Summer Writing Food: Lasting Salads

Fresh crunchy green salad that stays fresh and crunchy, topped with all your favourites.
Gluten-free | Vegan, Veggie, or Omnivore

As always, perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself.

I'm serious about the low-carb thing, for writing time. On the Summer of Writing workshops, the people yawning in the afternoons are always the ones who brought a sandwich for lunch. Top tip: don't bring a sandwich!

Salad is my most frequent writing-day lunch, especially when I'm writing outdoors. It's super easy to make a large salad earlier in the week,  to serve as a side for a couple meals as well, and set some aside for my writing day. The fresh crunchiness is a joy, the toppings are a treat, and no sandwich-sleepiness to pole-axe the afternoon with drooping eyelids. That's me on my writing day in University Parks, exactly ten years ago, with my habitual Greek salad and its little jar of dressing.

To be yummy, though, the salad has to stay crunchy and fresh – so here are the secrets of making lasting salad. By nature, this post is more principles than recipe, but I'll add a recipe at the end for my favourite salad proportions and favourite dressing.

How to keep it fresh

The cardinal rule with keeping green salad fresh is don't put anything wet in it. As soon as the leaves and bits touch wetness, they'll start to slump and it'll lose its crunch within an hour, never mind several days. So that means...

• Dress it when you serve it: I make dressing in jars (which is handy for shaking them up to mix everything) and only dress the salad portions dished up onto our plates. For writing outside the house, I take a tiny jar of dressing with my salad.
• Deseed cucumbers: The seeds are the wettest bit, so without those, the rest of the cucumber doesn't wet the salad leaves so much. To deseed them easily, cut the cucumber in half lengthways, then scrape a spoon down the centre to pull the seeds out. It takes about twenty seconds.
• Don't add chopped tomatoes: They're wet wet wet. Either add chopped tomatoes when you serve it or use whole cherry / baby tomatoes.
• No mushrooms or apple or other wet food: Mushrooms shrivel and go miserable and make everything else sad; apples go brown. Fruit like orange segments are wet, so they're out too. Avocado goes brown almost instantly and is wet.
  
• Keep it tightly sealed in the fridge: Find a tupperware the exact right size, so there's as little extra air as possible in the container. Don't push the salad down to fit it all in though - crushing the leaves will again hasten their softening. If you're making grab-and-go portions like my pic, you can portion it up when you make it.
• Take what you're having out the fridge: Fridge-cold salad is a bit meh, it's nicer if it's allowed to lose that edge of chill. If I'm writing at home, about half an hour before I eat, I take a portion out the fridge - either in its nifty serving container, or I dish some into a bowl and cover it.

With these strategies, a green salad can last very happily in the fridge for four days, without losing its lovely crunch.

You can also vary it by making a large salad base and then changing up the toppings. I often make a large salad base for the week on a Sunday or Monday night, with a base of romaine lettuce, deseeded cucumber, halved black olives, and red onion. That night we'll add feta and chopped tomatoes to make it a Greek salad, to go with moussaka; the rest often turns into a bacon & blue-cheese salad, for the week. (That's what I was portioning up in the pic at the top.)

What to put in the salad base

What you add is completely up to you, but here are some of the ingredients that are happy living in the fridge chopped up, as part of the salad base:

• salad leaves – I like the crunchier ones, romaine and little gems
• cucumber, deseeded
• spring onion
  
• normal onion, red or white, finely sliced
• red green and yellow peppers, finely sliced
• baby spinach
• sliced raw courgette
• celery
• mange tout
• watercress, rocket, etc 
• small whole tomatoes

Adding toppings

Your salad base is a perfectly respectable green salad all on its own, but for a treat writing lunch, you want some joyous extra bits on top. These are some of my favourites:

• bacon and blue cheese
• bacon and avocado
  
• prosciutto and blue cheese: prosciutto slices are very happy in the freezer and then you can just pull out a few slices when you take the salad out to de-chill. Because they're so thin, they defrost at lightning speed.
  
• Greek salad: feta and olives
• apple and walnuts
• other nuts / seeds sprinkled over
• croutons, because sometimes you want salad to hurt
  

And of course, a beautiful dressing makes a salad sing, so I've got my favourite recipe for that at the bottom.

My habitual "recipe" is below, but really, the principles here are the main thing, and the rest is following your heart and making an effort to treat your writer-self!

Recipe

Serving and times

Prep: 20 mins
Serves: 6-8 lunches depending on toppings

Ingredients

• 1 heart of romaine lettuce, chopped into inch-sized pieces
• 1 cucumber, deseeded (cut it in half lengthways and scrape a spoon down the middle)
• 1 small red onion, chopped into eighths and then sliced. (Shake it in a tupperware to separate the slices.)
• 1 jar black olives, drained and halved
• 300g baby tomatoes, kept whole

PLUS 

• 1 block feta (200g), drained and chopped into cubes 
  OR
• 220g Stilton, chopped into cubes, and 500g bacon, fried to crispy and drained on paper towel

Perfect classic French dressing

• 4 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 Tbsp lighter oil 
• 2 Tbsp red-wine vinegar
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 2 tsp caster sugar
• 1 garlic clove, very finely grated or crushed to a paste
• Salt and black pepper, to taste

I mash the garlic, sugar, salt, and pepper in the mortar and pestle to really crush the garlic, then add the mustard and mix that well, then scrape it into a jar, add the oils and vinegar, tighten the lid on the jar, and shake it well.

Happy writing and happy salad eating! And if you're hoping to bring your salad to a Summer of Writing workshop this August, there are still a few places left on Planning a Novel and Unravelling Secrets, and you can add your name to the waiting list for The Art of Short Stories, Living Characters, and Non-Human Characters. Full details and booking are here.

