Writing Habits Are Like Punting

It’s so normal, when we want to commit to new writing habits, to draw up a Dramatic New Plan and throw all our strength behind it. Especially at those new-start times of year: the September energy of a fresh academic year; the 1 January resolutions. You push hard. And then, come November or February, you find the New Plan’s already in tatters and you start berating yourself: Am I just lazy? Not committed? I need to try harder. Be better!

It’s normal. That’s what happens with those Big Pushes. And it doesn’t have to be like that. So take a lesson from punting.

That’s me punting with two of my cousins. A strapping lad of 17 and my ex-army cousin who climbs mountains for fun on the weekends. Punting’s basically pushing the punt along with a pole and they are way stronger than me. They should be shooting ahead. But I can leave them in my wake, punting.

They thrust the pole down, push with all their (considerable) might, hurtle the punt forward – diagonally, towards the bank. They hoik the pole back up – into the branches above. They stab it back into the river bed – now the punt’s veering into the brambles, the passengers frantically trying to flatten themselves. So the strong cousins jerk the pole round, biceps bulging to correct – but a punt is a long flat thing, and it carries on turning, so now they’re the ones heading into the brambles. They jam the pole down and push hard: there’s mud at the edges, which has gripped the pole. Punt shoots away, pole stays put, punter falls with an almighty splash in between.

Big Pushes in writing are the same. It’s not that you lack strength, energy, commitment – but if you use it like that, that’s how you end up in the water.

This is how you punt. Hold the pole out the water, vertical, and let it slip through your hands till it reaches the bottom. Gently, steadily, hand over hand, press the pole downwards behind you. You’re building gradual momentum, not trying to go from still to zooming. And if you’ve hit a pebble or rock, so it’s pushing at slightly the wrong angle, you notice, so you can lift and shift the pole before you’ve thrown your full force at it. One pebble doesn’t become a bramble incident. Or if you’ve hit mud, you can feel it, and twist the pole before you’ve jammed it too deep. One patch of clay riverbed doesn’t become a huge splash.

When your hands are down at your sides, don’t yank the pole up for another thrust: keep it in the water behind you, as much of it in the water as possible. Now it’s your rudder. If you pushed off at a slight angle, gently correct: the smallest of changes, because it’ll steadily keep going. Whatever you do keeps happening, so you just do a little, and watch. That ruddering is more important than how you pushed off.

Take a sip of cava as you float under the tree. Put your glass back at your feet. Lift the pole, hand over hand; hold the pole out the water, vertical, and let it slip through your hands… Each time, you refine how straight you push, and each time, you trail your long rudder, minutely correcting. And you glide smoothly, effortlessly, down the river.

And that’s how to turn your writing habits into a smooth effortless glide, too. It might feel like a Big Push will get you places faster, but only into the brambles and the water. Build momentum gradually, not in one Dramatic New Plan. Add to it bit by bit and push gently, observing the effects. Course-correct in small incremental changes, paying as much attention to that as you do to pushing. Pause as the branches float overhead – those tricky times, when any realistic friend would say “Mate, take a break” – knowing it’s safe to stop for a bit and your momentum continues. Refine, little by little, over time. And you’ll glide.

If you want to remake your writing habits like this in the year ahead, the Writers’ Greenhouse Community will help you refine them, course-correct, and steadily build momentum, till it really is that smooth effortless glide. Click here to find out how to join. And if you’re already a member, sign in here to start with your Trellising module and the next Writing Boost.

How Obvious Should I Make It?

In any kind of fiction writing, we need to manage our secrets. We want to hide the ending so it's a surprise, not a slow-moving inevitable train – but not such a surprise that the reader feels cheated. We want to tuck in foreshadowing, but not give the game away completely – or hide the hints so well that no-one even notices them. 

So how do we find the balance between making things glaringly obvious or playing our cards so close to our chests that the story doesn't work? How do you get it right for everyone? It can feel impossible. And it is impossible – if you think of "everyone" as a single monolithic Reader, for whom you want it to work identically.

Instead, write for three different kinds of readers: Smug Readers, Absorbed Readers, and Happy Lil Passengers On A Train.

