Most authors have writing rituals, ranging from the pragmatic to the bizarre. Hemingway famously wrote standing up, and Edith Wharton lying in bed. John Cheever wrote in his underwear but Victor Hugo went one step further and wrote nude. Truman Capote avoided Fridays, never beginning or ending a piece of writing on that day. Poet Frederick Schiller couldn’t write without the smell of rotten apples emanating from his desk drawer.
My own writing ritual has been simple: one cup of coffee and I’m away. I’m not alone in this. Apparently Honoré de Balzac would drink up to fifty coffees a day, making my own one or two cups seem positively puritan. He would write day and night, and when the coffee stopped taking effect he would chew on coffee beans.
Unfortunately I don’t have de Balzac’s constitution and my doctor has forced me to abandon caffeine. I must confess, it’s been tough. A coffee always immediately clicked me into gear. It was a signal to myself: time to work. And the caffeine buzz gave me that ability to embrace the empty page with enthusiam, even on days when I felt terribly tired. So I miss it. Desperately.
As I mourn caffeine and attempt to make do with roasted dandelion ‘coffee’ (it’s as bad as it sounds), I thought I’d ask some of my fellow writers about the one writing ritual they couldn’t give up. Here goes…
2017 is the thirteenth year of the ACT Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge, but it’s been anything but unlucky. This year saw more students than ever before take part, with 34,000 kids from 91 schools reading their 15 books. Twenty-six schools finished with a 100 per cent completion rate across the school — bravo! And 49 schools with the highest percentage of students completing the Challenge were invited to attend the awards ceremony.
The ceremony is always a wonderful celebration, and this year I was honoured to speak on behalf of the Ambassadors. Our job is to promote reading (could their be a more perfect role?) and visit schools. I was asked to talk about how I became an author, and so I shared how I began writing and making my own books when I was just a wee thing. I remember hours spent on my bedroom floor, writing fairy stories and researching books on hard-hitting topics like the royal family. But I never imagined that I could actually become an author.
I spent my childhood in England and I assumed that authors must be terribly posh people who wore tweed suits and spectacles, and lived in mansions where they wrote in cavernous personal libraries that required a ladder to reach the books at the very top. They definitely weren’t people like me who lived in the suburbs in a noisy, chaotic house with five annoying younger brothers and a dog who liked to eat socks.
Last weekend I presented at SCWBI’s Level Up conference on the collaborative process of editing a manuscript, and how the author–editor relationship should ideally work. I thought it might be useful to share an abbreviated version of the section on how to get the most out of the experience, because if you’ve never worked with an editor before it can feel like a daunting process. Every writer is deeply attached to their work, so turning a manuscript over to an editor can feel like having your soul laid bare, and critiqued.
It’s important to remember that editors are ordinary people who love books. An editor’s job is to make the writer look good. They have nothing to personally gain, other than the satisfaction of knowing that they helped you make your book better.
In order for the editorial process to run smoothly, it’s important to develop a good working relationship with your editor that is based on mutual trust and respect. So here are my top tips for how to create a strong partnership.
Let go of your ego
The truth is nobody really enjoys being critiqued. We all secretly want to be told that we’re a genius and the work needs absolutely nothing done to it. But even the most experienced writers benefit from a close edit. A good editor will provide honest, constructive feedback designed to improve your book. Anyone who believes they don’t need an editor is letting their ego get in the way of commonsense.
In 2016, at the end of a solo three-week trip through Thailand, I was sitting on this bench at Kanchanaburi station when I began scrawling down a story in my notebook. Writers are always asked where their ideas come from and it’s the most difficult question to answer because, for me at least, they have complex and elusive origins. In this particular moment the motif of the train line struck me, but that’s as much as I can explain. Where the characters and their story came from I don’t know. But as Paul Murray says, ‘When the right idea comes along, it’s like falling in love.’ That’s how I felt with this story, even though my characters are falling out of love.
As my short stories often do, this one emerged in fits and starts. I wrote a bunch of words during the noisy thrumming train ride to Krung Thep (or Bangkok), pausing to think, and watch banana palms and rice fields blur by. I wrote a bunch more words in Bangkok airport, sitting on a plastic chair drinking bad coffee. And then on the flight home, leaning on my wobbly tray table. Back in Australia the last of it came.