Writing Skill: Mystery Place

Writing mysteries is partly about an intense atmospheric sense of place, and partly a complex little puzzle of laying out your clues, reveals, and red herrings so the reader's neither bewildered nor bored, but enthralled, guessing along eagerly. This Writing Skill is a nifty way of playing with both halves, your rich place and mapping out the story's shape.

 The Writing Skills come alive when you play with them, rather than just reading them, so steal yourself 10–20 minutes, grab your pen and notebook / some paper, pour yourself a cuppa, and start creating.

Step 1: The Place 

First off, pick a place you find suitably intriguing or interesting. That can be somewhere you know, or a location from photos, or a random interesting place in the world. If you want ideas, try the first four Place links on the Writers' Links page. The first two let you choose a location by type, then you have lots of pictures of it; the third lists types of places for inspiration; the fourth gives you unusual locations around the world.

Step 2: The "facts" 

Next, write down 20 "facts" about the place, from the banal to the mysterious: some real ones, if you know anything about the place; some made-up ones; anything you randomly come up with. Allow yourself to invent and to add "silly" / "boring" ones. They don't all need to be great facts: that's why you're writing 20. And taking the pressure off lets you be more creative.

Step 3: The story 

Once you've got your list, you're going to select five of them:

• Pick one "fact" as the final piece of information that explains everything.
• Pick one "fact" as the first puzzling thing that your character encounters or discovers.
• Pick three "facts" to go in between, which do ultimately help explain what's going on with this place, but which also seem to point to another answer. Put them in order of increasingly surprising / dramatic / intriguing.

You now have the shape of your mystery story: the first puzzling thing to create the initial mystery; the three layers / plot twists / red herrings to give shape to the middle of the story; and the final reveal. You also have plenty of background on your place, and a good sense of it (possibly some photos too) to write compelling description-as-action-and-atmosphere, as your character explores and starts to uncover the mystery.

You can stop there if you want: you've already practised the techniques of a) brainstorming freely; b) mapping out a story shape according to five pivotal "reveals"; and c) using place to generate the story. If you'd like to carry on, start writing the story from the character first arriving at the place, some atmospheric description, and uncovering the first puzzling thing…

If you want to take your mysterious story skills further, the Summer of Writing workshop, Unravelling Secrets, is on Saturday 16 August in Oxford and covers mysteries, crime / detective fiction, and thrillers. And, of course, any story that's using that same approach of structuring a story around secrets and hidden clues, while keeping the suspense high. Across the day, you'll develop a deeper understanding of all three genres, enrich your story's possibiities (a new story created in the workshop OR your own work in progress), and map it out to the thrilling final reveal. See the full details and book your place here.

Am I Planning Or Just Procrastinating?

“How do I know if my planning is actually just procrastinating now?”
“Should I stop planning and start writing?”
“Is my planning just a writing-avoidance behaviour?”

I get variations on these questions a lot. So, first off: for those of you who prefer not to plan and just dive in and start writing – go! Be free! You're allowed to do that! You can do the plotty-planning stuff in your redraft stage. Work the way that suits you.

Those of you who like to plan, at least some, before you write: you're allowed to plan. Usually, when someone asks, “Am I planning or just procrastinating?” they do actually know which, in their heart of hearts, but a few fears or anxieties are clouding their clarity:

• “Writing has to mean words on the page.”
• “I have to perfect the plan / world before I can start writing.”
• “I can’t start writing in case I get the words wrong.”

“Writing has to mean words on the page.”

It doesn't. Planning is part of the writing. It doesn’t mean you’re procrastinating: it’s part of the process. Not all parts of writing produce word count. (Read – or reread – Word Count Is Like Paint to set yourself free from the word-count trap.) And actually, everyone plans. Some plan first, then write. Some write, then redraft / plan afterwards.

So ask yourself, honestly, “Am I still busy with the planning or am I just nervous to write prose?” Often, when I discuss this with students, it turns out that they are still busy with the planning; they're just feeling like they “ought to have started already”. So here's a reassuring bit of info: when I start a new novel, whether this was back when I was ghost-writing or now, the first quarter of the time I spend on it is planning. These days, that's often three months of two writing days a week.

It’s fine to plan for as long as you need to. But be wary of thinking that…

“I have to perfect the plan / world before I can start writing.”

You don’t need a perfect plan. In fact, you can’t have a perfect plan: you’ll always learn more about the story, the world, and the characters through writing. Once, I did create a “perfect” plan: with my second ghost-writing novel, I was determined to be more efficient and planned every detail, down to each scene. Writing it was hell: there was nothing left to discover, no creative leaps, just an endless colour-by-number with words. It was also the worst novel I’ve written.

You want to leave yourself room to discover, invent, and have exciting creative leaps and “Aha!” moments in the writing. Those are often richer than what you could’ve consciously planned, because you learn your character / world / story so much more deeply through writing it. And remember, the person writing the story always knows it better than the person who planned it – so the writer gets to change the plan.

Likewise, some conundrums and mysteries are best solved through the writing. Sometimes you need to trust the process and leave things open: “Yes, I'm including the giant octopus. I don't know why, but I'm convinced it’s important.” Sometimes you can't know until the end whether it’s is an important detail or not. You might end up taking the giant octopus out. It might be the whole solution to the end.

Your plan doesn’t need to and can’t be perfect. It just needs to be enough that you can start writing. How detailed that is varies from person to person, so you need to trust yourself to know. In order to trust yourself, you also need to be sure you’re not thinking that…

“I can’t start writing in case I get the words wrong.”

Both things can be true: you can be still busy with the planning and nervous to write prose. Putting words on the page  can be scary, especially if the page is very very clean and you feel like the words you write now are The Words That Will Stay.

If you’re still planning and you’re nervous of the prose, write snippets. When you're planning, sometimes snatches of dialogue or brief bits of scene just come to you, unbidden: grab some fresh paper, and scribble them down while they're coming. Tuck them in a “snippets” folder. It's glorious, reaching that scene and finding your hasty drafts already written. That way you capture it when it's fresh, you know you're not afraid of writing prose because you're doing it, and you're not hurrying yourself past an important stage in your process.

