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Never read as you write.

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Picture the scene. You’re writing – fingers dancing across the keyboard like two five-legged, polka-inclined spiders. This is brilliant. You’re actually writing. Fantastic. I wonder if it’s any good? I think I’ll just skip back to the start of this paragraph and-

STOP. RIGHT. THERE. You’re about to make a huge mistake. And it’s a mistake oh-so-many writers make. It may, in fact, be a mistake some writers never stop making. And it’s also a mistake many non-writers make when writing. It’s why people don’t like writing and why so many people take ages to write the smallest paragraph. Never – ever - read as you write.

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Let Loose the Spiders
Remember that big list of things that Writers need to be able to do? Remember how “Writing” and “Editing” were two different items on that list? Right. Well that’s because they’re two different things. Two very different things. You can edit, or you can write. You cannot do both at once and you cannot flit between them like an indecisive flittery-thing with some monstrous, red pen.

Writing is all about focus. It’s about that subconscious conduit of instinct from inspiration to your fingertips. And nothing – nothing at all – should be allowed to get in the way of that.

Trying to edit while you write is like trying to jump-rope while tossing pancakes. Regardless of the fact that it’s a superhuman feat of coordination – you just don’t have that many hands! Yes, you could spend hours writing a sentence and then re-writing it and then polishing and crafting until you’re left with a beautiful, multi-faceted micro-poem. And then you’ll move onto the next sentence and this time it’ll take you even longer because, while crafting and poetising, you’ll also have to make sure it flows from the previous sentence.

Instead – just write. Just start typing (or penning, if you’re feeling old-fashioned). Let those headless spiders beat out whatever rhythm your subconscious dictates. Let it flow.

Editing is a different beast. And that beast can be slaughtered later – just as soon as your pen becomes truly mightier than your rusty claymore.

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The Science Part
There is one very simple reason why you shouldn’t write and edit at the same time. I knew their had to be (instinct, remember?), but for a long time I just couldn’t figure it out. Ultimately, it was the science part of my brain which provided the answer.

I did wonder, for a time, whether it was simply a gender issue. The brains of men and women work differently and it’s a scientific fact that men just can’t multitask. We can work on task A, but if we want to switch to task B we have to perform something of a mental gear-change and – most importantly – we have to stop task A. Women, on the other hand, can happily AB or BA to their heart’s content. So, is that the solution? Is it just that my inferior man-brain rebels at any concurrent attempt to both write and edit?

Nope.

It’s because of what writing is. And this is where the science helped me out, because science often deals with opposites and inverses and when looking at writing from a scientific perspective, everything became oh-so-ironically clear. What is writing?

Simple – Writing is the opposite of Reading.

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Well, duh?
Pick up a book you know well. Open it randomly. Now read a sentence. Now stop and do something else – make a cup of tea, feed the cat or check what’s on TV tonight. Now read another sentence. Now do something else. Repeat until you finish the paragraph…

Finished? Good. Now tell me… What was that paragraph about?

Did you, by any chance, stop and think for a moment? Perhaps perform some sort of mental “Ummm…”, perchance? Of course you didn’t – because you almost certainly didn’t actually pick up the book or do anything I told you. But if you had, there would most certainly have been ummmm-age afoot.

It’s all about flow. The second you break it, you’re not doing what you set out to do. Reading is more than plucking sentences from a page and inserting them into your brain via your eyes. And, as it’s inverse, writing is more than spewing forth words from your fingertips. When you speak, you don’t randomly jump between topics – no matter how disjointed a conversationalist you might be, there will always be flow.

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Floooowwwww
And that’s exactly what you do – let it flow. When you set out to write, do just that – write. Start typing until your subconscious tells you to stop. Don’t think about whether it’s perfect – in fact, don’t think about what you’ve just written at all. Editing can come later. Will come later. If you’re too busy worrying that your last sentence was word-slurry then you can be certain that your next sentence will be, in actual fact, a slurry of words.

It’s good that you’re in search of perfection, but that comes later. If you never start on the next paragraph because this one isn’t “good enough” then you’ll never have anything to perfect. The sentences are not the story. The prose is not the story. The scene description is not the story. The semi-amusing spider/hand analogy is not the blog-entry.

I guarantee that what you write will not be perfect. But that isn’t the point – the point is to write.

So write. And then you can perfect what you have written.

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You already know Why. You just don’t know that you know. You know?

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At the risk of going a little “Obi-Wan” I’m going to talk a little bit about trusting your instincts – because that’s what a large amount of writing is; instinct. Writers often talk about problems with Act 2. They scream with frustration as they know how the story ends and they know how the story begins… but, for some reason, they don’t know how to get from one to the other. And there’s nothing wrong with this – it’s part of the great, bastardly monolith that is Writer’s Block – but it all stems from instinct.

