Category: Art Of Storytelling

We are constantly living our lives in the fast lane. There is so much happening around us all that time that we have practically gone numb. We don’t feel anything, we don’t notice much. We are going through life just like those bullet trains that whoosh by at the speed of two hundred and fifty miles per hour and where the outside scenery keeps changing every minute.

We apply the same approach to writing as well. We want to write quickly. We want to build a portfolio of articles in a matter of months, finish a book in a year, do revisions hastily and publish as soon as possible.

We measure our output by the number of words at the end of the day rather than the insights they carry. We are beginning to think that writing is the same thing as typing.

Good writing takes time.

Just recently I came across the concept of slow writing through Louise De Salvo’s book The Art of Slow Writing. Louise makes the case that mature writing often develops over a longer period of time. Deep immersion in the process of writing yields results that might are not possible with quick writing we have become so accustomed to. If we want our work to get stronger, more nuanced and more compelling we need to practice the process of slow writing.

Slowing down allows us to explore the complexities of the craft. Lousie gives an example in her book, “Virginia Woolf penned roughly 535 words and crossed out 73 of them, netting her 462 words for her day’s work. Let’s say she worked for three hours. That’s about 178 words an hour including the words she deleted—and Woolf was writing at the height of her creative powers.”

She explains, to explore our creativity we need to slow down. We need to give ourselves the opportunity to get to a deeper level by getting to know ourselves and our stories fully over a longer period of time.

Louise goes on to say:

“Trying to work too quickly, trying to work in too polished a way too quickly, expecting clarity too soon, can set us up for failure.”

[…]

“Slow writing is a meditative act: slowing down to understand our relationship to our writing, slowing down to determine our authentic subjects, slowing down to write complex works, slowing down to study our literary antecedents.”

[…]

“Getting completely lost, coming unstrung and unbound, arriving at unknown and unexpected places, is, for me, a critical part of writing.”

Louise DeSalvo, The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity

In the age of the internet, where we are continually under pressure to produce more content, strive to meet daily writing quota, write to deadlines and give preference to quantity over quality, Louise’s book is a sigh of relief.

Intrigued by the concept I went digging and found that slow writing is being used quite effectively in schools. The children are encouraged to slow down while writing, cut out the waffle and focus on every single word or sentence that they construct.

What is slow writing in schools?

In schools, slow writing is used as an approach to writing that uses a step-by-step structure to create a short text or paragraph. A teacher will give specific writing prompts or instructions as to what grammar, language or punctuation features to include in each sentence.

David Dadau has a lot of resources on the topic.

For adult writers, the concept of slow writing is wider than that. It refers to actually slowing down in life and making time to think, meditate and daydream. According to Louise De Salvo, “The most productive writers and creative people I know realize that dreaming and daydreaming are important parts of how writers work.”

Is there a way to slow down in our lives?

Apparently there is.

When a train is traveling at two hundred and fifty miles per hour if you look inside, the things are at a normal pace – a man reading a newspaper, a woman tending to her child, teenagers stealing a look at each other.

Franz Kafka said: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked…”

When we begin a new project, our ideas are in their infancy. They need to be researched. They need to mature. That takes time. As we learn and understand new information, and let it percolate over days and weeks at length, it makes unique connections with the information we already have in our heads. That is when we discover new insights.

It is the gestation process to become a writer. During this, we learn about ourselves as writers. We establish our work’s foundation. We permit ourselves to play and explore. We commit—or recommit—to working steadily and purposefully.

But no matter how fast the world zips along, if you want to write you need some silence and space, time to slow down to figure out what you think and feel.

Here’s what you can do to practice slow writing:

Schedule a time when you can sit still. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Anything. Keep a notebook handy. Let the thoughts cross your mind and try catching one that intrigues you. Write it down. Keep writing as long as it is there. Stop when your mind moves on to the next one.

For the next month, stick with that thought. Research it. Meditate on it. Look for examples to illustrate it. Find analogies to explain it. See what other people have written about it. Find out books on it and read them. By the end of the month, you will have enough material to write an elaborate article on it. But most importantly your mind will grow and develop insights. A simple thought that appeared randomly while sitting still has now become a fully formed insight. That is what you aim for when you practice slow writing.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Dear Writer,

Let me start by telling you are not the only one. Every writer, at the start of their journey, thinks their writing is good enough. Some like me will suffer from the malady all their lives.