If you honestly think you have finished planning, at least as much as you can for now, and you're just tinkering in case the words come out imperfect: write imperfect words. Write it badly, and fix it later. Honestly, we do that anyway, whether or not we intend to, so we may as well give ourselves the freedom of intending to. Scribble all over that clean clean page, and set about writing, badly, knowing you'll fix it later.

We’re not musicians on stage, trying to get everything right in one performance: we get to work in drafts. Rough out the action and add description later. Or write two pages of description because you need to know what everything looks like, then trim and interweave it later. Chuck down the dialogue and add the action later. Use boring familiar phrases which you’ll switch up for fresh ones later. Write in drafts, in layers. Include octopuses you might take out later.

*

Once you feel confident that you’re allowed to keep planning, that you don’t need a perfect plan before you start writing, that you can start writing alongside the planning, and that it’s fine to write imperfect first draft, then you can ask yourself “Am I planning or procrastinating?” And trust your own judgement.

If you want some help managing the strange mysterious process of planning, which can feel like mapping out mist, the Summer of Writing: Planning a Novel workshop will give you hands-on practical strategies, whether you’re starting from scratch or reworking raw draft. It’s in person in Oxford, full day, on Sat 9 August. Details and bookings are here; just 3 places left, so do be quick if you want to join it.

Writing Skill: Tiny Twists

If you fancy writing an absolutely tiny short story, this Writing Skill will give you the shape and all the tiny twists to make it exciting, with the bonus of a delightful little craft activity, some writing-to-discover, and some nifty plotting skills.

Very short stories are called "flash fiction". The official definition is under 1000 words, but they're often much shorter. It's a great wee form to practise all sorts of things – new genres, experimental approaches, new styles – because it's so short. The downside is trying to keep to that length, and that enemy of creative flow, word-counting.

Enter the tiny book! This is a nifty little craft and ever so easy, creating a little book with just a few folds and one cut. Then you can use the interior pages of your book (5, discounting the front and back covers, and inside front cover) as a natural story structure of 5 mini acts. Plus, the small pages keep the word count down naturally, even with your tiniest handwriting. The inherent enemies of the process become a delightful organic part of the process.

So first off, get a sheet of A4 paper and make your tiny book . There's a short how-to video here, on your preferred platform: Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok. (I don't post to those anymore, but the video's still there.)

Next, to start your flash fic, you're going to give a character a very simple task that they're trying to do. Something really small. Eg…

• sew on a button
• make a cup of tea
• change a plug
• write a letter
• arrange some flowers

… whatever appeals to you. You can launch straight into writing that, on the first page – but this is where the shape of your tiny book comes in. At the end of every page, include a tiny twist or reveal, that adds new layers of information for us, or makes the task more difficult or more important, or makes us see things in different ways. You can make those up as you go along, writing to discover. If you'd like ideas, here are some possible categories:

• a character fact we didn’t expect
• a character trait that makes it harder
• a circumstance that makes it harder
• a fact about the task we didn’t expect
• a reason it matters so much to them
• a reason it matters to someone else / other people
• a setting we didn’t expect
• an external obstacle

As much as possible, in the writing, try to stay in real time, in the action (what the character's doing), description, any snippets of dialogue. Avoid backstory, explanation, and too much time in the character's head. That'll keep your tiny story feeling fresh and lively.

And once you've got your complete little book, you can whip out the felt-tips and decorate the cover, if you like.

Why this Skill? 

Tiny stories like this are a great way to start experimenting with short stories, and  with writing in multiple different ways. Because it's so short, you're not committing a huge amount of time to the experiment, which allows you to play much more freely with any aspect you'd like. It's also a great opportunity to practise your reworking and editing, getting the story tight and making every word count.

Layering in multiple plot twists can make stories of any length much more exciting and gripping: the twists create a dramatic thrill for the reader and change the energy of the next section. Practising this in the microcosm of flash fiction is great preparation for turning the same strategies onto longer short stories (and even whole novels).

If you want to take your short story skills further, the Summer of Writing workshop, The Art of Short Stories, is on Saturday 2 August in Oxford. Across the day, you'll explore strategies and techniques for creating powerful short stories of any genre, with heaps more insights into making them effective and making them come alive on the page. There's just one place left (it's max 12) so be quick: It's now fully booked, but you can put your name on the waiting list (places do come available sometimes, and only get readvertised on the site when the waiting list is cleared) and book the other workshops that do still have spaces. See all the workshops and book your place here.

What's the Point of Description?

I’ve had some good teachers – in drawing, singing, running a business. Every time I find a good teacher, it reminds me of the difference between a taught course / curated resources versus just looking things up myself: they teach me the stuff I don’t know I need to know. Stuff I might otherwise ignore, dismiss, eyeroll at, or even actively refute.

Description is that, for most writers. Plot? Character? Dialogue? Everyone’s signing up to learn those. Description? I weave that in alongside the others, because I know you need it. Contemporary novels of all genres average 48% description, but so many people, avid readers of those novels, still believe description bogs things down and isn’t used so much these days.

So here are ten things all that description is doing.

It makes the story immersive. We live in our bodies; we experience the world through sensory information. That’s the info we need to feel like we’re living in the story.

It makes scenes memorable. Place is memory, as I’ve written about before. Do you want the reader to hold onto a particular scene or key information? Describe the place vividly.

It does your world building. Historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and travel fiction all hinge on a world that’s not the same as our own familiar environment. Everything you can describe – rooms, floors, food, clothes, scents, colours, plants – is giving information about your story’s world.

It creates mood and atmosphere. You want it darker? You want it creepy? Poignant? Vibrant? Intimate? Your description will create the mood in which you nest your action and dialogue.

