6

THINKING YOUR WRITING IS SHIT

Think your writing is shit? There’s a club for that called everyone. It is not a reason to give up. If everyone who thought their writing was shit gave up, no-one would write anything.

My theory is that anyone who has a desire to write:

is good at it

has the potential to be good at it

is someone who feels better and functions emotionally, intellectually and creatively more efficiently when they write. (Note that I say ‘anyone who has a desire to write’, not ‘anyone who wants to be a writer’ – some people just want the kudos that comes from saying they’re a writer; they don’t actually get anything out of writing.)

But to be honest, while you’re writing – especially while you’re getting that first draft down – your work might be shit. Most things are until they’re finished. Whatever you’re writing, it’s not what it really is until it’s done. How can you possibly know if it’s any good? It’s not finished yet! A dirty raw potato is not very nice to eat – because it isn’t washed, peeled or cooked yet.

As you write, more than likely your writing will be a bit of a shambles. It’s meant to be. And even if you love what you’re writing right now, you will probably look back one day and think it’s a bit shit. Or the opposite. You may think it’s shit now but look back on it later and think, ‘Actually, that’s quite a good read. Why was I so hard on myself?’ You know how you look back at old photos and think, ‘What was I thinking? Oh my god, I thought I looked so cool but I looked like a total fuckwit’? Been there, done that. With my writing. I cringe much of the time at things I have written in the past. And I’m not just talking about scribbles in the journal under my bed. I am talking about things that have been published. I am talking entire books, people! And you know how you look back at old photos and think, ‘Oh, I was so beautiful/thin/young back then! I can’t believe I thought I was ugly, fat and funny looking’? Been there, done that with my writing too. I have cried about how bad something I’d written was. Not in front of someone in the hope they would say, ‘You’re a great writer! It’s very clever/funny/accomplished and you’re so pretty and sexy.’ I have cried alone in the bath at the mere thought of its shitness. And yet a few years later, I have come across the same piece or performance and thought, ‘That was fucking brilliant! Why did I ever think that was shit? What weird glasses was I wearing that day?’

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Don’t compare your ‘behind the scenes’ with someone else’s ‘final cut’. Remember: comparison is the thief of joy.

Imagine you turned up early to my place for a dinner party – say, at 4 p.m. There would be a mountain of washing on the couch (with the dog sleeping in the middle of it), the kitchen surfaces would be covered in dirty plates, half-eaten food and half-unpacked shopping bags. There ’ d be three dishes in preparation on the stove, and the only music would be the sound of the electric mixer droning at full bore. You’ d think, ‘This is the worst dinner party I’ve ever been to. And what are you wearing, Dev? Are they jeggings? Crocs? A nightie?’

Because it’s not done yet! This is not the dinner party.

This is the getting-ready-for-the-dinner-party. And it’s actually this shitty bit – the hard work, effort, organisation and transformation – that is why I have dinner parties and I don’t just say, ‘Let’s get takeaway’. The effort turns me on. The not-knowing-how-it-will-end turns me on. Even if the cake sinks and I accidentally put baking soda into the casserole, turning it into a beef-flavoured Mount Vesuvius, this bit and getting through this bit and being able to remember this bit the morning after everything looked gorgeous, tasted fabulous and we all had a ball – that’s why I have dinner parties.

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I hear this all the time: ‘My writing sucks. How will I ever get good enough to write a book?’

You know when you are good enough to run a marathon? Only after you have run one. Are you with me? Same thing goes for writing. You are only good enough to write That Thing after you have written it. You learn as you go. You level up as you grind. You get as good as you can be by simply repeating the task. You are always better at the end than at the start.

Remember how I told you my seventeen-year-old is writing a book? He keeps wanting me to read a bit, but when I ask for a specific chapter he says, ‘No, I don’t want to show you that one I was talking about – the next one is way better.’ Then the next, then the next, then the next. If you are writing a book or have written one, I am sure that experience is familiar to you. If you wrote non-stop from the start of a book to the end without editing or polishing as you went, when you got to the end and went back to the start, the beginning was probably almost unrecognisable to you. As you write, the story explains itself to you. And you explain yourself to the story. You get into your voice and your narrative as you go.

So begin writing and by the end you will have worked out who you are, what you want to say and how you want to say it. Then you can go back to the start and polish up the rough, wobbly beginning and the mediocre middle with the solidarity, clarity and confidence you have by the end. You can’t get that perspective without going through the whole process. You can’t just fast-forward to being in that place, any more than you can run a marathon straight from being a couch potato. It’s kind of like icing a cake. You chuck the icing down at the start and you smooth it all out and make it consistent at the end.

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If you think your writing is shit, you could have cook’s mouth. Cook’s mouth is when you’ve been cooking something all day and you just can’t taste it anymore. People will sit at your table and eat the food you just prepared and exclaim that the lamb korma, minestrone or chocolate-chip biscuits are the best they have ever had. And you’ll reply, ‘Seriously? I’ve been cooking them all day. I just can’t taste them anymore. I feel sick at the sight of them.’

