Letting go of Pressured Language and other thoughts on writing

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

Sometimes ideas form easily for posting here on Substack, and are birthed with a minimum of fuss. Other times they are a like a hive of bees, buzzing in all directions, each as loud as the other.

I’ve had a headful of hive for about a week now, and no matter how much I try, I can’t quite tease out a single idea. I’ve made notes. I’ve gone for walks to see if a literal path can produce a single train of thought. I’ve been tempted to put all the ideas into a hat and pull one out. And I’ve discovered that muttering profanities while sitting my writing desk is, it turns out, not helpful.

But then today, growing hungrier and more frustrated as my idea-bees flitted around my head, I had a thought - it’s okay to not have some big overarching theme to a Substack piece. This is my own patch, and I can do what I want. It’s not a story, with all that Beginning, Middle and End stuff going on. And maybe, just maybe, the ‘hiveness’ of it all can be a strength.

So, I hope you find something useful in the collected thoughts below. I’m off to find something to eat. I’ve got a hankering for honey…

Let go of Pressured Language

This is not about language within stories, but the language we use in relation to the writing process, or the lack of it. I call it Pressured Language. More specifically, how tweaking your vocabulary can have a surprising effect on creative blocks and doubts.

How many times have you had a creative drought, or a period when nothing seems to be flowing, or you are too easily seduced by the procrastination goblins, and then said to yourself something like:

• I should do better/be more productive/just write something

• I need to write every day/week.

• I must improve my Work In Progress.

• I have to knuckle down and get on with it.

Should. Need. Have to. Must. All these can have their uses, but in small doses. Allow this kind of Pressured Language to dictate the pace and frequency of your writing, and they turn into scourges, not spurs.

So here’s an alternative, when you have a dark spiral about being a writer, then change up the words you use to give you impetus. Use language that emphasises choice, enthusiasm, and positive drive:

• I want to do better/be more productive/just write something.

• I’d like to have the benefits of writing every day/week.

• I’m keen to improve my Work In Progress

• I choose to knuckle down and get on with it.

Learn, don’t repeat

They say that ‘practice makes perfect’. Presumably ‘they’ have never seen me attempt to make rice for the billionth time, and still fail to find that middle ground between soggy mess or what looks like burnt maggots.

This old maxim ignores a crucial point. As my former writing mentor Alex Keegan once wrote: “Practise, practise, practice, misses the point, misses the point, misses the point.”

So what is the point? Let me give you an example, from a different creative process. I trained as a musician, and that meant (because my natural talent had limits) a lot of practice. But how I became a half-decent instrumentalist was not by simply playing several hours a day, but by consciously being aware of errors and mindfully teasing them out.

With a musical instrument – in my case the bassoon - it’s about muscle memory, where to place your fingers on the holes and keys that produce a particular pitch, then learning to do that rapidly and in complex patterns. But you have to be aware, hyper-aware, that you are not simply practicing mistakes and making bad technique a habit. Because then you have to unlearn it. And unlearning is even more of a pain in the ass than learning.

The same with writing. We can all improve and learn, but that requires a mindful attitude, so that each time we write, we increase our ability, rather than ingraining our flaws and weaknesses.

The quality of the why makes stories better

When I was training as a journalist, I was always told that in order to ‘get the story’ I had to find out the What, Where, Who, How and Why of it. That simple piece of advice has been handy in many areas of my life, not least writing fiction. And I have learned that to be richer, to have more depth and resonance, to be more intriguing or thought-provoking, the story has to have a good Why.

Here’s an example. A friend once told me the story about her cousin, let’s call him Max, who took part in a famous ultra marathon race - the Marathon des Sables (the length of six marathons in the searing heat and dust of the Sahara Desert). Max went back to work a few days later. But the lift in the office building was broken and the only option was the stairs. Max was so stiff and sore from his race that he only made it to the third before he had to get his work colleagues to help him the rest of the way.

At the moment, this is just a mildly diverting anecdote, a series of events without much richness or depth. It tells us about the pain and depletion and sacrifice that you have to endure to do something like this race, but it’s missing the key ingredient, the Why.

This is where the depth and interest lies. What I teased out from my friend, as I hunted for a Why to this story, was that Max’s older brother had been a high-ranking soldier, someone that Max felt compelled to compete with, or match up to, by putting himself through hardship.

But no matter what he did, he never really believed that his brother was satisfied that he had ‘made it’. Max believed himself to be soft and weak as a result, until he reached the stairs to his office. It was here in some dank, cold anonymous stairwell that he had his epiphany, realising that it was all about how he felt about himself, not about how his brother felt about him. That was the Why. He gave up struggling on the stairs not because he couldn’t push himself, but because he realised there wasn’t any point anymore.

The quality of the Why here makes for a better story, it brings in history, inner turmoil, family ties, and stubborn pride.

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That’s it for this time folks, so I hope you get something useful from this post. Before I go, just a reminder that Writing Talk is a reader-supported publication and I’d love you to become a Subscriber - every sign-up gives me motivation. If you become a Paid Subscriber, then even better! But if not, you can support me and Writing Talk by making a one-off donation via Ko-fi, using the button below. I’d really appreciate it.