It deepens your characterisation. Your character’s home. Their room. The pub they chose to meet in. The clothes they chose to wear, or are all they have. Every titbit of description here is a wealth of character info. Add point-of-view description from another character, and you’ve got a two-fer-one on characterisation.

It creates scene anchors. Are you interweaving story threads? Plaiting in sub-plots? Flashing back to the past then returning to the present? The rich description you seed in is the reader’s anchor for returning to that thread so they remember, quite literally, where they were in that story-thread before.

It creates action. Where your characters are limits or creates what they can do. Whether you’re writing epic fantasy, spicy romance, quiet literary fiction, or an action thriller, the place shapes what they can (or can’t!) do – so we need to know.

It paces your story. Need a beat for the reader to absorb what just happened, and really feel the ramifications? Want to draw out the building tension before The Thing happens – or doesn’t? Description is your pacing.

It’s the silence in dialogue. ‘They were silent for a long time’ doesn’t create a pause for the reader: it’s seven words; we skip right over it. A passage of description allows us to feel the silence, and whatever resonance that has in the scene.

It does your exposition. All that stuff you want to explain to the reader, for them to understand your characters, story, plot, world? A huge swathe of it can be woven in through descriptive detail.

With all that at work, it’s a wonder we can even cap description at 48%! We don’t give it all in one wodge, of course: we weave it in. Bringing the story to rich immersive life.

Spring Writing Food: Moroccan peas, artichoke, & preserved lemon

A hefty flavour burst of preserved lemon, artichokes, olives, garlic, ginger, turmeric and fresh coriander, all vibrant and zesty.
Gluten-free | Vegan

As always, perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself. 

This spring's dish is all of those plus some: super quick to make and to double up, with a smack of flavours like the sunshine bursting out after a week of grey. Plus it's all that lovely freshness and can be served hot or cold, for when the spring sunshine still has a sharp nip of chill.

It also uses almost entirely "store cupboard" ingredients: quote-marks because they're not necessarily things you have lying about in the cupboard, but they're all things that keep pretty much indefininitely. So if you want an option in stock for future writing time, add these to your grocery list:

• a tin of artichoke hearts
• a jar of olives
• a jar of preserved lemons (which keep apparently indefinitely in the fridge once opened)
• a packet of frozen peas
• fresh ginger to chop into inches, pop in a freezer bag, and freeze

That's everything you need, alongside some garlic, powdered turmeric, and olive oil. And optional fresh coriander, but I often make it without, as there are plenty of other flavours loudly bellowing.

 It freezes well, too. The peas do fade a bit when they're frozen, so if you feel strongly about peas being the brightest green, then freeze some of it without the peas and add them when you reheat it. On a non-writing day, or for feeding non-writing gannets in the household, you can bulk it out with pitta or ciabatta; for writing, just have it as-is. Maybe with some extra peas if the flavours are blowing your head off!

Moroccan peas, artichoke, & preserved lemon

Serving and times

Prep: 15–20 mins
Cooking:  5 mins
Serves: 4

Ingredients

• 6 Tablespoons olive oil
• 4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
• 3 small preserved lemons, flesh and rind finely chopped (fish out the pips)
• 1 tsp ground turmeric or 1 inch fresh, minced
• 1 tsp ground ginger or 1 inch fresh, minced / grated
• 400g frozen green peas 
• 30g fresh coriander (in an ideal world), finely chopped
• Salt
• 2 generous pinches ground black pepper
• 400g tin drained precooked artichokes roughly chopped
• 120g pitted kalamata olives, roughly chopped
• Optional: pitta bread or ciabatta to serve it with (for a non-writing meal)

Note: This really does need to use preserved lemons; normal lemons won’t do at all. Both Tescos and Sainsbury’s sell the Beldi Belazu jars, 320g, which contain about 6 preserved lemons each.

Method 

• Prepare all the ingredients first, as the cooking time is very quick. (I halve the 3 preserved lemons and fish out the pips, peel the 4 cloves garlic, and take an inch of ginger out the freezer, then throw all three together into the chopper.) If you're making this on a non-writing day, heat the oven to warm the ciabatta / pitta bread
• Heat the 6 Tablespoons oil in a large deep saucepan / wide pot over a medium heat.
• Add the crushed garlic, preserved lemon, 1 tsp/inch ginger, and 1 tsp/inch turmeric, fry, stirring, for a minute, until the oil is fragrant.
• Add the 400g peas and 30g coriander (if using), season and give everything a good stir.
• Cover the pan and leave until the peas are fully cooked – about four minutes.
• Mix in the tin of drained chopped artichokes and 120g chopped olives, taste and adjust the seasoning, and serve warm or cold.
• If you’re having it with pitta bread for a non-writing meal, you can also fill the pittas with it or let people fill them themselves at the table. Make sure to nudge people until they say "Nice food" so you can say "Thanks! It has pockets!" And if a pea rolls free, you point at it and yell "ESCAPEE!"
• Eat, write, and rejoice!
  

If you want more writing-food ideas, here are all the seasonal recipes so far. And don't forget there's also a free online workshop this spring: The Essentials of Storytelling!

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Recipe credits: Nargisse Benkabou in The Guardian

The Paperclip Principle

Just as my students start to compare notes on an activity, I can hear the comments:
    “Okay, so this is awful.”
    “I’ve probably done this all wrong.”
    “Mine’s pretty rubbish.”
    And so on: a stream of platitudes / shittitudes.
    Sometimes I leap in before the comments; sometimes I interrupt the chats just as the first are emerging.
    “Right! Everyone! Before you go any further, I need to tell you the Paperclip Principle.”

It’s a simple principle: if you slag off your work, you have to pay me a paperclip. You’re allowed to say “I just did this in five minutes.” Everyone knows that, anyway; you’ve all had five minutes. You’re allowed to say “This is first draft.” We all know that, too. You’re allowed to say “I’m not happy with how this turned out,” “I still want to add more description,” “I’m worried my dialogue is clunky,”… You’re not allowed to say “This is shit.”