Most of us, except for a few gifted occasions, are unhappy with whatever we write.

I used to be terrible to myself. On an almost daily basis, I would meticulously look for evidence to feed my belief that I was not a good writer and will never be able to become one. Yet there is nothing else I want to perfect than writing.

It is a constant battle, like losing five kilos I keep on putting back on every time I lose them. Just like my body keeps going back to the ‘overweight-threshold’ my mind keeps on going back to ‘not good enough’ baseline.

Getting good at any skill feels like climbing a mountain, the only difference is when you get to the other side you find there is another mountain. Writing is not just a mountain but a mountain range. You feel like you are climbing hill after hill.

Writing is compared to art and art takes practice.

And practice takes time.

You need to give yourself time.

Daily practice, even if it is for fifteen minutes is better than an occasional hour or a whole afternoon. Every serious writer writes daily, there is no example of anyone who wrote occasionally and produced good work but there are many who wrote daily, some only for fifteen minutes a day (think Toni Morrison), and produced a great amount of work.

More than anything else writing is about building a habit.

Initially do nothing else but concentrate on building the habit. Write anything, write about the sky, or the weather, or the surroundings, or the people around you. Develop your writing muscles. The stories will develop later. Concentrate on quantity, the quality will come later.

Always remember, there is more right with your writing than wrong.

This powerful reminder is inspired by a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn: “Until you stop breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you.”

As my friend Henneke says, “As someone who sometimes tends to zoom in on all my perceived flaws, it helps to remember that there are lots of things I like about myself too—like the fact that I’m alive and breathing and able to pave new paths whenever I choose.”

Focus on progress rather than perfection

Don’t worry about how far you have to go, look at how far you have come.

One of the biggest causes of self-loathing is our hell-bent need to “get it right.” We strive for perfection and success, and when we fall short, we feel less than and worthless. What we don’t seem to realize is that working toward our goals and being willing to put ourselves out there are accomplishments within themselves, regardless of how many times we fail.

Instead of berating yourself for messing up and stumbling backward, give yourself a pat on the back for trying, making progress, and coming as far as you have.  

Forget quality, write from the heart

Ann Handley describes an article her friend, Cara published on LinkedIn titled How To: Fucking Work from Home promoting her shed business. The post is riddled with spelling errors and profanity but it caused a ruckus: 55,000 views, 624 comments, and 217 shares.

Why? Because it was authentic, written from heart, using the language she would use describing her frustration to a friend.

The post gave a clear-eyed view of one of her typically brutal mornings and by extension the chaos of mornings everywhere. It boils over with the tension anyone feels when trying to balance home, family, work, recycling day, laundry, walking the dog, dinner.

You breakthrough when you let go

I started getting better when I stopped worrying and let go. It didn’t matter whether my writing was plain, clunky and not to the level of the writers I loved reading and so admired. True it will take me years to get to their level, or I may never get there but I was writing something and it was better than what I was able to before.

In the end, frame Ira Glass’s manifesto, place it on your desk and get to work on your art.

All the best.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

I wish someone had told me, or better still, I had figured it out myself at the beginning of my writing journey. It took me twenty years of painful, frustrating, trial-and-error learning to figure out that I only needed to concentrate on developing three habits in the first year to become a writer.

Like all aspiring writers, I wanted to write and publish a book as soon as possible.

Why on earth would you write anything else? 

I wanted to have something to show for all the hours I was investing in learning the craft.

This had been my approach with every endeavor. Even as a teenager, when I started learning embroidery, the only projects I ever undertook were the ones that I could hang on walls. I was not interested in embroidering table clothes and bedsheets, which wear off after a few years of use. My tapestries and cross-stitch are still hanging in my living room in expensive gilded frames.

In the busy, achievement-driven, self-important society we live in today, it is quite logical to set ourselves a goal of writing a book as soon as we can put a few sentences together.

It is no accident that the creative writing industry is booming. Everyone thinks there is a book in them, and everyone is in a race to write the next bestseller.

While I had every excuse on the planet (full-time job, raising a family, looking after aged parents) for not writing my book, the truth is writing is a skill hard to master. It takes time, and it takes old fashion hard work. Modern distractions (TV, mobile phones, social media) don’t help.