Smug Readers

Smug Readers are going to guess everything. They're going to spot every hint, remember every clue, smirk knowingly at every red herring, and predict the ending accurately.

And they'll be pleased about being right! It feels like solving a wordle, a crossword, a sudoku. They'll feel proud, satisfied, and yes, very smug. Quite deservedly so.

Let them guess. Give them the means to guess. If you hide things so well that you confound your smug readers, they'll be disappointed, not impressed. And you'll completely lose your…

Absorbed Readers

Absorbed Readers will spot some things, but not everything. They're absorbed, so they're paying close attention, but they're also absorbed in the story, not treating it as a guessing game. They'll read the foreshadowing and remember it, but they won't always put two and two together. They might have vague suspicions, but no more. Then, when they reach the reveal, they'll exclaim "Ohhhhhh! So that's why… Yes, I thought there was something odd about that!" 

They'll be thrilled at having been so cunningly confounded, and satisfied that it all hangs together. And when they reread it, they'll sing your praises at how clever you were, setting it all up.

So put the foreshadowing, the hints, the clues, where they'll see them – actually there, on the page. In words, not in a cryptic form that needs a Brain of Britain contestant to work it out. But put it somewhere that they won't spot it immediately – in the middle of a paragraph, for instance, or in the midst of some exciting action.

It's easy to feel like these are our ideal readers. But you also need to cater for your…

Happy Lil Passengers On A Train

Happy Lil Passengers On A Train are cheerfully immersed in the story. They're not trying to predict the direction – they're on a train! They're staring out the window while the story-scenery flows by, taking every red herring at face value, missing every scrap of foreshadowing, not making a single guess. And when they reach the reveal, they. Are. Astounded. Amazing! Incredible!

Happy Lil Passengers On A Train don’t want to be guessing anything: doing that means stepping outside the story, which means losing the lovely total immersion. They want to be taken on a wonderful journey and reach their astonishing destination. And then they will be very, very happy.

This means that everything, ultimately, has to be spelt out. At the point where your Smug Readers have already guessed a while back, and your Absorbed Readers have just gasped at the reveal – at the point where you think any reasonable reader should know this, how can they not, ffs – at the point where you need them to know this for the next bit of the story to work – you need to make a Train Announcement for the Happy Lil Passengers. Spell it out. In actual words. State it clearly where it's obvious: at the end or beginning of a scene, even at the end or beginning of a chapter, so no-one can miss it. And then, like a Train Announcement, say it again.

*

Instead of writing for one kind of reader, you're writing for three kinds, in turn. First come the clues and hints, which the Smug Reader will spot. Make sure they're there, on the page, so the Smug Reader has a chance: they want to guess right! Then a bit later comes the goose-pimpling moment of dawning realisation, when the Absorbed Reader goes "Ohhhh… Oh, I bet…!" And then, when the reveal is DONE and the story is moving on to the next stage, or ending, a Train Announcement for your Happy Lil Passengers, with a bing-bong at the start, which they absolutely can't miss.

Some people are predisposed to be one or another kind of reader, but we can all be all of them, at different points. Even the smuggest reader, curled up with flu and a book, turns into a Happy Lil Passenger On A Train. As long as you're catering for all three in turn, every reader, whoever they are right then, can enjoy it.

If you want to learn more about managing your story's secrets, look to the genres that specialise in secrets: mysteries, crime and detective fiction, and thrillers.  All stories have secrets, but for those genres, it's their stock in trade, so they have a wealth to teach us about it.

And if you want to dive deeper into those genres and what they can teach us about managing secrets, the Unravelling Secrets workshop is on Saturday 16 August 2025 in Oxford: a one-day workshop on how to balance suspense, secrets, and clues, using your own story or a practice story. Click here for the workshop details and to book your place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Word Count Is Like Paint

Say a novel is 90,000 words and you have three writing evenings a fortnight. Two of those fortnights you’re on holiday, so call it 24 fortnights a year. That gives you 72 writing evenings a year. So to write the novel in a year, you need to write 1250 words every writing evening. Cool. Sounds doable. Let’s g–

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE. Word count is like paint.