When I first came up with the Paperclip Principle, I was still teaching at one big round table, and there were occasional paperclips floating about, from my sheaves of handouts. When I moved house and started teaching standing up, with students at three different tables, I carefully kept my paperclips away from them, jealously guarded on my teaching sideboard. My students became ingenious. They’d bring in their own paperclip, to flourish as they slagged off their work; I’d grin and accept it as payment. They’d hand in writing for feedback knowingly paperclipped together instead of stapled. One student brought an entire box of colourful paperclips, which he presented to me at the door:
    “I think this will cover me for the course,” he said.
    I graciously accepted the box. “These are beautiful. Thank you. This counts as one paperclip unit, so you may slag off your work once.”

When I started teaching online, the Paperclip Principle became even more challenging: not only would they have to part with one of their own paperclips, but they’d have to get out an envelope, find a stamp, write the address, put it in the post. Easier, maybe, just not to slag off your work?

But it’s not easy, which is why we need the Paperclip Principle. It’s part insecurity and part cultural practice – that bit of our culture that says, “How dare you create something? How dare you be pleased with it? How dare you think it might be any good?” Even when someone isn’t insecure about their work, as soon as the shittitudes start flying, they swiftly join in, or at least hastily quench any excitement they were feeling. Embarrassed, now, by the group norm, to have felt that delighted flicker.

What a dreadful thing to do to ourselves. What a dreadful thing to do to each other. Specifically, it’s dreadful because:

It’s bad for your creativity

Think of your creativity as a three year old, I often say. Imagine a three year old excitedly picking “wildflowers” from the garden and running up to you with a “bouquet”. Would you crouch down in delight, thanking them for the beautiful bouquet of flowers? Or would you sneer and say “Why have you got a dirty fistful of weeds?”

And which response would mean you get genuinely elegant beautiful bouquets when that three year old becomes an adult?

Our creativity needs encouragement. Our early ideas are young: they haven’t had a chance to grow, yet; we need to cultivate them through enthusiasm, trusting that they’ll develop later. We need to praise our creativity and thank it. Not slag it off.

It’s bad for others’ creativity

As soon as one person starts slagging off their work, the others join in – or, as I said, at least quickly dampen their own delight. It’s not just our own creativity that we’re hurting: it’s the creativity of everyone in the room. And even beyond that room, it’s perpetuating the cultural practice that says “Don’t you dare be pleased at creating.”

It’s outsourcing our confidence

“So, I know it’s awful, sorry…”
    “No, it’s not, it’s amazing, you’re a really good writer!”

When we insult our own work, we also set up a little game: I insult my work; you rush to reassure me how marvellous it is. It’s a familiar game for anyone who’s been in the ladies’ loos:
    “I look awful.”
    “NO, babes, you look AMAZING! I look like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards!”
    “Sweetheart! Darling! You look like a goddess! I look like something a fox dragged out the food caddy, covered in bin juice and onion peels!”

As soon as you start slagging yourself off, you’re placing a demand – an unfair demand, actually – on the other person to reassure you. That’s rubbish for them, but also rubbish for you. (Seriously covered-in-bin-juice-and-onion-peels rubbish.) Because even if their reassurance works, what then? You haven’t gained any actual confidence. Just an external source of it. And the day they’re tired, or down, or busy, or don’t want to play that game anymore, the floorboards open up beneath you. Because you just said “I’m awful,” and… no-one disagreed.

But you’re not awful. And that’s something you need to know.

*

If it’s so dreadful, why do we do it? It comes, as I said, both from insecurity and from cultural practice, the two intertwined, with the cultural practice rehearsing and reinforcing the insecurity. Strange as it may sound, insecurity is actually about ego. Ego doesn’t mean it’s arrogant: it means it’s focused on our perceptions of ourselves.

An unstable creative ego is prone to wild extremes. It says, “I’m brilliant! I’m shit! I’m a genius! I’m a fraud!” A stable creative ego says, “I’m neither brilliant nor shit. I’m making a thing that’s at a particular level of development, and I’m continuing to learn and develop. It’s not about me. I’m fine.”

That’s why all those other comments are fine:
    “This is first draft.”
    “I’m not happy with how this turned out.”
    “I still want to add more description.”
    “I’m worried my dialogue is clunky.”
    “I’m struggling with the focus of this scene, it’s feeling muddled.”
    “I can’t tell what’s working and what’s not anymore.”
All of those open the discussion to what needs development and what’s working well: the thing we’re making, at a particular level of development.

We’re always allowed to express uncertainty and confide insecurities. We want to be there for each other as writers, who share the weird and weirdly specific concerns that non-writers don’t get. We don’t want to force people to shore up our unstable ego, to model or perpetuate unhealthy behaviours, or to treat one piece’s development as a referendum on our worth as writers.

So how do we get there? We start with a small step: we start with paperclips. A few weeks into a course, after I’ve explained the Paperclip Principle, I start hearing,
    “Careful, Megan will make you give her a paperclip!”
    then “You owe us a paperclip.”
    then, simply a cheerful “Paperclip!”

The norm has changed. It’s not the end of the process, but it’s an incredibly good start. And each of these beautiful paperclips represents someone taking a step forward towards a more stable creative ego, and seeing their work as something to develop, not as a fixed brilliant/shit binary.

Give each other paperclips. Build trust. Model healthy behaviour and avoid perpetuating unhealthy behaviour. And be kind to yourselves as well as each other: this too is about steady thoughtful development.

You Are Not Ark Fleet B

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams describes an overcrowded planet whose inhabitants decided to relocate. They divided the population into three groups: Ark Fleet A, all the rulers; Ark Fleet C, all the people who did the actual work; and Ark Fleet B, the rest – all the middlemen, such as the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. Ark Fleet B left first, to prepare the new home planet for the others, and… Ark Fleets A and C settled back into life, in a less overcrowded planet. Rid of the fluff.

