The Writer's Life: The Hospital Clock

 

One thing about getting older is that you spend more time at the local doctors surgery or, occasionally, a hospital visit. Even if you’re fit and healthy, you can end up needing a check-up now and then. And this is the second time this year I’ve found myself at a local hospital — nothing serious, but I still needed to go in for tests.

I have written before that writers tend to look at the world differently; everything is potentially a story. 

That was the case on this visit as well.

My appointment was for two thirty in the afternoon, the letter saying that I should allow for two hours. I arrived at the hospital with thirty minutes to spare and made my way to the department, only to be surprised that the reception was empty. The only person there was seated at the reception desk working away on a computer.

I thought, ‘Lucky me, no one is waiting; I should be in and out in no time.’ I handed in my letter to register that I had arrived. Unfortunately, I soon found out that I was not so lucky after all, as all appointments for that day were to be seen on the first floor.

“Go out this door, turn left and up the stairs. The door directly opposite is where you need to go.” Said the receptionist.

The Writer's Life: Why Writers See the World Differently

 

An idea crossed my mind.

Writers often move through life with a slightly different perspective from everyone else. It is not necessarily something that the writer chooses. In many cases, it simply happens over time. The more a person writes, the more they begin to observe the world in a way that others might overlook.

And I asked myself the question, ‘Why?’

I am a latecomer to the world of writing. Five years ago, writing was just something that I did when I had to. Social media, blogs, and bulletin boards were not something that had taken over my life. I did occasionally write a post here or there, but I felt that I had better things to do with my time. As a form of writing, though, it was all very fleeting. 

And then I wrote a book, Son of My Father.

I wrote it because after the death of my mother, I went through the experience of thinking about the past. Memories and stories started to fill my mind in a way they hadn’t before. Then I had a thought. I decided to write about them.

From that moment I was hooked on writing. 

I came to think that writing about life changes the way we observe it. A writer does not just experience events; we notice them. Even small details become important. Watching how someone pauses before answering a question, or noticing the exact phrase used in a conversation and the tone behind it. Being aware of the language used, the mood in the room, and how people react. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, but it carries meaning.

The Writer's Life: Life After Medium and Writing Short Books

It has been around six months since I left Medium (you can find out why in this six part series — The Truth About Medium).

I no longer post on Medium as much as I once did. Most of the time, I will import a post from this blog, to keep things going, and see if anyone reads it.

That was one of the difficulties at Medium: finding the audience and getting reads. It is a site that does all the SEO stuff for you. If it did, I’m not sure that it helped in any way. It sounds like a good idea, just post and trust the algorithm to find readers for you, but I can’t say it worked well for me.

I tend to do my own SEO and keywords on this blog, with a little help from ChatGPT. AI is useful in that regard. In fact, I would say that I get a better response doing this myself on my own blog than I did relying on Medium's algorithm.

The Writer's Life: When Illness Strikes - The Art and Fear of Being a Writer

 

I recently caught a winter cold, which turned into an infection,  or it came with it, just before Christmas. It was just a cold, or so I thought.

The common cold had taken a backseat in recent times, as COVID-19 got all the headlines. But it has been around a long time; there are about two hundred strains of it. It was just waiting its turn, or a new strain was around. Old or new, I got it from somewhere.

And it was a lingering cold.

A continuous cough is not just something that comes with COVID-19; mine from this simple cold lasted three weeks, and I’m still not over it. The cough pounds away at the rib cage — it’s like going ten rounds with Mike Tyson at his peak.

It all meant that I struggled to write. That’s the way it is when I’m ill. I might have good intentions, that having all that time,  I will write. In reality, that doesn’t happen. Being ill drains any desire to do anything, other than to get over it.

You eat a meal without tasting a bite. You read a message twice and still don’t absorb it. Watch a YouTube video, without taking it in. Somewhere along the way, you forget to write. The hours drag on.

And this is where writing lives.

To be a writer is to exist half a step removed from the world, constantly translating experience into language in a way that, hopefully, someone will like and understand. The writer is always watching, listening, and storing fragments away in the mind for future use. Even in moments of rest, or illness, thoughts are working, shaping sentences, rehearsing conversations, rewriting endings that never happened.

This is the art of it.

The Writer's Life: First, or Third-Person? That is the Question.

 

I had a moment yesterday, when I started to question what I was doing. It was very specific, concerning a project that I have been working on since late last year, when I decided to try my hand at writing fiction.

The end result is now within sight. I am writing the final chapter and conclusion. 

So, the end is within reach. 

However, yesterday I was on Twitter X, and noticed in my timeline there was a tweet asking about books written from a first-person perspective. The question was, what did people prefer, first or third person? Many replied, saying that they did not like first-person books at all. It seems to be like marmite, you either like it or you don't.

I had not given it much thought, but I was writing this book in first-person. I did so for the following reasons.

Writer's Life: Saturday Night - Burning the Midnight Oil.

There are times when you just have to write. Last night something came to me out of the blue, and I just had to write it down because otherwise I would probably have forgotten it. 

So, around midnight, I ended up writing an extra 900 words of dialogue between the two main characters in the book that is my first attempt at fiction. 