This September, Will and I set about repainting the living room. We knew the size of the walls, and they all needed to be covered in paint, so measuring our progress in inches of paint would be reasonable, right? Our 30 square meters worked out as 46,500 inches of paint. We wanted to finish it in two days, so call each day eight hours, so we’d each need to paint 1,453 inches an hour. Cool. Sounds doable. Let’s go.

Will, wielding the roller, had a great painting day! He did loads! Me, going around with the cutting-in brush – I didn’t do nearly so well. Very few inches indeed. I guess I’m just a slower painter.

That was the afternoon, though. Actually, we both had a terrible painting morning. We were vacuuming walls, sugar soaping, dusting behind radiators, moving furniture, laying paint sheets – classic PAB (Painting Avoiding Behaviour) amiright? Not an inch of paint applied. Disaster.

Yeah, yeah, without that, we’d get paint clagging up with invisible spider webs and dust bunnies, paint peeling where there were grease marks, paint spattered on the sofa and floor, yadda yadda yadda… Pfft. Just excuses. Just putting off getting started. Painting nerves, right?

The next day, sadly, when we moved onto painting the skirting boards, dado rail, and cornices, Will’s painting streak evaporated. He actually did even fewer inches than me. While I got on with the business of getting paint on surfaces, you know, actually painting, he procrastinated, faffing about with “caulking” then “letting it dry”, he was “rehanging curtains”, “rehanging paintings”, “taking up paint sheets”, “carrying furniture”, “cleaning the roller”… He probably had some kind of Painter’s Block, right?

Obviously, this is absurd. The prep is essential. Clean-up is essential. Painting with a roller (province of Will’s long reach) is wildly different to cutting in edges and trimmings (province of my steady hand). Will’s expertise with caulking is a lot better than hurriedly bodging paint into the gaps, and of course it needs to dry before it’s painted. Of course the room needs to be put back together. While we want every inch painted, we can’t measure progress by inches painted. That would be unhinged.

It’s exactly the same with writing and word count. We know roughly how many words we ultimately want, for a short story or a novel, but we can’t measure our progress in word count. Any more than we can measure our painting in inches.

Here are just some of the important writing activities that don’t add word count, add it very slowly, or actually subtract it:

• Researching things that’ll change the plot shape (eg a particular law for a court case)
• Researching details that’ll make it convincing (eg when a crescent moon is visible)
• Deep-dive brainstorming stuff you need to make up (eg the food / market for your world)
• Deep-dive planning crucial info (eg currency for a story where money matters)
• Reworking a first-draft scene to be less clichéd / adverby in its second draft
• Reworking a second-draft scene in response to feedback on characterisation, logistical details, etc
• Cutting a scene’s tangents to make it pacier
• Turning chunks of exposition into detail drip-fed through existing scenes
• Editing generic words (eg “tree”) into specific words (eg “mangrove”)
• Creating a plot map or tension map (at the start, in the middle, or to rework the story)
• Refining the opening / ending lines of scenes and chapters to enhance narrative tension
• Revising a character’s dialogue to make it more their voice
• Rereading the whole story to assess it for redrafting
• Creating an overview by chapter
• Identifying plot holes and issues
• Resolving plot holes and issues
• Moving scenes and tweaking them for their new position
• Making a spreadsheet of the timing / calendar across the story
• Cutting paragraphs, scenes, even chapters
• Fine-grain editing of the near-final draft

Unlike painting, there isn’t One Right Order to do these. You don’t have to plan before you start putting down words. A lot of those things happen alongside, between, or after the activities that do increase word count – but note that I don’t say alongside, between, or after the writing. They’re all part of the writing. Just like everything Will and I were doing was part of the painting.

A lot of gung-ho writing advice says “Just get the words down!” I also say, “Write it badly, you can fix it later.” But fixing it later is part of the writing, whether that’s at the end of the scene, the chapter, the story, however you prefer to work. So is planning, if you need to know where the story’s going before you start getting words down. So is reworking, so is research, so is editing, so is all of it.