At the start of the pandemic, we all got a fresh perspective on whose jobs to value. The bin collectors, the delivery drivers, the medical staff. With a cousin in the army, helping with logistics, and his partner a front-line nurse, I jokingly but sincerely referred to myself and my work as “Ark Fleet B”: the inessential fluff that an indulgent late-stage society has developed, which the planet and its people are better off without. I even named our group-chat that.

They were saving lives and keeping people alive. I was stuffing handouts in envelopes and arranging absurd stuff on a slice of wood on a lazy susan and filming it while I pushed it round with a wooden spoon. Spot the difference. I know a lot of creatives felt similarly.

But during that same period, everyone, including me, was turning to the arts, and specifically to immersive stories, to keep ourselves sane, to look after our fraying mental health, so we could all do the life-and-death essential functioning we needed to. At the same time as I was mocking myself as a pointless Ark Fleet B person, I was recording creative-writing audios for my students, creating a Poem-a-Day project that offered respite from anxious thought, filling my website with free writing resources, and advertising those instead of my courses.

I knew that writing helped people find a respite of calm, absorbed flow, which they urgently needed. Likewise, I was writing daily poems myself, as a constant essential practice to hold myself together. Likewise, my partner and I were mainlining stories in the evening: books, TV series, whatever could absorb us and give us respite so we could carry on.

When my army cousin and his nurse partner got home, shattered from what they’d been doing, rigid with worry – they also sought stories, in film or TV or books, so they could recover, so they could carry on.

When people needed poems for funerals, because they needed to say what this meant and couldn’t find the words, those were there too. Written by people who probably felt they belonged on Ark Fleet B, recommended by people who felt their knowledge of poetry was 100% Ark Fleet B candidacy.

The arts in general, and stories specifically, were a mental-health lifeline. People had made those stories. People who were probably also feeling like they belonged on Ark Fleet B. We can call it “escapism”. We can call it respite. We can call it mental health. We can look to the physical health benefits of easing stress, and how much that heals, how much it wards off. We can look to the societal benefits of not going berserk with cabin fever, not fighting with the only person you’re allowed to touch, not blowing up the new group-chat with stress-induced anger, not tumbling into conspiracy theories out of boredom-meets-helplessness-meets-terror.

This isn’t the indulgence of a late-stage society either, of people whose food is delivered in crates and whose refuse is carried away by trucks. Stories, poems, music, art, have been vital to every society throughout history, especially in the hardest times. They’re not the tip of our societal Hierarchy of Needs: they’re part of the foundation. All that’s changed is how we name the different ways that stories-poems-music-art combine, from cave art and bards to films, books, lyrics. It’s always been essential, and healing.

Your writing – you, writing – isn’t inessential fluff or indulgence. You’re not Ark Fleet B. You’re a healer. Even if no-one ever reads what you write, society is better for you writing. That strange half-hour of filming the Display of Curiosities left me calmer than I’d felt in days, which meant I could support other people and not crumble / start screaming / snap. If all it did was restore me, that was already enough to be a help to others. But it did more: it helped other people find that space, so that they could help others, and so on, rippling outwards.

The arts do so much else besides, but if ever you doubt, remember this: you’re not Ark Fleet B. Or A, or C. You’re more like trees: you help people breathe. Filling your leaves does good.

Winter Writing Food: Stuffed Aubergine Parmigiana

 

 

Roasted aubergine halves stuffed with mozzarella and breadcrumbs, topped with a parsley garlic and cheese crust, baked in a sea of tomato, onion, and garlic.
Vegetarian | Gluten

As always, perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself. 

This winter's recipe is a glorious indulgence. It's comforting, rich, low carb, colourful, and easy to reheat: a sumptuous writing-day treat. It's not traditional aubergine parmigiana; it uses some cheeky / outright questionable hacks, but it is utterly bloody lovely.

It's also a lot quicker than regular aubergine parmigiana. Still not objectively quick, it's not a five-minuter, but I've managed to refine the original recipe down to 1 hour of active time, and it makes 8 portions, so that's a very generous reward on the time. After you've made it the first time, you also have parsley-garlic paste stashed in the freezer for the next two times you make it, so that speeds things up too.

If you're having a full writing day, you can make it earlier in the day as a brain-break, and then hold off the final 10-20 minutes in the oven. Alternately, make it on a non-writing day and pad it out with crusty bread or fried / boiled and herby potatoes, so the precious aubergine boats don't all get inhaled.

If you're after something healthier, quicker to make, vegan, or gluten-free, try last winter's recipe. If you've got 1h40 to be around (1 hour of which is active time) and you're looking to treat your writer self, then you may want...

Stuffed Aubergine Parmigiana

Note: There are also pictures at the bottom of the post, to show some of the techniques / cooking in progress.

Serving and Times

Cooking: 1h40, of which 1h active

Serves: 6–8 or 8 writing-time meals

Ingredients

Main

• 1 onion, diced
• 60ml extra-virgin olive oil (¼ cup), plus extra for drizzling
• 4 medium aubergines
• 2 tsp pouring salt
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 x 400g tins whole peeled tomatoes
• 1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
• 15g chopped parsley to serve, plus crusty bread / potatoes when you have it as a non-writing time meal (so your lovely aubergine halves don't all get snaffled up)

Parsley-Garlic Paste

• 70g parsley, leaves and stalks roughly chopped
• 5 garlic cloves
• Zest and juice of ½ lemon
• 125ml extra-virgin olive oil (½ cup)
• ¼ tsp pouring salt (½ tsp flakes)

Parsley-Garlic Crumbs

• 80g parsley-garlic paste (¼ cup)
• 100g breadcrumbs
• 50g butter
• 1 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

Stuffing

• 50g breadcrumbs
• 340g of your 500g mozzarella (the rest is for sprinkling)
• 15g parsley, roughly chopped

Equipment

• Large shallow baking dish that can fit 8 aubergine halves next to each other (mine is 24cm x 34cm and 6.5cm deep)
  
• Full-sized oven tray
• Baking paper
• Large mixing bowl
• Optional, makes it quicker: a food chopper; a 400ml jar for shaking garlic; a mezzaluna for speed-chopping parsley.

