You are here because you want to write. Maybe you’re blocked. Maybe you’ve never even started. Either way, you aren’t writing even though you want to. Which kind of means you want to want to write. This reminds me of a question my mum once asked me: ‘Catherine, how do you get the motivation to motivate yourself?’
Simple answer. Motivation follows action. Remember how I said if everyone only wrote when they felt like it, no-one would write anything? Yeah, that.
Remember how I said writing sucks, it’s horrible and sometimes you just have to Hate Write? Yeah, that.
Remember how I said that thinking your work is shit and worrying about what other people think of it is normal and you have to find a way around those feelings or you’ll just give up? Yeah, that.
If there is one thing I hope you remember from this book it’s these three words: Motivation follows action. You don’t just wait for the motivation to sweep you up and then open the floodgates. You turn off distractions, walk past the things you feel you ‘should’ do – things your stupid brain tries to stooge you into thinking are important – commit to an amount of time writing or a number of words, and do it. And you don’t commit to too much or you’ll fail before you even start.
A funny thing happens with your body when you commit to doing something you have been avoiding or procrastinating about. You get this really happy, cathartic rush. A kind of tingle. Like Tinker Bell is waving her wand over you. Like the sun has peeked out from behind the clouds and you are suddenly bathed in warm golden rays. Like those first few mouthfuls of champagne. It is the feeling of those happy endorphins we get in anticipation of reaching a goal.
Listen to your body. Notice how tense and bunched up you feel when you faff around the house instead of writing.
Sit down. Turn off the internet. Open the document.
Feel your body. It relaxes and a huge sense of relief washes through you. Tinker Bell, sunshine, champagne.
You start to write. It’s a bit clunky. Writing with a crayon in your mouth, and all that. Then you get a whoosh of an idea. You go like the clappers for a bit. Then it suddenly peters out and you think, ‘This is crap. What’s the point? I’ve run out of ideas. This whole thing is a mess. No-one will ever want to read it and I don’t want anyone to see this part of me.’ Remind yourself no-one ever has to read it. You write for yourself to make you feel good.
‘Pain is temporary; quitting is forever.’ Sure, Lance Armstrong said that and his autobiography has been moved from non-fiction to fiction, but it’s still a great quote! OK, here’s one from a non-drug-cheat, my son Charlie (ok, he did steal a Freddo Frog from the local supermarket when he was four): ‘Think about how good you’ll feel when you’ve finished.’
The most important thing is that you keep writing. You don’t get up. You don’t abandon it. Override the thoughts that you should make a run for it. Keep plugging away. When you don’t know what to write, write anything. Write the start of another chapter. The final page. Or this thing you thought about today that you figured would be good somewhere but you don’t know where to put it yet.
There are two points of your daily writing session and your overall project where are you most likely to want to conk out: ‘me fah’ and ‘lah te’. What am I talking about? Think music. Singing up the scale: ‘doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, te, doh’. You are most likely to feel you have run out of steam at the point where you would sing ‘me fah’ and the point you would sing ‘lah te’ – which is simply another way of saying when you’re 30% or 70% through a session. Feel like you want to stop? You’ll probably find you are about a third in or beginning your final third. Knowing this is a comfort because if you know to expect it, you won’t stop. You’ll work out how to get over, under or through it.
Staying in place and keeping on writing will give you results. It will make you feel good and create positive associations about busting through procrastination, self-doubt and insecurity. So when you next feel those things, you will remind yourself, ‘Hey, remember how you felt like this before, but you kept going and you got over it and were really happy with the work you produced and happy that you stayed where you were meant to when you wanted to flee?’
Stay on your flower.
Don’t know what that means? Let me explain. When she was four, my niece Alexandra performed in a dance concert. My boyfriend, Bear, and I went along. It was one of the funniest nights ever. The four-year-olds danced to ‘Single Ladies’ (Don’t ask!). When the curtain opened, the dear little dancers were each standing on a vinyl flower shape on the ground. Each one was a different colour: the idea was that the flowers would help the little dancers know where they were supposed to stand so they’d stay in formation. There were some side steps in the dance – sashays, I think the technical term is – and after these, they were each supposed to get back in place on their flower. But after the sashays, some flowers were empty and other flowers had three dancers on them, confusedly looking at each other or the flower. Some of the girls kept dancing absent-mindedly, others were cross and let the others know this was their flower and they should be on their own flower, which was the mauve/peach/lemon one. It was hysterical.
Bear and I now use ‘stay on your flower’ as shorthand for ‘stay on task despite having to sashay at some point – remember your moves and keep smiling’. After a run, a performance or simply a work day, we will often ask each other, ‘Did you stay on your flower?’
I told my sister Helen (Alex’s mum) that the term has become our shorthand for staying focused and not getting distracted.
She said, ‘Did I tell you what happened at the concert the next night? Curtains opened, little girls all on their flowers. Just before the music started, Alex walks off her flower and takes three steps forward so she’s standing in front of all of them.’
Okay, so you don’t have to stay on your flower all the time. But you do need to know where it is and end up back on it eventually.
*
When I was four, the kinder teacher asked everyone what they wanted to be when they grew up. (Nowadays they tend to ask kids what they want to ‘do’ rather than ‘be’.)
Mrs Mitchell asked, ‘Darren, what would you like to be?’