They’re not “writing nerves”, WAB (Writing Avoiding Behaviour), procrastination, or Writer’s Block: they are writing. And rather than being a sign that you’re “scared of doing the writing”, they make you a lot braver about writing. How much easier is it to rough out first draft when you know you’ll sort out the details later? And how much easier is it to sort out the details when you’re not beating yourself up for “not writing”?

You can have a brilliant, incredibly successful, deeply valuable writing session that doesn’t increase the word count at all. You are not Lorem Ipsum: your purpose is not word count. You are a person: your purpose is a wonderful story.

If you want to read more about breaking free of the wordcount-goal trap, read this tip: Set time not goals and this article: The Joy Is In the Doing. And if you want to explore the process of planning a novel in more detail, the Planning A Novel workshop is running on 9 August 2025 in Oxford. You can see the complete list of workshops, past reviews, and how to book here.

Finding Your Own Style

When you think about your writing style, it’s easy to feel caught between an amorphous blue cloud – a sense of self, unrealised or indefinable, an elusive mystery – and a bristling red pen, scratching things out and dictating schoolish rules.

Like most writers, I started with no idea what My Style was, beyond a vague hope that I must have one (surely?) and an iron conviction that I was a Good Writer. I wrote my entire first novel like that. Looking back, it was mostly transparent prose in literary register, with some of Angela Carter’s influence on immersive description, and some of AS Byatt’s influence to pare that back. It did work out as a decent style, because I had good models, but it wasn’t mine.

In fact, I’d written an entire novel without using one of the most powerful tools available to me: its style. I was like an artist whose composition and perspective are coming along nicely, but who hasn’t yet discovered colour. To take the metaphor further – there’s nothing wrong with using just black and white; monochrome artwork has a fantastic tradition. But to stick to that just because I didn’t know about colour, or know how to use it – that was missing a trick.

Almost 13 novels later, I still can’t tell you what My Style is – not because it’s stayed amorphous and mysterious, but because I have many. It depends what I’m writing. Our writing styles are always plural: our own voices change and grow continuously, just as we do, and shift like a ventriloquist with different genres, stories, and character voices. I have many colour palettes at my disposal now. And I know when to choose monochrome.

So how do you go about finding your style – or indeed, styles? Will working on your style spoil its authenticity, pruning back the very things that make it yours? And won’t a course on style just teach you to write like someone else?

How you do you find your style?

Most of us start by copying other people’s styles, as I did – and that’s fine. It’s a great way to learn. The writers you copy can be a useful indicator of your own taste in style, too: who do you want to write like? Who do you want to influence you? Who do you not want to influence you, even though you like their stories? Having a sense of your own tastes and working with good models is a great start.

From there, you want to strike out further – “breaking the rules”, writing the way you’re “not supposed to”, giddy with a sense of daring, playful and perverse. It feels naughty and wrong, because you’re no longer copying something you’ve seen before. You’re writing your way.

Don’t worry about overdoing it. You can always trim it back in an edit, if you need to, but it might turn out that you don’t need to. You might become even more daring.

It’s about permission to write “improperly”: again, in ways you haven’t seen before. So here’s your permission: write improperly. Go wild, do whatever the hell you want, and see how it turns out.

Will working on my style spoil its authenticity?

It’s tempting to see our first drafts as a pure untouchable thing, the original expression of self, and to think that tampering with a word would sully it. But your self is as much there in the editing process as in the writing, and we’re always developing as writers, even across a single piece. The you that’s finished the short story has more writing experience and more knowledge of that story than the you who was writing it.

Our first drafts, if we’re really writing freely, are often a patchwork of several things. Our most unusual and original phrasing leaps out, because we didn’t censor it: hurrah! The most familiar copy-paste phrases (the clichés, the collocations) flood the page too, because they’re right there, at your fingertips, on the shelf, on tap, easy as pie: that’s fine. When we’re making things up, we often need to grab whatever language is to hand, to capture our ideas.

Some odd things happen, too. The –ing words that felt so lively and energetic in the writing feel limp and flimsy on a reread. Those unstoppable tumultuous sentences that seemed to gallop through the action are now slowing it down. That slew of vivid emotive adjectives now feels syrupy. And so on. Some of our choices are about the process of writing, not the final effect we want.