Method

50 Mins Active Time

• Find a baking dish large enough to take 8 aubergine halves (mine is 24cm x 34cm and 6.5cm deep).
• Dice 1 onion med-fine and put in the dish with 60ml olive oil. Put in the cold oven, then turn oven onto 180° C fan. Set onion timer for 15 mins.
• Line an oven tray with baking paper. Halve the 4 aubergines lengthwise and score them deeply, criss-cross diagonally, not piercing the skin. Sprinkle about ¼ tsp salt on each half, pressing the aubergine edges down so the salt can fall into the cracks. Lay the aubergines face-down on the baking paper.
• Shake the 9 garlic cloves (4 if you have your parsley-garlic paste already) in a jar, to remove/loosen their skins.*
• Blitz the peeled garlic in a ninja/chopper. If you're making parsley-garlic paste, set aside just under half  the garlic to join the onions later.

• Make the parsley-garlic paste: Add to the 5 cloves garlic in the ninja/blender: 70g parsley, zest and juice of ½ lemon, 125ml oil, ¼ tsp salt. Blitz till smooth. Divide into 3 x 80g: one to use now; two in small jars for the freezer, for future.

• When the onions have had 15 mins and the oven’s hot, take the onions out and put the halved aubergines in. Set a 30-min aubergine timer.
• To the onion dish, add the remaining 4 cloves minced garlic, 2 tins tomatoes, ½ tin water (200ml), 1 Tbsp red wine vinegar. Crush the tomatoes with a masher. Pop the dish back in the oven.

• Fry the breadcrumbs: Melt 50g butter in a frying pan. Add 1 Tbsp olive oil, 80g parsley-garlic paste, and 100g breadcrumbs. Fry till golden, stirring regularly. Between stirs, you can mix the stuffing.
  

• Mix the stuffing: Roughly chop the remaining 30g parsley. In a large bowl, mix half that parsley, 340g mozzarella, and 50g breadcrumbs. (Set the extra mozzarella and parsley aside for later.)

• When the aubergines have had 30 mins, take them out the oven. Turn the aubergines face-up to cool and set a 15-min timer.

15 Mins Rest

• Finish anything not done, clean kitchen, chill, etc.

10 Mins Active Time

• Take the tomato dish out the oven.
• With a spoon, scrape the aubergine flesh from the skins into the stuffing mix bowl, keeping the skins whole. Mix well.
• Lay the aubergine skins on the tomato mix. Fill with stuffing mix. Drizzle olive oil over them.
• Put in the oven for 15 mins.

 25 (15 + 10) mins rest (or longer if you wish)

• After 15 mins (this can be 20 if you wish), take the dish out and top each aubergine half with the parsley-garlic breadcrumbs and the extra mozzarella for sprinkling.
• If you want to pause dinner, you can keep it out the oven for longer now.
• If / when you’re ready to eat, put it back in the oven for 10 mins if it’s still piping hot (or 15–20 if you paused it and it needs to regain its heat).
• Sprinkle the remaining parsley over it before serving. (It's fine to parsley the ones for the freezer too.)

Freezing

Refrigerate the tray overnight, to help everything firm up. The next day, use a flat spatula to scoop each aubergine boat, along with the tomato mix under it, onto tinfoil. Wrap the portions in foil and label with masking tape & a sharpie.

Recipe credits: Alice Zaslavsky in the Guardian. I've adapted the technique to streamline the prep, cooked the tomatoes and onion for longer, and adjusted the quantities to suit the amount things are sold in, in the UK.

* Shaking garlic in a jar to peel it: This is not a spoof hack; it really works. A 400ml jar works best, not a huge one. For older garlic, the peels will usually fall off after vigorous shaking. For very fresh garlic, the peels often don't come off, but the bash-about in the jar makes the fresh cloves easier to peel: cut off the blunt end without severing the peel on the other side, then use that to pull the rest of the peel off.

The cooking, in pictures

The stuffing mix in its bowl (before the aubergines are added) with the two extra jars parsley-garlic paste.

Two extra jars of paste labelled for the freezer.

Holding the scored aubergine open to sprinkle with salt.

Scooping the aubergine flesh out the skins.

Empty aubergine skins laid out on the tomato sauce.

Aubergine halves filled to be baked before their topping is added.

Aubergine halves baked, before the parsley is sprinkled on.

Aubergine parmigiana for my writing day.

Four portions for the freezer, for future writing-time joy.

How Do I Write a Novel? An open letter to my younger self

When I wrote Word Count Is Like Paint, I realised that however sound the advice was, it would leave my younger self stranded. After all, how do you approach something as ambitious and amorphous as writing a novel, except with the one thing you can measure: word count? 

So this is my letter to that younger self, exactly half my age: she was having a kitchen-painting party for her birthday, in the photos below, so even our painting theme continues, and it's my birthday on Sunday, and I've just today finished my twelfth or thirteenth novel, depending how I count the two-volume one. And it's an open letter, because I thought you might find it useful, too.

Hey darling,

I know you’re longing to write a novel, you dream of being a novelist, and it seems as far off and unobtainable as being an astronaut. It’s not. You can totally do it and you don’t have to wait until some magic point of Readiness: you can start now.

First off, don’t worry about the words. I know it feels like that’s the main, most difficult thing, but really: you can do the words just fine. You’ve been inhaling novels since you learnt how to read. You know how the words go, in novels. The same way you learnt to speak, by being around people speaking? You’ve already learnt how to write.

