Thought for the day:
from
Chris Cleave's NaNoWriMo Week Three Pep Talk. For the full piece go
here:
"It doesn’t matter what genre you write in. All literature is
transformative. To make people laugh; to tell a light-hearted romantic
story; to let intelligent readers forget their troubles for an hour in
the absence of the politicians and the money men who make our lives hell
– these are some of the hardest feats to accomplish as a writer, and
some of the most serious political acts you can perform. You don’t have
to be a Serious Writer to be a serious writer. I once read a beautiful
paragraph about teenage vampires – teenage vampires, for goodness’ sake –
that moved me more than all of Hemingway. You don’t need to be trying
to change the world in order to change someone’s world. What you need is
to be seriously committed to your work...
Something I’ve learned is that it’s very hard to tell, at the end of
your writing day, whether you’ve done great work or bad work. The
quality of the writing is hard to judge until you’ve had some sleep and
got some perspective on it. Often sheer euphoria at your own brilliance
will keep you writing late into the night, and you can hardly sleep
because what you’ve written is so damned good. Then you wake up the next
day and read it, and you realise it’s a pile of self-indulgent crap.
This happens to me two days out of five. Then you get the opposite case,
where you beat yourself up because the ideas are coming so slowly and
all your dialogue seems timid and pedestrian. A week later you might
look back on that day as a pretty solid performance, where your
characters were honest with each other and maybe even created a couple
of touching moments.
The more I learn about the writing process, the more I suspect
that there is no such thing as a bad day at the keyboard. Sometimes you
need slow days where you work through a dozen ideas that aren’t destined
to fly. It creates a kind of intensity that eventually goads your brain
into giving you a good day. Or sometimes, if you keep having slow days,
then perhaps the novel really is asking you a deeper question about
whether your plot, or your characterisation, or your theory about the
human heart really is up to scratch. Experience is knowing when you’re
having a slow day, versus when you’re having a slow novel.
The good days are when you perform; the slow days are when you
learn to perform better. The only bad days as a writer are the ones when
you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give
it everything you have.
If you can sit down at the keyboard every day in November and
give it everything you have, then there is no writer on earth who is
better than you. I hope that it will be an exciting, frightening, weird,
joyful, unpredictable, transformative month for you, and I hope that
you will produce fantastic work that you are proud of."
I write from a trailer I bought from the son of a woman who now lives in a nursing home..."
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