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Notes From Inbetween Girl

On silk robes and hashtags


Performative hashtaggery pisses me off no end. You know the kind of thing I mean: #amwriting, #writerslife, #writersofinstagram and other such hackle-raisers. I see their usefulness, up to a point – if nothing else, it’s a way of finding an online community – but good grief, they don’t half make one sound insufferable.
 
But it’s not just the general sense of insufferability I resent – it’s also the notion that writing is a mystic, unearthly process that requires a garret and an impractical, wafty silk robe. 

99% of the writing process is about as far from divine and ethereal as it’s possible to get. Sometimes finding your groove is a pure slog. Writing is mostly an act of rearranging, of chiselling and fiddling. I bang on about it a lot but there’s nothing quite like moving a paragraph further up or down a piece and realising that in its new place, it pulls everything together. 

I’ll concede that on some level, I do believe that all ideas are out there in some sort of ether - *gestures vaguely upwards, silk robe flapping* - and that they find you, rather than you actively creating them, but I also believe that you have to do two fundamental things in order to get those ideas to choose you:

1.    Look out for them, and 
2.    Sit down at your desk.

Years ago, I did work experience on the editorial team of a student website, and pitching 3-5 potential articles first thing every morning did wonders for my ability to actually generate ideas. When a hard-to-impress editor is expecting you to just say something, you don’t have too much time to worry about your own personal standards. So you have a few crap ideas, and guess what? There’s no thunderbolt of damnation, nobody makes an attempt on your life or banishes you from the town, and it cleans out the filters, making it easier for good ideas to rise to the surface. The more ideas you force yourself to have, the more adept you become at having good ones. That’s really as mystic as it gets.

I’ve noticed recently that having no ideas makes me sad and grumpy (actually, that may just be my personality). If I don’t have a blog post or newsletter draft in progress, I feel like something’s missing. There are no mental knots for me to be untangling, no sign of my ego’s next boost, and everything feels off. My brain feels… itchy. And it turns out that the only cure for an itchy brain is to sit down and start typing. Start trying to write the thing you think you can’t write and see what comes of it. We are held together by rhythms, and the gentle percussion of your fingers on the keyboard will often kickstart something glorious.

Writing isn’t a divine process. But when you say the thing you realise you’ve been trying to say – when you look over what you’ve written and realise you’re spinning pure gold – it comes pretty fucking close. Maybe I’ll concede that too.
 
(Please excuse my vanity; I took this in the summer when I was a lot less tired.)

 

Non-fiction: Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style


You will be wholly unsurprised to hear I adored this. ‘An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style’ sounds like it’s going to be a fairly dry read, but friends, it is anything but. Reading Dreyer is like having a lovely natter with your biggest writing nerd friend – I don’t know quite how he manages to write about style and usage in a gossipy tone, but manage it he does.

This book will make you a better writer, I promise – you’ll find yourself referring to it over and over. Worth buying solely for the clarification that ‘blowjob’ doesn’t need a hyphen – oh, and that ‘cum’ is an acceptable spelling for… well, you know (this is probably the only thing I’d disagree with him on, unless we’re actually discussing items that have more than one use). A style guide with NSFW content is my kind of style guide.

 

 

Fiction: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept


I’m a sucker for a love story that makes very little rational sense – Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favourite novels mostly because the only redeeming feature Cathy and Heathcliff can claim between them is their mad love for each other. They’re awful people, but good grief, they believe in their passion, and Cathy’s ‘I am Heathcliff’ speech is surely one of the most romantic paragraphs in literature. So it was inevitable that I’d come to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept at some point.

This fictionalised account of writer Elizabeth Smart’s long affair with poet George Barker is less a straightforward narrative, and more a barrage of exquisitely-articulated feelings. But it captures the feverishness of passionate love better than anything I’ve ever read before – what Smart does with language is paralysing. You’re left with more questions than answers – the one that nags hardest at me is ‘why on earth did the clearly stupendously-talented Smart spend so much time chasing troubled, uncommitting Barker?’ – but 1) 'twas ever fucking thus, and 2) all the best stories leave you wanting more.

 

The awful self-promotion bit



Someone told me this was 'full of righteous fury and sexual energy', and if I weren't terrified of the unsolicited DMs, I'd change my Twitter bio to that.

PMS is fucking wild.


 

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