How I learned to just fucking write

It involves a lot more eavesdropping than I'd like

You don’t want the ‘recipe on a food blog’ version of this. You just want to know what I do.

• I pay attention to what’s happening in the world. When I can. Sometimes I just can’t drop into that kind of awareness, I’ve got shit to do.

• I set up a shortcut on my phone called ‘Noticings’. I tap the shortcut. It asks me what I noticed. I write it down and click save. (Note below for Android users!)

• That gets added to the end of a ‘Noticings’ file in my Obsidian vault.

• I come back to the stuff I’ve noticed periodically and elaborate on it. Sometimes that’s a single thing, sometimes it’s drawing connections across things.

When I was a teenager I made YouTube videos. This was entirely me trying to get famous. As a working-class kid in a town I loved but hated, it felt like a get-rich-quick scheme was the only way that I might make something of myself. Whilst I was busy huffing the fumes of late capitalism, though, I began to see it as an artistic outlet.

I was experiencing a lot of difficult shit at that time that I didn’t know how to process. I could, however, pick up a camera (or an iPod Touch, in later years) and make a video. Or think about making a video. I found so much relief in finally having somewhere to put all the stuff I had to say. But after the initial flurry ran out, I found myself returning to a creative block I was already well-acquainted with from blogging—the feeling that I didn’t “have anything good to say”.

I was trying really hard to make #deep content, inspired by the vlogbrothers ‘Thoughts from Places’ videos, and Ze Frank’s intensity / philosophical density. I kept finding myself stuck, though. I was manufacturing things to say. Walking round a local war memorial saying things about how there was ‘stuff here before, and in the future there’ll be more stuff’. I had failed to account for the fact that, unlike the Green brothers or Ze Frank, I was a sixteen year old boy.

In those days, I‘d ask my YouTube friends (who were also artists but weren’t sixteen year old boys—shout out Jon, Cy, Sari, Ina) what inspired them creatively. One of them said that they didn’t think about or experience inspiration. I found that really confusing, because at the time I understood art in the tradition of Great Ideas and Great Men. You were influenced by something external which moved you such that you had to create. A divine spark style of creativity. My only other experience of creativity up until this point had been writing poetry as a way to feel my feelings. So it makes sense that all of my experiences so far had told me that you will be struck by the need to make, and when you are, you must do so.

Over the years, those ideas fell away. I stopped waiting for the spark to hit. Gradually began to realise that it didn’t matter how many ‘good ideas’ I had, a good idea that didn’t get made was worth exactly nothing. Years of failed NaNoWriMos for Very Good and Smart stories. Instead, I fell into the trap of believing that all it takes is discipline.

In 2020, I did The Artist’s Way. And look, I’m not trying to start a fight about The Artist’s Way. It helped me a lot. The only reason I ever made my zine series LOST FUTURES is because of it (and a global pandemic, and cheap printing and postage)! It helped me to confront things I’d been avoiding acknowledging about my relationship to creativity. I recognised my then-status as an academic as being a shadow artist par excellence. I was creating innovative, interesting design methods and writing about them in lucid prose that was very much not befitting of academia¹.

So with The Artist’s Way and its toolbox of morning pages and artists’ dates (during a global pandemic…), I inherited a discipline-centred creative practice. You just need to write every day, said like it’s no mean feat. Write no matter what and then you will make Good Art. Don’t get me wrong, I got benefit out of my morning pages, but I also spent most of them thinking ‘is it okay if it’s a paragraph under three pages? I’m tired, I don’t know if I can actually write this. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this at 6am’.

Morning pages are great. They’re a wonderful tool that helps us to bridge our unconscious to our conscious life—which I think is an essential part of a creative practice. Yet I started to think that to make art, to be engaged in a creative practice, you only needed consistency and discipline. For me, though, that doesn’t tune into the fact that I have a busy life that I mostly enjoy being busy. I was writing morning pages early in the day because that’s when I had space for them. So I continued to find it really difficult to practice. I do benefit from consistency and discipline—who doesn’t—but when I break that consistency, I have a tendency to all-or-nothing it.