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Blocked
The Writer’s Block in this instance is a combination of two effects. The first is a failure of imagination – and I don’t mean to imply that the Writer’s imagination is lacking, simply that it – for whatever reason – is currently understaffed or wandering around the wrong part of whimsyland. Whatever the cause, the Writer’s imagination is unable to find a solution. Or, at least, a working solution.

And that’s the second part – instinct. The imagination is probably spewing out all kinds of inspired possibilities – and instinct is kicking them all away again. They don’t work. It might be a fantastic idea – but it doesn’t work in this story. But why? Odds are, should you be in a position to ask this of the Writer, you’ll do one of two things – receive no answer or solve the problem.

If you’ll excuse the tautology – writer’s operate instinctively on instinct. That is to say – most of the time, we don’t even realise that our Writer’s Instinct is guiding our hands across the keyboard. It just happens. This, unfortunately, means it’s all the harder to unstick ourselves when we find the story crushed beneath the dreaded Block – because we can’t quite say how we got their in the first place.

And that’s not a bad thing. Everything we’ve learned. Every mistake we have made. Every online-writing-guide we happen to have read. All of it. It all gets stored away in our subconscious and our instinct mines that rich vein of guidelines and unwritten-rules to help that story flow directly from the inspiration-center of the brain to our fingertips without any of our pesky higher-brain-function getting in the way.

It’s the same for anything. Anything in the world. Do you have to calculate gravity and air-resistance when you throw a ball? Of course not, your subconscious draws on experience, memory and instinct and – should you have enough – then you send the stumps flying (that’s a cricket metaphor, for the uninitiated). Do you think Roger Federer thinks about the angle of his racket? Or the sweep of his arm? The strength of the shot? No. All he thinks is – “I want to put the ball there.” – and then instinct does the rest. It’s the same with writing.

That is… until it isn’t.

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Unblocked
Quite often – almost always, in fact – the best cure for Writer’s Block is to stop writing for a while and do something else. Let the brain recharge and let the subconscious draft in some part-time support staff to cope with the workload. Find a Zen activity at times like this – something that you don’t actually have to think about like cleaning the house or jogging. In effect – turn your brain off and then turn it back on again. Full system restart.

However, when this doesn’t work – and there will be times (horrible, horrible times) when this happens – there are other ways out. Which brings us back to – yet again – the all-important “Why?”.

We rarely ask this of our subconscious. We’re so used to it having everything well-under-control that when something goes wrong, we don’t even think to blame the little imp that sits at the back of our brain, yanking at the controls. So now we’re standing at the foothills of the Writer’s Block and our instinct is coming up blank – as far as our conscious mind is concerned – because every spark of inspiration is being instantly quashed by that naughty little imp.

But there’s a reason said quashing is afoot. As I’ve said, those bits of inspiration don’t work. They don’t fit the story. They don’t fit the characters. They’re just so horribly wrong that they don’t even make it to the conscious mind. We, as the saying goes, draw a blank. So, where’s your way out?

Simple – ask Why?

Generate any old solution, no matter how random. Then ask yourself – Why doesn’t it fit the story? Why doesn’t it fit the characters? Why shouldn’t her hat be that colour? Your answers are probably somewhat generic at this point – “Because there aren’t antimatter-teleporters in 12th century France,” for example. That much depends on the randomness of your initial random solution. Well, don’t stop now. Keep going.

Every time you reject an idea. Make sure you know Why you rejected it. And not just the cursory “lack of antimatter-teleporter invention” problem – keep asking Why until you get to the very heart of the issue-

Character A wouldn’t do something like that. Okay – WHY wouldn’t Character A do something like that?

Keep going. Keep going. And sooner-or-later, you’ll find a Why that you can’t answer. Why wouldn’t Character A take the action which the story requires of her? Could it be that she’s missing some back-story? Could it be that her motives are unclear? That’s your problem. That’s where instinct stalled. And that’s where you find your solution. Give her a motive. Or change her character. Or take the choice out of her hands. Or… well, anything.

In effect, you’ve performed the very same exercise as your subconscious – generating solutions and dismissing them because they don’t fit. But where your subconscious cannot answer a “Why” where no answer exists, your conscious mind can create that answer. And there’s your solution.

So, what are you waiting for? You’re the creative one. It’s your story. Create, damn you!

