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How not to write a book in 30 days

by J. C. Greenway
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This week my eye was caught by an informative and amusing interview in the Paris Review with Geoff Dyer, ‘The Art of Nonfiction No. 6’.

Paris_Review_Issue_207_160

Closer examination reveals it to be taken from the Winter 2013 issue, which goes to show how well I keep up with the literary times. But, still! It is immensely worth reading as it pretty much covers all the writing advice a person might need, without the bother and expense of a Masters in Creative Writing.

Why not begin with this gem:

Beyond the effort and hours one puts in at the desk, I’m also aware that when I’ve written travel pieces. I’m out there wherever it happens to be, looking around, having to notice stuff, and I find that tiring, rather dread it, actually… I love not having to notice stuff—and, even more than not noticing, I love not having to articulate what I’ve not noticed. Whereas somebody like Updike seemed to live every day at an amazing level of noticingness.

Like a group of people watching a live event through the screen of their recording smartphones, to be constantly required to notice things seems to me to keep the writer at one remove. That can be handy at times, but it is also preferable to float along without worrying about taking notes, word counts and how events will be interpreted later.

Mr Dyer is also refreshingly honest about his own writing process:

There’s no way of getting around the fact that the first however many months are going to be no fun at all, and not much of that material is going to end up in print. In an ideal world you would skip those first three months and just start at month four or whatever, but you can’t.

Oh, if only. I have also found myself thinking similar thoughts to these recently:

I’m so revolted by writers taking themselves seriously that, as a kind of protest. I’ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life. I do it when I’ve not got anything better to do—and even then I often do nothing instead.

In amongst all the online forums, constant #amwriting updates and courses offering to sell the secrets of literary success, this comes as a breath of fresh air. In our interconnected world, we can all probably relate to part of this:

I find it incredibly difficult to settle and I have very limited powers—if we can dignify it with that word—of concentration, so at first I’m up and out of my chair every few minutes. Later on I can stay at the desk for longer periods until eventually I don’t even have to force myself to stay there. The general process is just to splurge stuff out, without being particularly worried about the spelling or anything. Just splurging to make sure there’s something there. And then I begin knocking it into shape both at the level of the sentence and the overarching structure. But that initial phase is the one I increasingly hate, so I try to get it done as quickly as possible, in the five-minute bursts that I’m capable of putting in at the desk before I get up to do something else.

Given that Geoff Dyer is no slouch at getting books finished and into bookshops, one suspects a little exaggeration here.  However, it is comforting to learn that – among the practitioners of 1,000 words per day targets and the approaching NaNoNiNu, where writers are encouraged to bang something out in 30 days – there is room for some ‘faffing around’. Any decent writing or research process should require an amount of faffing around, one feels. While it is not good to linger in the quagmires of faff for too long, singularity of purpose can so often lead us headlong into a brick wall.

There is more of the same good stuff in the interview, on the processes involved in writing individual books and how he got started as a writer. Overlook the fact that it isn’t from the PR’s latest issue, more smouldering than hot off the press, as it does contain an awful lot of great writing advice, all for a few thousand quid less than a university creative writing course.

 


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