What I found useful in this method of making art was its focus on immediacy and immanence, and defeating the inner critic. I started to ask myself fewer questions of whether what I was doing was good, and instead just… did. I allowed myself to be moved by whatever came up, almost meditation-like.

So I’d gone from thinking about external inspiration to completely denying its utility. Like all dichotomies, this one was false too.

I started LOST FUTURES, we ran it for a while, published six publications, and then we realised it was getting in the way of our individual creative practices, and closed it. I began writing the novel that would become Festering in earnest around then, in a document initially entitled ‘A Serious Writing Project’. I had been in a shopping centre, and it made me think about the shopping centre I’d been to with my mum all the time when growing up.

The very first time your mum lets you out out on your own—properly on your own—you spend most of the day in the too-shiny-for-its-age shopping centre.

I hurriedly found myself writing 3000 words on shopping centres, and mouldy houses, and watching your best friend eat an entire frozen cheesecake and appreciating the warm haze around the memory, even if it what came after didn’t reflect that.

That first piece of writing had conjured a few things: a protagonist, the best friend that he loves, a mum, a step-dad. The bones of some characters were there, and it made me think about some notes I’d made for an idea I’d had to use Heaney’s ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ as an outline for a story. I returned to some other notes I’d scribbled over time, too—the uncanny feeling of being the only person waiting at a metro stop, for instance.

I’d been a big David Lynch fan for ten years or so, and I’d been revisiting his films and philosophy. His famous analogy—which he believed to be verifiable truth—was that ideas were like fish:

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful.

The way that Lynch caught these bigger fish was through Transcendental Meditation. I have tried and failed to keep a frequent meditation practice so many times throughout my life. But being in that shopping centre let me catch a shopping-centre shaped fish.

I spend a lot of my time thinking. I am trying to spend more of time feeling. I’ve been seeing my therapist for almost five years now, and that has helped me at the very least catch the patterns that keep me in thinking rather than feeling, even if I don’t always manage to interrupt them.

I was struggling to find consistency in my creative practice, but I realised I was approaching it as a thinking problem. This was right about the time Frankie Simmons started talking about Lynda Barry’s ‘Syllabus’ as a great alternative to ‘The Artist’s Way’ for people who want to feel, rather than think (or something like that. She had a great pitch.)

I snapped up a copy. I really like ‘Syllabus’, and would recommend it to anyone. There’s an activity in there based around keeping a daily diary of things you did, saw, and heard. I felt like this was a thing I could keep up.

You can read more on the course tumblr.

Except I couldn’t, or couldn’t quite! So then I thought—you know what, I’ll make this easy for myself. I’ll set up a shortcut on my phone, so that when I notice something, I can just write it down straightaway.

Update for Android users: Dylan Tweney let me know that the Obsidian app lets you put a widget on your home screen that opens a specific note. This’ll accomplish the same thing.

I found myself going through the world in a different way. As I described in “The Other Side”:

On Friday, I walked down Northumberland Street and felt like I was able to notice things again. To see the world in Technicolor. To pay attention to what needs to be focused on.

I opened my notes app and scribbled down some hurried lines of poetry, the first I’d written in months.

What I found in my Barry-inspired noticing practice was a way to drop in to seeing the world in Technicolor, to be present in a way that served my artistic practice. I had needed to bring together inspiration and discipline all along. Of course.

So how do I just fucking write? I notice, and then I elaborate.

My noticing looks like writing down things I see or hear. A lot of it is hearing. I try to write down verbatim interesting conversations as much as possible. There’s a couple reasons for this:

• Training my ear for natural dialogue, the cadences of how people actually speak.

• Paying attention to tiny details and textures to make descriptions feel more real.

• People say considerably wilder shit than you would ever let yourself write.

Let me give you some examples.

• “I’ve never woken up sad. I’ve woken up thinking it was a shame I had an argument with that person but I’m not sad.”