But as I became a veteran, I realized a simple strategy would have given me much better results in much less time. I was so trying too damn hard that I failed to see it.

Writing is not a God-given gift or attribute of geniuses. It is a set of habits you develop over time, just like a sportsman or a singer or a dancer does.

Rather than getting overwhelmed by all the learning, I believe you should concentrate on developing just three habits in your freshman year.

1. Write Daily

No excuses. Full stop.

Write one page, or one paragraph, or just one sentence. But write every day.

Write whatever. It doesn’t matter what you write. When you are starting, you are writing to learn to put your thoughts on paper. The actual content doesn’t matter; the formation of sentences does.

Write about your day, mood, surroundings, the tree outside your window, the smell in the air, the sound of the birds, or a conversation you overheard at the bus stop. If nothing else, write about the weather. You are not writing for others but for yourself to develop your muscles.

Your body has writing muscles. Did you know that?

Neither did I.

But apparently, it does.

Just like our body has drawing muscles (as my drawing instructor told me). Since I was not using them, they were deteriorating. I started drawing a sketch every day, and they got stronger and stronger. I am drawing much better sketches within a year of practice.

Start exercising your writing muscles daily. You will be surprised by the result.

You can write online, on your computer, or better still in a notebook. My preference is a notebook. Something magical happens when your fingers glide across the paper. They knock on a special area in your brain where creativity resides.

2. Read Daily

Reading is an easier habit to develop than writing. If you are interested in writing, you may be an avid reader. If books inspired you to write, great, continue reading them.

Rather double the amount of reading in your freshman year.

Read in different genres. Reading books in the genre of your liking will make you a boring writer. To become a good writer, you must be well-informed in other fields as well. That is called cross-pollination. You will find that the novel you started writing had ideas from the gardening book you read years ago. This is exactly what happened when Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the “Signature of All Things.” She was reading about the plants in her pots and where they originally came from, and lo behold; she found a 500-page story to tell.

You need to read with a purpose. Start a journal and note down the paragraphs that inspire you or the quotes you can refer to in your own writing. It is a significant phase of your development as a writer because all this reading will influence and infuse your thoughts.

There is nothing more frustrating when years later, you want to refer to a story, and you can’t remember which book it was from. Or worst still, you don’t remember at all, which leads to habit number three.

3. Organize your writing and notes

No writing book or article I ever read mentioned organizing your writing and notes, yet it is one of the most important habits for new writers.

I have spent months trying to find things that I scribbled somewhere or notes I took and forgot about them. A writer needs a system to organize and store their work and their notes.

Your system should consist of three things.

a. An easy but robust filing system. Both digital and paper-based. Save everything. Any writing which seems trivial at the moment will sound beautiful when read months or years later.

b. Easy retrievability. When you need anything, you know where to look for it and how to retrieve it.

c. An Idea Notebook. This is to capture any idea you get at any time of the day. It should travel with you everywhere, even in the bathroom (especially in the bathroom to capture the ideas you will get in the shower).

Everyone is different. The way you will figure out your system will be different too. It is worth sharing mine here so that you can cherry-pick what you like.

My physical filing system is a string of diaries and journals — separate diaries for separate purposes. In my daily diary, I write about my day. I have one page per day diary, which is all I need to capture my day. On the other hand, my journal is a register size where I write about thoughts, ideas, feelings, and notes from my readings.

Digitally, I have moved from Word documents to Evernote to store everything under appropriate categories. Evernote is one of the best note-taking apps and is available for free with lesser functionality. It has a mighty search engine, and as long as you can remember one word in an article or story you are searching for, it will dish it out for you.

I also use 750Words, a digital app, to write daily. It gives me a blank page and 24 hours to fill it. My writing is stored on the cloud and is accessible at any time. I can write from home, work, or bus stop using my phone.

For writing novels and non-fiction books, I use Scrivener, an application for writers developed by writers. It takes writing tools from everywhere and bundles them into one application.

This is it—the three habits of a freshman writer.

You don’t have to worry about characterization, plotting, great opening lines, foolproof headlines, and all that jazzy stuff so many books throw at you. Leave them for the sophomore year. First, build these habits, which will set the groundwork for a serious writer.

Concentrate all your energy on developing and cementing these three habits, and you will be on your way to becoming the writer you want to become — a bestselling author in not so distant future.

Photo by Chris Spiegl on Unsplash