Writing for Pleasure

As most writers will know who have worked with me, I have spent the years since my first novels were published immersing myself in structure. Reading everything I could find on the subject, pulling down book after book from my shelves, home-schooling myself in the construction of the stories I most love. 

At first this was for myself, and then it became a crucial part of my working with other writers. I love a good plotting system, a chart, a cycle. From the most ancient to the latest on the market. There are so many different templates out there which have helped me understand story and what makes a reader keep reading - more than keep reading, what makes them impatient to get back to the story each time they set it down. We all know that feeling.

Many of these plot systems I have shared with you in the posts on this website, and I continue to work with them in my groups and in one-to-one work on manuscripts. Picking and choosing what feels useful and appropriate to the stuck-ness in the story, or the writer.

But something has shifted in me this year, both as a writer and an editor. Maybe it’s because I’ve reached the point where, after so many years of immersion, I can trust myself to react organically to stories - both my own and others - without direct insertion into a specific template. There are lots of different terms for the same elements in a story - inciting incident, trigger, awakening - but it doesn’t matter which you use as long as you are conscious of the wave rising, and what that means for your characters. 

I think what has changed this year in me, though, is I am letting the story tell itself. I have given over the reins. I am writing sentence to sentence, without knowing what is coming, or second-guessing. This doesn’t mean I have thrown out structure - not at all - but the sensation is of structure from the inside out. Of letting the story emerge on its own, first, with all its organic beats and plot points, and trusting that if the story is still exciting me, these elements will be present without me trying to lever them into a pre-existing form. 

What I am suggesting to you, I suppose, is that you try your best to excite yourself as you write. To think of it as a child would, at play - to make yourself laugh, or cry, or rage – but whatever the emotion, to be energised by this as you continue. The longer I work with writers who have become blocked in their novels, the more I am convinced the solution is not about ‘writing better’, about re-writing and re-writing that midpoint scene on which they are stuck until somehow magically it comes to life. Any writer knows the feeling when the battery has died, when there is no excitement about sitting down to write a story, no energy in the scene or the characters. And this is when a writer needs to be brave. 

It’s not because you’re a bad writer that you’re stuck. There might be loads you need to learn at a line level in order to improve the vividness and specificity of what you place in my imagination, but that kind of detail won’t be the reason your story is going nowhere. Your story will be floundering because your imagination is bored. For whatever reason, your imagination is saying ‘uh-uh’ to this game. And that is why I always say to writers the blockage won’t be right here where you are currently slaving away; it will be someplace earlier (a few pages, a few lines, a few chapters back), where you have gone in a direction that didn’t turn out to be the best one. It’s okay, you didn’t know, you were trying something. But now the battery has died, now that the light has gone out of your writer eyes, don’t flog a dead horse. Re-trace your steps. Find the place, the action, the bit of story where something flickers to life again, the place where you feel something deep within you respond, and start from there. 

You’ll feel your imagination perking up. You’ll find yourself wanting to write again. 

In the last six months I have laughed out loud as I write, in surprise at what has surfaced. I have created characters I never expected. I have written sentences that seemed to arrive fully-formed. 

And when that feeling of exciting myself, of writing for pleasure, has faded, and I’ve felt the battery go flat because I am trying to force the story into a pre-figured shape, I’ve learned to stop. Leave it for a while. Switch to something else. Come back when an image, some fragment of a sentence, or a new action has re-ignited my imagination.

It will come. Write for pleasure, sentence by sentence. Feel the plot points rising and falling as they emerge (and in the second draft you can shape and refine around these landmarks, accordingly). But while you are creating story, just play. 

That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? No matter the genre.

Make-believe.