So, we start tinkering. We consult our own tastes, for what to keep, We consider the experience of reading it, not just of writing it, for the effect we want. We wash away some of the mud, so the bits we want to keep sparkle, and we add some flourishes.

Your thoughtful assessing mind is just as authentically you: this is simply another, equally authentic, part of the process.

Will a course on style just teach me to write like someone else?

Not if I’m running it! I actually held off teaching anything about writing style for the first 8 years of running courses and workshops, because I was concerned about exactly the same thing. I did not want to create some School of Megan! Over those years, I gained a lot more experience in varying my own styles, in noticing and appreciating the different strengths of various styles, and in helping my students refine their own styles through individual feedback. Then I felt ready to teach style, in all its glorious possibilities.

That's why the Writing in Style course isn’t about The Correct Way To Write: it’s about the many various ways and why we might choose each. There are some common principle of good writing across styles, which we’ll also explore, and you’ll look at how to use those for the style you’re working on, for the piece you’re working on – and when to ignore that principle, because you want a particular effect.

Above all, the course is about finding freedom: the freedom to be you on the page and the freedom to experiment with new approaches. You'll explore a wild range of styles in your writing, build your confidence in writing first draft, and develop a repertoire of techniques to refine and enliven every page – all through imaginative adventures in language and storytelling. This is your chance to experiment, to discover all the ways you can experiment, so you can choose the colour palette you want when you’re writing.

Should I Just Give Up Writing My Novel?

It’s a fair question. Writing a novel takes a lot of time and dedication. Some people will rush in to say “Nooo! Never give up!” But if you’re asking, it deserves consideration. Maybe that specific novel is something you’re ready to ditch; maybe it’s become an albatross around your neck. You don’t have to carry on if you don’t want to. It doesn’t make you a quitter.

Or maybe you’re having a standard creative crisis point, the ones every writer and creative gets, but you don’t know about those yet. And if you ditch this one, the next project will reach the same crisis points – precisely because they are standard.

It’s not a question I can answer for you. But I can pose the questions which will help you decide and I can tour you through the standard crisis points you might be having.

The Characters that Let Your Stories Fly

When I started writing more keenly, I thought what I needed most was to plot better. I worked on that, hard, and my stories grew wings… but somehow they didn’t take flight. They felt like planes circling the airport, even with their immaculate flight plans.

What I actually needed to learn took me much longer, because I didn’t realise I needed that: to write characters unlike myself. Not just the wrong ‘uns, all of them. Especially the main characters.

Again and again, in my teaching, I’ve seen other writers hobbled by the same thing. It’s not a glaring lack, like plot, but it stops stories flying. And you don’t know why – because our selves are a blind spot to us. How we are, that’s just normal, right? But other people are different. And until all our characters can be too, including our main characters, we’re clipping our stories’ wings.

It is a blind spot, because our selves are our normal. So before we launch into why it's important, here are two quick tests of whether you’re stuck in characters like you:

• The Three-Traits Test: Can you (and your writing group / buddy if you have one) quickly and easily write three separate personality traits for them? If you can’t, they’re not fully characterised, and likely a diluted version of you.
• The Reaction Test: When your character reacts to something big (a heartbreak, discovery, thrill, frustration), can you say why they specifically react like that? Or is their reaction just “normal” to you? Because them being just normal might be them being just you.

If, in your writing so far, your characters are mostly you, especially the main characters, you have a wealth of discovery and joy ahead of you. Because this is what characters unlike you – again, especially the main characters – will give you.

You get more vivid characters

We don’t see ourselves as clearly as we see other people. Like fish not noticing water, we live inside our own traits without realising how much is specific to us, rather than standard-issue human, so we don’t describe those characters well. Without that clarity, our characters-like-us stay vague, undifferentiated. Worse still, to make the character “not us”, we often strip away what is unique and interesting, leaving the character not only blurry but bland. When your character’s not you, they become crisply drawn with distinct personality.

You vary your characters across stories

Even if your stories are wildly different, having much the same person at the centre of each gives them a sameyness. That gets boring for the readership you want to grow and boring for you as a writer. Different central characters bring fresh sparkle and variety to both your stories and the writing process.

