It took me far too long to come to terms with the fact that a central part of writing is not writing.
Way back in the late 1980s I took a year out after university to write full-time. At that point, I’d only sold a couple of pieces of writing to small-press magazines, and I had very little money to live on, so it was a huge gamble. Because of this massive commitment, I felt I had to prove myself by being at my desk all day, every day. It was a good discipline, and it certainly worked: in the first twelve months I’d completed a novel and I had started to sell short fiction to professional magazines and anthologies. On the back of this, I gave myself an extra six months and during that time I sold my novel to a major publisher; somehow that year out lasted ten years, before the erratic lifestyle – and income – of a writer was no longer enough for my growing family responsibilities and I finally had to get a real job.
It was probably only when I stopped writing full-time that I realised how important the whole not-writing thing was. Just because I was away from my writing desk, it didn’t mean the creative part of my brain was switched off, and often it seemed to function better away from the blank page: no matter what I was doing, that part of my brain was bubbling away in the background. I’d get ideas for new stories or plot twists or random stray images while I was commuting to work, or in a day-job meeting, or chatting to someone while we waited for the kettle to boil.
A writer never stops.
The need to pay the bills and support my family kept me in day jobs through until ten years ago. When I finally returned to the life of a full-time writer, it was as if I had unlearned that lesson. All over again, I felt the need to justify myself: I had to be at my desk, and I had to feel that everyone could see that I wasn’t slacking just because I was my own boss again.
It took me at least a couple more years to convince myself that it was just as important to be away from the desk as at it. One day I might write a thousand words of new material; another day I might edit a couple of chapters, fixing all those shoddy words I’d churned out a few weeks before; and another day I might go for a ten-mile walk and have a single idea that comes from nowhere but which will move my work-in-progress forwards, or which might twist the plot in unanticipated directions, or simply give me a new insight into why my characters are the way that they are. Which of those days is more productive? None: they’re all vital parts of the process.
Most days now I go for a walk, even when I’m writing hard and fast; some days, going for a walk is all I do. One way I helped myself to accept the importance of all this not-writing was that I started to call it my Outdoor Office, and I’d post photos online of my Outdoor Office of the Day. Sharing photos on social media has been appreciated by many of my friends, but I do know that it’s also irritating: reminding them that they’re stuck in their offices and classrooms while I’m out hiking. But what can I do? It’s part of the job. Honest, it is!
One of the unexpected bonuses of this is that it has reawakened my love of photography. Back when I was a teenager, my ambitions were to become either a writer or a photographer. (Or a rock star, but that was never going to happen.) The writing won, and for all kinds of reasons the photography fell by the wayside. The Outdoor Office social media postings started out as simple photos taken with my phone, but soon that old passion was reignited. Now, my Outdoor Office days are rarely without a proper camera and a couple of lenses. In fact, they can be so much about the photography that I’m in danger of forgetting the real justification for my time away from the desk (“It’s work. Honest it is!”) But then I’ll stumble across a ruined old building, or a minor detail in the landscape, and I’ll get absorbed in how to find a composition that will make an image that will tell the story of the place… and then I’ll start thinking about that story, and what might have happened here; I might latch onto that or my mind might start skipping in all kinds of random directions, and I’ll get that one idea or insight that is worth those thousand words at the desk, and it will all make sense.
It really is my job, doing all this, and I love it!
[You can find my photographs on Instagram at www.instagram.com/colourblindkeith/ and more about my work at www.nickguthrie.co.uk]
Trace Evidence 