• “Mate you can’t be pissing in the coke room”

• “I hope you’re going to sit down and eat that, cause some young people these days just eat whilst they’re on the go”

These were real things people said. I could never have written those from scratch. Never! Let me take that second one as an example. My partner and I were visiting some friends in London. We went for brunch, and it was a glorious sunny day, and one thing turned into another and then it was a boozy Saturday. We ended up at a gig? day festival? being run by a pub local to them. Everything was like a fever dream. So there we are, listening to East London-dad-core-Mumford-and-Sons-wannabe bands churn out some frankly incredible music. Some coked-up guys befriend me (forcibly) and start telling me about some pretty traumatising things that had happened to them, and I was doing my best to de-escalate the situation whilst also not being lumped with them all night. I managed to.

Because I’d been talking to them for what felt like an hour, I was desperate for a piss. So I took myself to the toilet, and mid-stream, someone else walks into the toilet and is like “Mate, you can’t be pissing in the coke room! People have got to do coke there!” And look, he was slightly joking, but not as much as you’d think.

So I immediately wrote that down. Post-piss, obviously. And the beauty of noticing things in this way is you can preserve as much or as little context as you want. I remember a lot about this one, but sometimes I deliberately strip an evocative quote or image from its context, because when I go back to it, it makes me think “when and where would this have happened?” I have this personalised pool of images, words, and ideas that I’ve collected from my life that speak to me, and I find interesting. How could you not want to write when faced with those?

When I return to these to elaborate on them, I approach it in a few ways at once. Are there patterns across recent ideas? Interesting scenes that present themselves, or conversations I want to hear more of? I might continue some dialogue and see where it goes, or find an interesting connection between two moments that happened months apart.

I started writing a new novel this week, and the first thing I did when I opened up a new Scrivener file was paste in things from my Noticings file that speak to themes I want to write about.

Here’s an example. In October, I went to the BFI London Film Festival as I do every year now. During that, there was a pro-Palestine protest in London that went across the Waterloo Bridge. Coming back from lunch with some friends, I had to walk against the flow of the protest to go see my afternoon movie. I felt really weird about it. So I typed down a note - 'walking against protesters to go to a film festival’.

Months later, I was walking the opposite way to some people headed to a football game. Instantly, I knew how to flesh it out:

Walking the other way against the football crowd. Against the protesters the night of the film festival. Never felt more bourgeois than that, he thought. Walking against the tide of the people he cared about the cause of just to reach the 3pm showing of some foreign film none of his friends would ever see. Not that art inherently bourgeois. Just the feel of it wrong. Every man he passes sizing him up. Seeing if he’s a fan of the right team. Check the colours. Not ours. But not discernibly someone else’s. Let him pass.

Like that, I could draw connections between two experiences that might otherwise have been unconnected for me. Walking against the flow of a crowd becomes a container for my—or some character’s—anxieties about protest, art, privilege, and masculinity. This is the shape of a character that I’ll get to know as I start fleshing out the novel.

My dad was a huge Steve Harley fan (more about that here). When he’d play Tumbling Down live—my favourite of his songs—towards the end, he’d hand over to the audience. “Go on, you do it,” he’d say. “It’s your show, we’ll go home”. “It’s your show, you do it, we’ve had enough.” They’d sing back to him, oh dear, look what they’ve done to the blues, blues, blues.

It’s your show. You do it.

• Tomorrow, whenever something pierces your attention and you really notice it, write it down. It could be a turn of phrase, something beautiful, an annoying that happened. Anything that affects you.

• You’re not going to do it all day. That’s fine.

• That evening, set aside ten minutes to elaborate. Ten minutes. You have it. I promise. All you have to do is crack open one of those noticings and make it more.

Then, I think you’ll find, you’ll end up just fucking writing.

EDIT: for those of you who are looking for the shortcut to write down those noticings - grab it here!

1. Or like, what I was doing in academia. It wasn’t right for me.