You vary your cast within stories

The disjuncture between different types of people is a rich narrative seam. It increases your story’s depth, intensifies the point of view, and offers wonderful narrative tension as your disparate characters connect and clash. For that to work, all your characters need to be different, not just the “villains” of the piece. That also means learning to see the value in traits very different from your own.

You get wider scope for stories

As your characters open up in variety, so too do your storytelling possibilities. There are stories I’ll never be able to tell about a Meganesque character, even if I dress her up as an astronaut, a religious peasant, or a cursed child in a desert land. As soon as it’s not me, though, I can write about a Machiavellian commitment to social change, a status-driven ambition, a rigid adherence to minutiae, or a stone-cold indifference to others’ opinions, and how those traits play out to the good. When your characters aren’t you, your stories open up in exciting new ways.

You get more consistent characters

Once a character isn’t you, they start shaping their story themselves, because they have a distinct personality, which you can identify, and they act according to it. When your characters are still “basically you” and you’re trying to write a specific story, the events and character are often at odds. A Meganesque character doesn’t make sense as an astronaut: yes, she has the maths skills; sure, I can give her the fitness levels; but an astronaut needs the easy equanimity and (to me) near-bland resilience she simply doesn’t have. That clash will show in the writing. When your characters aren’t you, they stay in character – their character, not yours.

It’s easier to write about autobiographical events

The big things that have happened to you, which you want to approach in fiction or auto-fiction: surely, given they happened to you, perhaps even shaped you, this is where the character should be most like you? Counterintuitively, no. To make fiction about that, or even the thinly veiled memoir that is auto-fiction, you need artistic distance. That’s hard to get about something you feel so vulnerable, pained, or raging about. Putting clear blue water between you and the character – making them distinctly not you, or unlike you, in a few significant ways – helps hugely. It lets you write about it in a way that does draw on your experience, with all the insight that gives, and also with the objectivity that makes it the stuff of story.

You get to step through the magic doorway, regardless

There are times when writing seems impossible: when you’re so stressed it feels like you can’t breathe; when you’re crying so hard you can’t see the words. If you can step through the magic doorway into your story’s world, it’s transformative. You enter a flow state and your breathing returns to normal. Your tears dry and you rediscover a part of your life that doesn’t hurt. I’ve done both, but it’s only ever been possible when my characters weren’t basically versions of me. Having characters that aren’t you lets you step into your story world, whatever’s happening with you.

*

All your characters will always, in some way, be you: after all, you’re writing them. But instead of having mini-yous or bonsaied-yous enact every story, you get to act out being all those different people. Your stories’ freedom becomes your freedom.

And you do have the skills to do it. You live in a world brimming with people who’re very different to you. You socialise with them, work with them, and make a dozen accurate predications a day on how they’ll behave, without even noticing. That’s part of being human. That’s the same skill you can bring to your writing, to create characters unlike you and set your stories free.

Mapping Out Mist

The Chaos of Art

The thing we’re creating doesn’t yet exist.
We’re sat in the mud pit, banging our rocks
and shouting at flowers. Suddenly adult, insist
on a Timeframe of Output, firm, at a desk,
mapping out… mist. We can’t yet exist
in such untrammelled time. Thought-barges collide,
now huge in the fog, already. A list?
We detail the tips of our icebergs and teeter,
the swaying unseen bulk dismissed,
placating the busying Protestant mind
while we grow things that don’t yet exist.

I wrote that in 2023, while I was planning a new novel and also the Planning A Novel workshop. It’s a strange business, planning things that don’t exist, which also can’t exist without a bit of planning. You might have an exciting heap of ideas (as I did with the workshop) or reams of first draft (as I did with the novel). It has a definite existence in potentia, but… well, it doesn’t exist.

I plan a lot of things that don’t exist. Novels, courses, workshops. Every year, when I find out the two new Summer of Writing workshops, I set about writing the workshop descriptions: a line or two introducing the topic, fine; a paragraph of what we’ll cover, cool; and then a paragraph beginning “By the end of this workshop, you’ll have…” My brain skids to a halt so fast it leaves tyre tracks.

