and, well, I have to eat.

I hope I don’t sound melodramatic or ungrateful: I only mean to be honest. Bringing a book into being is not easy, and sharing it is even harder. What’s so precious to you might be incidental or even ridiculous to other people. Nobody owes you their understanding, much less their adulation. You send it out into the world, this delicate thing, like a kitten into a sawmill.

You are not going to please everybody. I expect most learn that lesson far earlier in life, but at 27, this people-pleasing, hyper-achieving straight-A student has only just stumbled onto it. This is the gig. This is what you sign up for, not just when you publish a book, but when you put any thought or action or expression out from within yourself to be received and critiqued by others.

So why do I do this? There are easier ways to get an ego trip. There are much easier ways to make a living. I’m currently on a bit of a break from writing, as I’m settling into a new ‘day job’, and in plenty of ways it comes as a relief. I’ve got more time for rest, for seeing friends, for doing the things which – outside of writing – make life meaningful. But obviously, obviously, something is missing.

I write because it is the most rewarding job I know of. Because that reward is there long before you hold a physical copy of your book in your hands, before anybody else reads the words you have written. Even, to some degree, before they have been written at all. I do this because these imaginary people, these imaginary places, are where my mind wants to go as soon as I set it free to go there. These people, these places, they are my friends and my home.

I do this because I become unhappy and frustrated when I don’t; because it’s my own little patch of land and I want to grow things there. Because it’s what I’m for. Because every book, beneath its layers of metaphor, is a discovery of things I hardly knew I thought and felt and believed.

C.S Lewis famously said that we read to know we are not alone. And of course we write to know that we are not alone, too; to tap some stranger shyly on the shoulder and say, I have felt this way. Have you felt this way too?

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