I tightened and edited the piece, by now called ‘The Line’, and gave it to my short story group who made helpful comments like ‘hope you didn’t have an affair as research’. (They may also have given some more useful feedback.) I rewrote the ending more times than I can count before I felt I’d struck just the right note. And then I sent the thing off to the City of Rockingham Short Fiction Awards. I rarely enter literary competitions these days, but the brilliant short story writer Laurie Steed was judging and there was a decent cash prize on offer. Needless to say I was thrilled when ‘The Line’ won.
With the award win I was eligible to enter the highly regarded annual anthology, Award Winning Australian Writing. I’ve never quite managed to coordinate myself to submit to the anthology before, but this year I did and was delighted to receive notification that they’d selected ‘The Line’ for their tenth anniversary edition. It launched in Melbourne recently and has just landed in my mailbox; I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it.
So there you have it, the evolution of a short story from a Kanchanaburi bench to Award Winning Australian Writing 2017.
I have very few writing rituals, things that I actually need in order to write. Having children has focused me in a way nothing else ever could because until this year I wrote in the cracks of life. I grabbed an hour while the littlest slept and the two older children were at school, or while the bloke took the lot of them down to the park. I learnt how to ignore the housework and sit down at my computer and just go. When time is limited every second counts.
This year, for the first time, I have all three of my children at school. But that ability to sit down and get on with it is now ingrained. There is only one thing that I need before I start writing: coffee. It doesn’t matter where I write (my study, the library, cafés) but I need (good) coffee. The caffeine helps my fingers fly across the keyboard, but in reality it is just a ritual. A small thing that signals a shift into a different mindspace.
Mostly I work from home. In some minds this seems to translate into me swanning about the house, and writing the odd sentence or two. It’s as far from that as you can get. There is zero swanning involved. It’s a job like any other, except that I don’t take a lunch break or stop for cake to farewell some colleague or chat about the weekend in the staff room. After I’ve done the school drop-off I take five minutes to make coffee, then get stuck straight into it, drinking at my desk while I read back over a little of the previous day’s writing to get me started.
Because I try to cram in as much as I can between my working hours of 9.30 to 2.30 while the kids are at school, for lunch I eat last night’s dinner, or whatever I can scrounge from the fridge that requires zero prep time, at my desk. Last week Master 10 was home for a couple of days. He was sick enough to be off school, but well enough to entertain himself, so I kept working. That day I took a proper break to eat lunch with him. ‘Your work is intense, Mum,’ he said to me with mild admiration. ‘You don’t stop.’
But there is one exception, my second ritual: a daily walk. Sitting on your bum for hours is not the best, so in the middle of the day I get out of the house and walk. It gets everything moving again, but it’s also the best way to reset and prepare for the afternoon. At the moment I’m finishing a novel, and on Monday to Wednesday I divide my day roughly down the middle. Morning is for writing, afternoon is for all my non-writing activities: editing other writers’ manuscripts; developing any workshops I might be running; prep for my university editing seminars or upcoming events; answering emails and other admin, and so on. (Thursday and Friday are dedicated solely to editing.) In-between I clear the cobwebs with a walk.
The view from my balcony — I swear Canberra has the best sunsets in the world
Sometimes I listen to a writing podcast, sometimes I don’t want words filling up my ears. However there is a danger inherent in walking after having written all morning. Sometimes I tune out of the podcast and begin unknotting some issue with my novel, or ‘writing’ a new scene. The mind is a strange thing, often I don’t realise I’ve even been subconsciously doing this until the solution presents itself to me. Of course then I have to get that down on paper which means the afternoon’s work gets shunted to the evening or the weekend. But hey, that kind of flexibility is why I love working from home.
Writing and walking commonly go hand in hand. I know so many writers who walk to work out thorny problems with their manuscripts. I’m fortunate that I live in a house looking to the hills, so my walk is accompanied by a vista over the valley to the Brindabellas. Honestly, I never tire of it. It fills me up every single day. And at the moment, when I’m in the middle of a particularly busy couple of months, it’s an indispensable pause in an otherwise ‘intense’ day.
Unfortunately I don’t have de Balzac’s constitution and my doctor has forced me to abandon caffeine. I must confess, it’s been tough. A coffee always immediately clicked me into gear. It was a signal to myself: time to work. And the caffeine buzz gave me that ability to embrace the empty page with enthusiam, even on days when I felt terribly tired. So I miss it. Desperately.