‘I’d like to be a fireman.’
‘Great! Julie?’
‘I’d like to be a nurse.’
‘Lovely. And Catherine, what would you like to be when you grow up?
‘Mrs Mitchell,’ I said, ‘When I grow up I would like to be Carol Burnett.’
Carol Burnett was a comedian.
I had the urge to perform and make people laugh and perhaps point out the elephant in the room from a very young age. But growing up disadvantaged and female, stand-up comedy and writing were not things I ever thought possible. My parents certainly didn’t encourage me. They would have seen it as quite irresponsible to encourage that kind of lifestyle. We were very poor, so they encouraged us to get jobs they saw as stable and reliable. Performing, creativity and writing were seen as hedonistic and sure paths to ruin. Yet I have had a far more successful career than either of my parents, been a million times happier and made far more money.
One sentence – one remark – was directly responsible for my life turning out so differently to those of family members before me. I was about sixteen and trying to decide on subjects for Year 11. A family friend, who was a physiotherapist and was possibly the only person I knew who was happy and enjoyed his life and his job, said, smiling, ‘Choose the subjects you love and your life will follow.’ I could not have received a better piece of advice. I offer it to all the high-school students I come across.
When I left home and university, after completing an arts degree with a double major in film and drama, I was knocking around with a lot of people who were starting out in the arts. Actors, rock singers, editors, journalists, directors. They would say, ‘You should do stand-up.’ But I didn’t start stand-up because they said to. I did it because I wanted to. Clearly I was interested in it from a young age, and they emboldened me. It kind of created this pressure from deep down inside me. I felt they gave me permission, so I had no excuse.
When I did my first five-minute spot, my motivation was not to die. I don’t mean this in a figurative sense: I mean it literally. I was scared of dropping dead on stage from shame. I wanted people to think I was funny, cute, and smart but not up myself. I wanted people to laugh and not boo.
I did it.
I got off-stage and those original motivations had vanished. My motivations now were to get more laughs, do a longer set, write better material and perform for bigger audiences.
Nowadays my motivation for both performing and writing is simply to get better. To blow my own mind occasionally. The only person I compare myself with is myself.
Your motivations will keep evolving – as long as you keep doing the work.
*
When motivation comes up, so too does the word inspiration. Oh god, I cannot tell you how much I hate these words. People think both motivation and inspiration occur naturally. Fixating on these two concepts prevents and discourages people from writing. So if motivation follows action, what’s the deal with inspiration? ‘Inspiration is for amateurs’ is the famous quote from Chuck Close. The whole quote is: ‘Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.’ The word inspiration is just an excuse. If you are waiting for inspiration, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. That’s all I have to say about inspiration. It’s just another excuse.
*
We have to be a bit careful with motivation: we’re not always motivated towards the right action. I have discovered through my hundreds of Gunnas students that one of the most common reasons for procrastinating is a motivation to wag. We all love the idea of not doing the thing we’re supposed to, don’t we? Playing truant from school, staying up late, leaving work early, sleeping through the alarm. Face it: we get a kick out of wagging, out of getting away with something. It’s a bit of ‘Fuck the police!’ Watch out for this kind of cheap thrill. It’s the short way round but the long way home. It’s caving in to what we want to do now, as opposed to what we really want to achieve. It’s the lure of novelty and distraction over effort, satisfaction and change.
Here’s a good writing tip: write as if someone is watching over your shoulder and you can’t wag. Write in such a way that the person watching you will think, ‘Oh, look, she/he is actually writing! How impressive. She/he is a writer.’ I know it sounds nuts, but it works. Get yourself to stay on your flower by convincing yourself someone is watching you as you write.
My seventeen-year-old came home from school the other day and said ‘Mum, everyone is talking about what jobs they are going to do and the courses and universities they are keen to get into. It’s all they talk about. But I don’t have any idea.’
I said, ‘Dom, you are 160,000 words through writing a book. These people are preoccupied with all these things because they feel they need to turn into someone, be something. You know you are a writer and you already are that person. You don’t feel you need to become someone else.’
[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one’s way of being through the act of writing.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
‘Becoming’ a writer is the motivation for many writers, but what does the term ‘writer’ even mean? And can you become one or are you simply a writer because you write, because you have been paid for writing or because you have bought this book?
A writer is not a person who writes, it’s someone who can’t not write. All the full-time professional writers I know go through periods of not writing, and when they are not writing they don’t feel like themselves. If you are a writer who is not writing you don’t feel healthy. You feel kind of constipated, anxious and full of self-loathing.
Writers are writers before they have ever written a book, play or one-woman show. They are a writer simply because writing makes them feel normal.
Many Gunnas struggle with the idea of defining themselves as writers. They see the term ‘writer’ as something of gravitas, something to be earned. Perhaps something that is bestowed by others.
‘Am I really a writer?’ they ask. Yes. The answer is always yes.
Writing transforms people. As they write, it transforms them little by little, and they are transformed on a larger scale when they finish a project. They have extracted something from deep inside them, birthed something and they feel different. Many writers are unconscious of this, but nevertheless they write because of who it makes them become. It peels the layers off and reveals who they are. Writing gets you closer and closer to your core every time.
Put the hours in. Your progress in words and pages will encourage you and your mastery of your writing practice as well as what you write will improve.