You’ll get better and better at it, as time and writing go by, and you’ll discover exciting new things to do with style and words, but those are things you can only discover through writing – and what you’ve learnt from all that reading is more than enough to get started. Just go for it.

Writing a novel will take time and commitment, but you’ve already shown you’ve got that. Think of all your studying, the effort you put in – it’s like that, but this time with something that’s much more yours, that enthrals and delights you. It’s half commitment and half like falling in love, wanting to steal that time for it.

So you’ve got the commitment and you’ve got the words. You just need to know how to do it.

Here’s something that might surprise you and seem very obvious at the same time: the story is the main thing. Not how beautiful the words are. Not how important the Central Theme is. The story. None of your English teachers at school, none of your Eng Lit lecturers at uni, talked about novels as stories, ever, but that’s what they are. That’s why you read them. Even your favourite literary authors put the story first. The words have a job to do: to tell a story.

A novel is a substantial story, but not as long as you think. (Remember that 1500-word essay you were set? And you turned in 4500 words? Yeah. You don’t have a problem with writing too little.) But it’s substantial enough that you need to chunk it, both in story terms and your own progress.

Novels are measured in word count (I know that seems batshit, when words are such different lengths, but yes it works – they average out) and for your first novel, you should aim for 80k. I know you’ll overshoot. We want max 90k. (Trust me on this. This is very important. Do not spend ten years writing an absolute masterpiece that’s 330 000 words long. No-one will publish it, because they can’t; it’s too bloody long. Now matter how good it is. Just, y’know, a tip from the future.)

So aim for 80k. To make that manageable, chunk it into five parts; let’s call them acts. (I know your uni film course said three acts, but films are much shorter than novels, in story terms.) Make the first and last one about 10k words each, and the middle three about 20k words each. (Beginnings need to work fast and endings are often quicker than we expect, so those two get less.)

Don’t worry if that word count seems huge compared to the academic essays you’ve written. Fiction is much easier and chews up word count, because you don’t have to research or prove everything; you can just make it up. A good meaty scene with two characters actually doing stuff, somewhere interesting, and having an argument, can easily chew up 1500 words.

We’re using word count to measure the total size of the novel, and the approximate size of each act, but we’re not going to use it to measure progress. (That’s important. I’ll come back to that.) We’ll use the story to measure progress.

To do that, we need to map out the story across acts. Think of any story you know well. Lord of the Rings, if you want. (Btw, you’re going to meet someone who loves it as much as you do and you’ll get to introduce him to Terry Pratchett. Good things are coming.) What’s the main story line in that? Write that down in your notebook, in a sentence or two.

Now, what are the main points where things change, in that story line? For instance, the first one is when Gandalf tells Frodo he has to take the ring out the shire. Those change points are what mark the end of one act and the beginning of the next. You want four of those big change points (turning points) for the switch from one act to the next.

Your story also needs a thing that sets it going at the start (eg Bilbo giving Frodo the ring) – we call that the inciting incident, but it can also be the ongoing situation at the start. It doesn’t have to be massive, but it gets the story-ball rolling. And at the other end, an ending, which you might know before you start writing, or you might figure out much later.

You can map that out on one page of your notebook or a scrap of A6, to get going. Treat yourself to a coffee out, even a month of Saturday morning coffees if you want to keep brainstorming and coming up with ideas, but then dive in and start writing. You just need enough plan to give you a direction to write in. You’ll learn so much more about the story, and get to know the characters, through writing. And your plan will change, as you get to know it all better, and that’s fine – great, even. The initial plan is just your springboard.

Don’t get caught up in word count. I know I said 10k, then 3 x 20k, then 10k, but that’s a rough guide. I know you love spreadsheets, but try not to make a pie chart. Some acts are longer, or shorter. You might discover new change points, so your story has six acts, or seven, or ten. But you need some clarity, certainty, and structure to start with, so start with 5, and then be flexible.

I know what you want to know now, because you’re me: I stood shivering at those London bus stops with you, on the way to a temp job, leaden as the sky, notebook in our handbag, staring into the cosy coffee shop we couldn’t afford. How do I find The Idea? A good enough Idea, Worthy Of A Novel?

That’s the second thing your teachers and Eng Lit lecturers got completely wrong. And most of the world still gets wrong. The idea doesn’t matter. It does to you; it needs to, to you; but it doesn’t need to be Worthy, novel-length, or prize-winning. Ideas aren’t those things. It’s writing that grows ideas into novels, and the original idea can be lost as a seed-husk in the full-fleshed fruit. You don’t need to wait for The Idea. You just need an idea that will help you start writing. Everything grows from there.

It doesn’t need to be The Best Idea, either, because this won’t be your best novel. It’ll be your first, your best so far, but you’ll keep writing. Of course you will. So you’ll keep getting better.

All the idea needs to be is something that excites you to write. The way you keep thinking about sunsets. Or the creepy atmosphere of that field when the mist creeps over at night, which puts you in mind of witchery. Or the dreadful fog-horn sound of that misused amp and the description you’re writing of the building next to you. Small, such small, seed ideas that you’ll grow into novels by writing them.

I have so much more I could tell you. So much more I could advise. But most of it won’t make sense until you start writing. In fact, telling you all of it now would hold you back. Remember when you were 14 and you read every book the Wynberg municipal library had on writing? The car park’s hot tar and eucalyptus-tree smell wrapped through them? And how you couldn’t write for almost a year, because you knew too much about it but not how to do it? That’s why I can’t tell you the rest, now.

But I can tell you this: you can write a novel, and you can start now. The idea only needs to entice you; the rest will grow. The story matters more than the words, and you can do the words. Chunk the story into five acts, around change points, and use word count as a loose yardstick of story, not your metric. You can learn so much more when you’re writing, but you need to be writing.

And you can; you just needed to know how to get started. Now you do.

All my love,
Megan

P.S. I’ve learnt an awful lot in the last 24 years, so there's a heap more info about writing a novel in the Story Elements course.