How can I possibly say that? I don’t know! The workshop doesn’t exist yet! I haven’t made it! I frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk. At some point, in the next day or two, my brain will leap forward confidently and declare, “Come on, it’s easy. If you went on a workshop described like that, what would you expect to have done by the end? Cos that’s probably what that bit should be? Duh.” And I briskly scribble that final line.

I’ve tried writing down that sage impatient advice, for future years, but it doesn’t work. I still need the “frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk” routine. Somewhere in that process, I’m working it out: mapping out mist.

Fog

Fires, canal-side grey. The
faint sparks drown in air. Light
fades and swells, ballooning
flimsy round a lost lamp.
Follow the path – but it’s gone.
Feel for barbed, bare hawthorn:
find where escaped thoughts hide.

The frown-scribble-crossing-out bit is feeding your brain all the puzzles you want it to solve. The moments that you’re walking, or staring out the window, thinking you’re not thinking but actually thinking very hard, are often the most productive. But you also need to capture all those mist-emerging thoughts, and order them so you can find them again. But how do you order something which has no order, because, again, it doesn’t exist yet? And you can’t have too much order, too soon: you need to keep the possibilities open.

Focus

Fixed stare – at nothing – I
float: the brambles have spread…
folding origami
flowers with unseen hands…
Focus! But as my dreams
flit, I see their work: they
fix what I’m not watching.

That’s wild mental work. During this work, I often painstakingly devise the exact thing I need to help me capture ideas. To draw these felt-tip rectangles, it would help to have a straight edge – a piece of cardboard, perhaps? I could mark the length and height of the rectangles on the cardboard, so they’d all be the same. Something firm enough to press a felt-tip against, with regular units of measurement I’d have to create… Oh, look, I’ve invented the ruler. Well done, me.

These pieces of paper: they belong together. But their order might change: I can’t staple them. I need something like a staple, but which I can easily put on and take off. Something that slides on, instead of piercing the paper. Perhaps, with a longer length of thin metal than a staple, I could twist it to fashion some kind of… Oh. I’ve invented paperclips. Again. I’m the Elon Musk of stationery.

When your mind is that full of half-seen story, you become simultaneously absolutely brilliant and very stupid. It helps to have stationery, for a start. A lot of stationery, if only to save yourself the trouble of inventing it from first principles. I’ve gradually learnt to add all the relevant stationery to my writing bag. For the first Planning A Novel workshop, I put in my biggest ever order, to create what we variously termed the “stationery villages” or “non-stationary stationery”:

And alongside the stationery, techniques. Over the years, and some eleven or so novels, I've worked out principles and processes, strategies that now seem as simple as paperclips. I lay my notes on those next to me, alongside the paperclips, the post-its, the slide-binders and felt-tips. I know that even though I haven't yet mapped out this mist, I have the tools of my creative cartography right there: the approaches for how to map out mist.

Esoteric problems often have deliciously simple solutions. "This is how you join pieces of paper you'll later re-order." "This is how you turn a series of brick story walls into things you can explore." "This is how you free your mind to work on one piece of the puzzle, without the whole Jenga-tower of thought falling down." Because if you can sort out the practicalities, the rest of your head is free for the esoteric. We need both: the simple solutions, and the respect for the esoteric, the seemingly-invisible work we’re doing.

And as you veer between the mapping and the mist, in strange ways, with a lot of apparently mindless staring at starlings and some seemingly pre-school-style Busyness With Felt-Tips, you’re conjuring up something that will, and increasingly does, exist.

Lapse

Light slips, between soft sounds:
loose as humming, it’s a
lilt of a moment, mind,
life – a caesura in
liturgy: we forget
lists, briefly, slide into
liquid thoughts, lipid ways.

The Planning A Novel workshop is running on 9 August 2025 in Oxford, exploring how to support all those strange kinds of thinking, heaps of practical solutions, and a truckload of lovely stationery. You can see the complete list of workshops, past reviews, and how to book here.

Why Can't They Remember?!