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Growing Your Instinct
Now, that’s all very well. But that’s a solution for seasoned Writers. What about those who have yet to acheive that coveted capital “W”? Well, sadly there’s no hard-and-fast rule here. Instinct is something which grows with use, so you’re best-off using it as much as possible. As for how you use it when you haven’t really got it yet…? Well, that’s the sort of question to make ears bleed, but that’s not to say there aren’t answers.

Step one – Write. Then write again, but do it better this time. Then figure out what made the difference. I know that’s an infuriatingly vague piece of advice, but that’s all there is in this area. When dealing with instinct, everything because so subjective to the person that it’s hard to give any real help. It’s up to you.

Learn how to analyze your own work – which will, admittedly, require you to get other people to analyze it as well, just to make sure that your analysis was right in the first place. The important thing here is to keep breaking things down into “Why?”s:

That bit doesn’t work? Okay – why doesn’t that bit work? Because that character isn’t believable. Okay – why isn’t that character believable? Create an annoying four-year-old in your mind and keep answering it’s incessant “Why”ing until the only answer you have left is “Because.”

Step two – Read. Then do exactly the same as above from the other direction. Figure out why certain things resonated with you. Then figure out why they didn’t resonate with other people. Watch bad films and read bad books and then figure out why they were bad films and why they were bad books. You hated this film, but everyone else seems to like it. Well, everyone develops their instinct for liking and disliking differently – so figure out what it was that made you hate the film and then figure out why everyone else didn’t seem to mind (or even notice).

Analyse. Compare. Explain. Expound. Etcetera. Keep asking Why.

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And it’s the same for Everyone
Every time you answer one of those “why” questions, you’re building a little more framework for your instinct. And, here’s the good news, it’ll never be complete. Think that doesn’t sound all that ‘good’? Take a second to think of your favorite writer. Well their framework will never be complete either. You never finish learning – but, then, it’s not about finishing, is it?

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Before you can write, you need to become a Writer.

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Writing – and creativity of all kinds – is an art form. You knew that already, I’ll wager, but did the full enormity of that fact sink home? Writing any work of fact or fiction requires more than simply a will to do it, and more than simply some natural talent.

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A Writer is more than just one who Writes
It is said that Mozart, at age four, just sat down at the piano one day and played. He had never touched the keys before, yet somehow he was able to bash out a tune the very first time he laid finger-to-ivory. Apparently, he learned simply by watching his sister during her lessons. Wow.

Now, that story is almost certainly apocryphal – an overt elaboration, no doubt, of a child who showed enormous potential with music from an early age. However, I was told it many years ago and have never – not once – taken any steps to determine its veracity. Because I don’t want to. It serves its purpose as a great example of the point I wish to make. There is a world of difference between someone who plays the piano, and a Pianist.

Mozart watched his sister. He practiced fingerwork without the keys. He learned how to read music – and possibly even compose – without ever playing anything himself. In essence, he learned all the individual skills he needed – mastered them, maybe – before he ever got around to pressing one of the little white oblongs that actually produced the notes.

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Mastery
Another generic piece of possibly-wrong trivia is that it takes 10 000 hours of practice to master any given skill.

Again, the veracity of the figure itself is meaningless (unless you actually plan to keep a log of the time spent honing this craft) but it illustrates the point that this is not something which can be achieved overnight. Not by a long shot.

I don’t say all this to dissuade or to sap your moral, quite the opposite. Becoming a Writer is something to be proud of – it’s a huge accomplishment. If it was easy, anyone would be able to do it – and everyone would be doing it. In short, earning that capital “W” is its own reward. If it didn’t need to be earned, then there would be no reward.

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Becoming a Writer
So how does one start down this road? How does anyone go from the wish to be a Writer, to that point where they can look back and realize they have climbed that mountain.

Well, it takes more than writing alone. Ten-thousand hours of writing will make you extravagantly eloquent, but it won’t make you a Writer. You’ll need to hone the following crafts as well:

• Writing
• Reading
• Editing
• Story
• Characters
• Themes
• Structure
• Dialogue
• Prose
• Description
• Drama & Comedy (yes, you’ll need both)
• …and, of course…
• …
• Suspense

All very well and good. And, if someone asked you to list the skills of a writer, you’d probably have written all of those as well. But you may, perhaps, have missed:

• Psychology
• Selling
• Pitching
• Willpower
• Time Management
• Instinct
• Research
• not to mention any specialist skills for the topic you wish to write about

All of which are, arguably, harder to learn – especially for those of us with the mindset to become writers in the first place.

Well, don’t worry, these are all skills which can be learned and there are a thousand ways to learn all of them. There are books, websites, conferences, courses and people who can teach you one or all of the above (as much as any of them can be taught).

Or, alternatively, you could hang around here instead.

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