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.
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