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Another reason you think your writing is shit could be that you are too hard on yourself. That’s a strong possibility. You may have very high expectations of yourself and your work.

Just remember: it’ll never be good enough.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

We finish writing when it is as close to how good we want it to be as we can get it to be.

We finish because we run out of time.

We finish because we run out of puff.

We finish because we have cook’s mouth and we just can’t taste it anymore and are sick of it.

Sometimes we just rage quit.

Sometimes we die.

The best thing you can hope for is that it gets finished. It will never be perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good. Embrace your inner completionist. Tell your inner perfectionist to go sort the cutlery drawer. But not until you’ve completed your writing!

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I went out with two mates the other night and we ordered a jug of Moscow Mule, a cocktail made with vodka, ginger beer and lime. I poured three glasses. One of my mates said, ‘Wow, heaps of ginger beer in this.’ The other said, ‘No way! All I can taste is lime.’ I looked at them and asked, ‘Are you serious? This just tastes like a jug of vodka.’ Same thing. Three different opinions. I can guarantee you if you sat us around that table and served up the same mix a week later we would all probably have different opinions about the jug of Moscow Mule.

Thinking your writing is shit doesn’t mean it is. It doesn’t mean it’s not. It doesn’t matter. This feeling is normal; expect it. All writers, beginners to professionals, feel like that regularly.

It’s none of your business what you think of your work. The only thing that matters is putting in the hours.

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When you have written for a while and got a lot down on the page, you can look through this huge mass of work and see the peaks and troughs in it. There is stuff you can point out and say, ‘That was quite good.’ Or, ‘That is less shit than the other stuff.’ It’s like that when you write anything, in my experience. Writing is like: ‘grind, grind, grind – oh, not so bad – grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind – now that’s more like it!’

Humans are a bit like sharks. They need to constantly be moving forward or they’ll die. We need to feel we are constantly improving and progressing. If we don’t, we feel as if we are going backwards, even if we’re not.

If you feel your writing is shit, you may have hit a plateau. You are not shit – you’ve just been improving and levelling up consistently and you have now hit a holding pattern. Don’t panic. It won’t last forever. Just stay in it.

When you can point to something you wrote and feel not so cringe-y about it, either within a piece or your whole body of work, take note. Go back to that. Reread it. That’s why you write. For that. And the more you write, the more of those moments you will have.

I never know if anything is actually good, but generally I know if it ‘works’ or not. I know I’ve written something above par when I find myself going back and rereading it. Not rereading it to check, edit or correct it, but immersing myself in it because the way the words hang together – the lilt, timbre, variety, flow – feels ‘just right’. I know my writing is working when I find myself irresistibly drawn to rereading it – the way I’m drawn to the Travolta Room.

Let me explain. As I write this, we are renovating our kitchen and living room area, so all the furniture, supplies, objects and ‘storage solutions’ that usually live in that space are squashed into other spaces. There is only one room that has not been affected. It’s neat, clean, and not filled with clothes and refugee furniture. It has lovely light and a perfect temperature. We call it the Travolta Room, after the official model name of the couch in it: the Travolta. I find myself constantly drawn there – because of the hygge. Hygge is a Danish word that kind of means ‘cosy’. It may be distantly related to the English word ‘hug’. Hygge is the absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming in your surroundings, your home or in small gatherings. It means taking pleasure from the presence of gentle, soothing things.

If I find myself compulsively rereading my work, I reckon it’s an indicator it has hygge. That’s my way of feeling when something works. I also draw on a design principle of the Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio. He identified ‘firmitas, utilitas and venustas’ (firmness, commodity and delight) as the three elements necessary for a well-designed building. I look for these things in my writing to see if it’s working. Those words and concepts may not resonate with you. That’s not the point. It’s how I want my writing to be that matters. And you will find your own benchmarks and indicators of how you want your writing to be.

The more you write, the more often you hit sweet spots where everything flows. Those vibrating, soul-affirming moments help your writing get better and they encourage you to keep writing, because they establish happy associations with putting your bum on the seat, your fingers on the keyboard, your eyes on the screen, turning off the internet and blurting, vomiting and bleeding the words out.

You know how they say you can’t be it unless you can see it? It’s true of writing. But what’s important is not just being able to see the way others write, but showing yourself what it is you can write. And, people, you can only do that by actually bloody writing!

I know that I’ve done a good day’s writing if I have done what I set out to do, written more than I expected, surprised myself or done Hate Writing – forced myself to write.

You have to do a stack of digging to hit gold. Sometimes you feel like you’re digging dirt out and then putting it straight back in the hole again. But you aren’t. You are getting closer and closer to the gold – you just can’t see it. You need to have blind faith. Stone-cold determination. Grind, grind, grind.

Here’s a technique for when you hear those voices saying ‘what you are writing is crap’, ‘no-one will ever want to read this’, ‘you are wasting your time’, ‘what will people say?’ and so on.

Tell the voices to come back in an hour when you have finished your writing.

