What Should I Write to Get Through the Ugly-Duckling Phase as Fast as Possible?
The winning question from our Itch of Writing 2nd Birthday Competition - and my reply.
To celebrate the Itch’s second birthday, I asked subscribers to post a question they’d like answered as a reply to that Happy Birthday post, and I’d pick a winner. Thank you so much to everyone who entered; they’re all brilliantly thought-provoking, as I knew they would be! - and it was incredibly hard to choose.
I’ll definitely dip into the others as the basis of posts in the future, but in the end I went for Paulina’s as the winner, because it raises such useful questions for any stage of one’s writing life. She wins this post, and an exclusive Itch of Writing notebook.
Q: If the first writing attempts or books of most writers are poorer than the later ones as writers develop, as an emerging/‘early-career’ writer, what should I aim to write to get past that stage as soon as I can? Thank you!
A: Hi Paulina. This is a great question, thank you! Obviously, because this is the Itch, I’m going to start by reminding myself that there’s no one definitive kind of writerly wiring and learning style, nor one definitive kind of ‘better’, so there can’t be one certain route to better.
But there are unquestionably things you can do to help your writing develop faster and further. I’ve divided what follows into thinking about the actual projects you might embark on, and the long-term habits which can support your ambitions for your writing.
Writing Projects
It does help to take the long view: we all know the book trade runs on glacier time, but so does creativity, and the things which may make the biggest difference in the end may not be perceptible in the short term. And as I quoted Ray Bradbury saying in this post,
An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.
In other words, you can’t magically will your writing to be better quality. Instead, the question becomes: how to produce and focus that quantity to get the most useful experience that will lead to the sort of quality that matters to you?
The crucial thing to realise is that each writing project will set you certain creative problems, which you’ll learn huge amounts from solving as you build the story. But there will always be writing skills and experience you need - or at least will benefit from developing - which that particular novel didn’t require of you.
Notwithstanding books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and indeed my own The Bruegel Boy, I would always suggest that if you want to develop the foundations for a writing career, you’ll learn more by spending a decade pushing three novels through to some kind of final-draft finishedness, than if you keep reworking one novel over that length of time.
So if you’re trying to develop your creative writing strategically, it’s worth thinking not only about what you want to write as the first push for your new ambitions, or want to write next, but also what problems you could set yourself help to nudge those skills upwards.
Easier said than done, of course, but let’s have a go. As so often, reaching the right answer for you it is first about the questions:
What story ideas have you got in your habit notebook? What happens when you sit with one of them? And another? And another? Jot down your thoughts and reactions without trying to force out definitive conclusions.
What is potent for you? What settings, subjects, life-events, joys, hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, have that inner vibration for you: that sense of having more inside them than their outside suggests. This isn’t necessarily about being exposed, about baring your soul in the autobiographical sense. Still less is it about outright masochism: the fact that something is hurting is not proof that it’s working - though it may be. But it is about being willing to use material that matters to you, and see it through.
Do you have projects that you haven’t pushed to some kind of resolution and final-draft finishedness? Do you tend to give up on that and pursue the Other Novel? Even if you’ve only ever abandoned one project, spend a little time thinking about what happened and why, for each - and whether there’s a common factor. Learning to finish a story is as essential a writing skill as learning what and how to start, and how to muddle through the middle - so learning what prevented that is useful.
In terms of the narrative setup - your opening decision about narrators, narrative voice(s), tense, structure and so on - what have you done in the past? What project might ask for a different set of decisions? Would that stretch you and set you different problems to solve? You could even do some brainstorming about the pros and cons of different approaches.
Is there anything which you did in past projects which manifestly didn’t work? Whether it was the setting, the structure, the choice of viewpoint characters or whatever, was it it that you didn’t handle that choice well, or did it turn out to have been the wrong choice in the first place?
But don’t beat yourself up for things which didn’t work: as Grayson Perry says, creativity is mistakes - so if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
Finally, if you feel a flare of furious resistance to some possibilities - as opposed to a mere meh grade of uninterest - it’s worth getting gently curious with yourself about that. What might be the fear underlying that resistance? Is it a fear that restricts you in other ways? What might it feel like to let go of that restriction?