I am finding that I am not writing the story from start to finish in one go. I have the story in mind, a beginning, middle, and end, things tend to change as I go along. Then ideas for inclusion at any point in the story just tend to come to me. I will work them in. There will always be editing later, at which point they may get written out.

I start at the beginning of course, but at some stage, what I have already written, may need a re-write to include the new ideas. Seems like an anarchic way of doing things, but that is the way that I write. I suppose it is just the way that my mind works. It doesn't give me the whole story from the start.

I sometimes wish it did, as I would save a lot of time. 

That's what happened last night. The dialogue I wrote will be included in a later chapter that I am still some way off from writing. For now, I have the outline. The scene is written now, waiting to be included in that chapter, whenever I get to it.

The Writer's Life: The Word Count - My Word is My Bond

I noticed on Twitter X recently that authors will occasionally mention their word count for the day. Some are quite impressive, writing several thousand words in a day. I'm not that productive, and I felt for some time that I was more of a binge writer than someone who could just write every day. However, I have tried to change this, and that was because of Covid.

When I tested positive for Covid, I decided that while under the weather, I would try to do two things. The first was to catch up on my reading. I have many books that I want to read, but just don't get around to it. Second, I was going to write more consistently. I ended up doing neither. I did some reading, but not much. Furthermore, I did no writing at all.  

For two to three weeks, I just waited for Covid to do its thing and then clear up. Fortunately, It did, but then I thought about all that wasted time. I did very little because I did not feel like doing anything, but this wasn't just procrastination. I did think about what I should be doing, and then I set a goal that I would write every day. So far, that is what I have been doing. In the past, I have never really thought about doing a daily word count, but now that is what I'm doing.

So, in the last four days, my numbers are 1050, 1183, 2286 and so far today, 1058.

This is writing on two WIP. One, is my first attempt at fiction. I will write more about this in due course. The second is non-fiction. 

Someone posted on Twitter X the writer Ian Fleming's (he of James Bond fame), daily routine. Here it is.

It does help that he was a successful author and making decent money. For most of us, it is not realistic, but the general principle to write something each day if you can is a good one. 

What seems to work about writing every day, if you can do it, is that the numbers soon add up. Average 1000 words a day, and that is 365,000 in a year, and potentially three or four books. You do need to have the ideas, and then there is all the editing, the promoting, etc, etc. It is never that easy as life, and procrastination, gets in the way. 

However, while there is not much I can do about life getting in the way at the moment, I can do more to avoid procrastination. 

 

 

Image by Nybro Bildelar, creativecommons.orglicensesby-sa4.0, via Wikimedia Commons 

The Twelve Posts of Christmas - Day Nine: When You Get the Writing Itch, You Have To Scratch It, Part Two.

I didn't mean for there to be a part two to the writing itch post. 

I hadn't planned it, but maybe it is something to do with the time of year, but I don't have the urge to write right now. For the moment, there is no itch. 

I wrote in a previous post about binge writing, doing it when inspired, when the ideas flow. The alternative being those that set themselves a goal of writing every day. The goal of setting a number of words to write each day looks a good one, as five hundred words a day gives you five thousand after ten days and fifty thousand in a hundred days.   That's a short read book every three months, or a long read in five or six months, but are the words any good? Are the words that come from writing every day inspired ones?

I think I might be a binge writer, someone who needs to be inspired to do it at the time, but I sometimes wonder if it is procrastination and laziness? I would like to try to find a balance between the two. 

At least I have written something and the Grammarly language tool is telling me it's fine. Not fine in the sense that it is any good, but fine as in, no errors found.

Merry Christmas!

The Twelve Posts of Christmas - Day Seven: When You Get The Writing Itch, You Have To Scratch It.

So, it's Christmas Day, and I'm writing a blog post. 

It will just be a quick one today, because if you feel the urge to write, then you just have to.

Here's what happened.

I fell asleep last night after an early evening carbohydrate rush took over. I woke up around ten and pretty soon I wasn't sleepy at all. I started to think about something that had been on my mind about a story that I am writing. The opening line and first few pages. I've read that it should be dramatic, and set the scene for what's to come. I looked at the first page and the opening line of fiction books that I owned. They all had a fairly dramatic start. Authors on Twitter X comment on this occasionally, and I looked at what I had written so far. The start wasn't that dramatic, I would even say it was mundane, I needed something better.

The thought that suddenly came to me, late night Christmas Eve, was around a character that I had planned to introduce later in the story. It occurred to me that it would make a good opening to the story, so I got writing. Several hundred words later, I think it works. Time will tell.

I also discovered something else recently about my own writing. I watched an interview recently with the author Cheryl Strayed, who described herself as a binge writer. She is not one for writing every day, someone who seems to write better when the inspiration is there to do so. I suppose when the ideas are ready to flow. Others require the commitment of writing every day. I think I am more of a binge writer than the latter, although I try to mix both. Science says that binge writing is bad for you, who would have thought?

Binge writing

All I know is that when it comes to having ideas, I work better when they just come to me. I struggle when I try to force things. 

It was the same when I was at school.

 

It may be Christmas Day, but if I get the urge to write more today, like an itch, I just might struggle to resist the temptation to scratch it.

Merry Christmas!