And keep telling them again and again and again until they bugger off and leave you alone!

That’s it.

When you finish your writing, I can guarantee they’ll be nowhere to be seen.

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Who cares if you hate your writing? You are spending your time well. And I can’t promise it, but chances are you are improving. In increments. Let me tell you a story about increments …

I have always loved Ferris wheels. Slow, dreamy, circular rides in the sky. Slightly hypnotic. Incredibly romantic. Any chance I get, I will go on one. When the Millennium Eye was built in the UK, I was besotted. It was glorious. If it wasn’t the biggest Ferris wheel in the world, it was close. I googled images of it and even set an important scene in my novel The Happiness Show in that magnificent white wheel of magic. Ever heard about those crazy people who marry rollercoasters, the Eiffel Tower or the Berlin Wall? I could so be one of those people. I’d marry that sexy white Ferris wheel; I just don’t believe in marriage.

A few years after writing the scene and eight years after it was built, I finally went on the Millennium Eye. As we drove there, I could see it in the distance. We parked the car and I gasped at my first view of it up close. It was a fucking masterpiece. We bought tickets and hopped on. The doors closed and I felt the giant capsule lift. ‘Wow!’ I thought. ‘I am actually in the Millennium Eye.’

I looked out over the Thames, at the little houses below, the streets, the sky and … you know what? It was boring.

I was thinking, ‘Are we actually moving? Is this it? Is this thing on?’

Here’s the thing. The Millennium Eye is slow. It takes about an hour to make one full rotation. The scenery doesn’t really change. Your view is your view. Parts of it just get smaller or larger depending on where you are on the ride.

I felt deflated, disappointed.

The ride came to an end and we got off and had a coffee. I was nonplussed. The ride of my dreams had been no big deal. Nothing had really happened.

We went back to the car and I turned around for one last look at the Eye. It took my breath away again. What an extraordinary feat of design, technology, science, vision! I suddenly realised what a big deal it was that I had gone around in it. I finally truly understood it. When I was inside the Ferris wheel, it didn’t feel like it was moving. It didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere. But when I took a few steps back … wow!

Life is like that. A lot of the time it doesn’t feel as if you are getting anywhere. It’s only when you look back that you realise how far you have come, what an incredible journey you have taken. In increments.

When you are writing but feel like you are getting nowhere, please remember you are moving. In increments invisible to the naked eye.

You are getting closer to finishing. In increments.

You are getting better at writing. In increments.

You are getting better at sitting down and staying on task and not being distracted by the internet. In increments.

You are getting better at identifying the things you are putting in front of your own success and using to procrastinate. In increments.

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Your writing may be shit. Chances are it’s not. Or if it is, it won’t be shit forever. And even if it is shit, and it will always be shit, if it makes you feel better to write – who cares?

Here’s a red-hot tip. Generally the more talented people are, the harder they are on themselves. The people I know who are very good at what they do are rarely happy with what they produce, and consider themselves quite lazy.

As I mentioned earlier, I run. I’m slow and uncoordinated, and many times I end up walking a fair whack of the way, because I run out of puff. I frequently fall over. Sometimes I randomly get worse at running. I can run ten kilometres fairly easily and then suddenly, one day, for no reason, I conk out. I get a few kilometres into my usual run and have to walk all the way home. And you reckon that’s bad? My skiing is even worse. And don’t get me started on my guitar playing. My kids call it ‘ear rape’. So why do I run, ski or play guitar? I do it for the same reason I write. Because it makes me feel better. That’s reason enough!

There is a bit of a gambling element to writing. Sometimes you hit gold. Sometimes you write something that blows your own mind. And it’s such a buzz you don’t care if no-one else ever reads it. The thrill of adulation will never be as big a buzz as the writing itself when it’s that good.

I’m well known as the world’s greatest optimist. Mum says, ‘I always say to people, if Catherine was told she would have to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life, her first words would be, “Oh great, I can choose any colour I like.”’ So if I’m such an optimist, you’d think I would be telling you that you are a genius, your writing will be brilliant and you are going to be the next J.K. Rowling, Annie Proulx, Stephen King or Doris Lessing.

I’m not going to tell you that.

I will not make any promises about you publishing your writing, making a living from it or even liking what you write. But I will promise you this: if you keep writing, you will feel better. And if you keep writing, you will get better at it. And that’s the only chance of ever getting any good.

Stop focusing on writing as a vehicle to becoming rich and famous. Because I know that’s not really the reason people write. How do I know? Easy. There are heaps of easier ways – far more guaranteed ways – to get rich and famous. Someone once asked Ricky Gervais, ‘What is your advice for someone who wants to get famous?’ His response? ‘Kill a prostitute.’ I am not suggesting you kill a sex worker. Nor is Ricky. The point Gervais makes is that fame is not something to strive for. There are many things you could do, horrible things, that would provide you with celebrity. Hitler was famous, for fuck’s sake. Becoming famous is not necessarily a good thing.

Novelist Isabel Allende is a little sweeter about writing: ‘Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.’