When you’ve thought your way through the above, sometimes things stand out quite clearly: you know the project you want to tackle - or tackle again - and what you’re most likely to be able to see through. Then you can settle down to the how of it.
If that kind of triangulation didn’t lead anywhere clearly, you may need to be a bit more cold-blooded in playing with different combinations of elements. Either way, this post about how to develop an idea (£) should help.
Given how long it takes to get a novel or creative non-fiction project through to final-draft finishedness, it’s worth resisting the temptation to settle straight into the first project-idea that seems right. Instead, go with The Other Rule of Three: by pushing on to explore another few possibilities, you may well come on something much more potent, exciting and original.
Helpful Practices and Habits Along the Way
Reading like a writer - which is to say, noticing how you readerly self experiences each piece of writing, and stopping every now and again to look at what it is in the writing that’s done that.
Doing Writer’s Yoga - if you manage to set up a routine daily or weekly habit for these, respect to you. But doing some on the occasional train, or in a café waiting for someone to arrive, can also make a big difference.
Establishing a habit notebook - and using it.
Setting up an appointment to write (£) - even if you’re going well on the main project. Among many other reasons, it’s a great way to discover ideas for possible future projects.
Trying new ideas out in a low-stakes way: play with a new combination of voice, character, story, narrative setup, etc. by rough-drafting a short story based on that setup. Revise it a bit, so you revisit it with a bit more distance, but don’t feel obliged to do more than that. Your goal is to play and problem-solve, not to produce a successful story - though by concentrating on process, not product, you might just find you’ve done just that.
Setting yourself the challenge of writing the complete opposite of your usual thing - in literary form, length, genre or audience. It will develop useful muscles, including some you didn’t know you had.
Get into the habit of checking in with the playing-out of your creative decisions, and thinking about what happened and why. The Creative Writing course commentary is just a formalised version of what writers have done since time immemorial to help themselves, so have a look at that post to understand what kind of checking-in is useful.
Giving yourself permission to take your writing seriously, and act on that permission. This makes it much more likely that you’ll get the maximum benefit from both habits and projects. For example:
Decide what writing time you have in the next week/month/year, and then defend it like a tiger from the encroachments of others, and your own procrastination.
Claim the right to tell people, or not tell people, that you are writing, and what you’re writing.
Decide how much and what kind of engagement with social media is good for your writing and your writing self, and when it does damage. Then do what’s good for you both, and not what’s bad for you both.
Don’t stint on your professional materials if you can possibly help it, whether that means paying more for your perfect kind of notebook, spending time or money on research for your projects, or buying subscriptions and tickets to keep up with your settings/periods or genre. Your writing self is worth it.
Bag domain names and social media accounts for your writerly identity. Just don’t spend any money that you won’t be able to afford if things don’t work out as planned.
Cultivate a smiling refusal to engage with people who try to persuade you that your serious ambitions are pointless and/or you’re too big for your boots. They are either so ignorant of the realities of the industry that their opinion is worthless, or they are feeling threatened by your confidence in following your dreams - and that’s all about them and nothing about you, let alone your writing.
And finally, talking of ugly ducklings…
… Whenever you start acquiring a new set of tools on a course or just from setting yourself new writing problems, it’s incredibly common to suffer a depressing stage when your writing seems to get worse, not better. You understand the new tools in theory and principle, you may even have done some exercises which you’re pleased with, but when you take those tools to a work-in-progress it all goes rather wrong.
It’s easy to blame yourself - or the course, or the teacher - for your writing’s scruffy brown feathers and awkward, clumsy gait, and to long to return to the small, pretty fluffy stage that everyone loved and said was wonderful.
But in fact the ugly duckling phase is a sign that your writing is growing up. Indeed, if you choose your projects to set yourself problems you don’t know if you can solve, you may well find that every project has its ugly duckling phase, while you fumble with its new demands.
For myself, that’s the only kind of project that summons up enough energy to keep me at it for months and years: the one where I’m doing at least some things for the first time ever, the one where I believe I will make it work, eventually, but it practical terms I don’t actually know that I’ll succeed.
It might seem that, having got one’s writing up to publishable level, and then up to actually being published - not the same thing - the job is done: one is good enough. But in a creative life worth having you will always be operating at the far edge of what you know you can do, grappling daily with problems which you may or may not be able to solve. So be it.