It’s one of the most maddening things. You excitedly present the next instalment of your story to your writing group, your writing buddy, your friend who’s eagerly reading alongside your writing. You can’t wait for their reaction: their shock at your Dramatic Reveal, their thrill at the plot twist, their emotion at the most moving thing you’ve ever written…

Instead, they’re drawing a blank. They can’t remember who the character even is or confuse them with someone completely different. They’ve forgotten that plot thread, so your carefully constructed Dramatic Reveal lands with all the impact of a wet dish cloth. They’re asking “Is this about X character?” when it’s clearly five hundred years before: for crying out loud, it even says so on the page, right there, in the middle of that paragraph, see? “Five hundred years”. And that character: there was a whole scene about her, in chapter four! And that Dramatic Reveal: you have your notes from before; one of them spotted your foreshadowing and guessed what was coming! Are they even bothering to read your writing? How can they not remember?!

Sometimes, in writing group, we’ve discussed whether it’s because we’re not reading like “real” readers. “Real” readers don’t have to wait a week or a fortnight for the next instalment; they can just turn the page. “Real” readers aren’t following the story over a couple of years; they might finish the book in a month, a week, or even a single day of holiday.

It’s true, we’re not reading like “real” readers. We’re reading with our pens out, underling favourite bits, spotting repetitions, scribbling notes in the margin. We’re going back over the whole section in group, discussing it at length. Sometimes we’re reading the same scene again, rewritten with its previous issues ironed out. We’re paying incredibly close attention.

And those “real” readers, with the complete book in their hand? They’re reading in the bath. On the bus or the tube. In bed with their eyes drooping. On the sofa, curled up with a head full of flu. They’re listening while they chop vegetables for dinner or while they navigate the traffic on their way to and from work.

Every time, the group comes to the same conclusion: the gaps in time are more than balanced out by the incredibly close attention we’re paying to each other’s work. So if we can’t remember those details, the “real” readers don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.

Of course it’s frustrating and disappointing. Of course we’re tempted to pull up the exact passages that our writing buddies seem to have not even read or had wiped from their minds. But if they can’t remember, that’s a problem in the writing, which needs fixing in the writing.

As a teacher, I have a mantra: if a student doesn’t understand, that’s my fault, not theirs. It’s literally my job to help them understand. The same is true for us as writers: if readers don’t remember, that’s on us and it’s our job to help them. If two people in my group remember and one doesn’t, it still needs fixing. That’s a third of my readers confused, so why not make it clearer?

There are lots of things we want our readers to be wondering about. What’s going to happen next. If X is a bad ’un or is going to turn out trustworthy. Whether Y and Z will end up together. If that’s a clue or a red herring. We want to save the reader’s headspace for all of that, not squander it with them trying to work out the basics of who characters are, what happened before, and when even is this.

Frustrating as it may be to encounter the problem, fixing it is blissfully rewarding. It’s not like ironing a bug out of some code or correcting a spelling error, a dutiful necessary task. It is rich with discovery and delight. As you go back to make those characters more memorable and find ways to sneak in reminders, they leap to fuller life than they ever did before. As you seed memory-hooks into that past scene and weave them in to the new one, both turn thick with vivid detail and new story possibilities. When the phrase “five hundred years before” isn’t registering and you make everything look, feel, smell like it’s five hundred years ago, you discover astonishing new depths to draw on.

And even if you had to bite your tongue so hard it hurt, when you were getting feedback, now you can loosen it to thank them – because by flagging up the problem for you, they’ve helped you discover all this.

Then the next time you’re writing, you remember to create and seed those details in from the start, which embeds them even deeper in the story and opens up richer story possibilities. And then, when you’re asking the group if they remember X, they’re saying “Of course, how could I forget her? She’s the one…” and “Yes, absolutely! That was the bit where…”

A Poem for Every Moment

For years, I waited for poems to come to me. I'd coax their arrival with long walks; I'd catch fragments and phrases, and wait patiently for them to build. When it came to writing stories and novels, I'd long since learnt not to wait for inspiration, but I firmly believed poems were different. They were mystical, magical, elusive. If I had an evening to myself, I'd make a Special Occasion of it: light candles, put on music, pull out my notebook and pen, and Await Poems. They often didn't arrive.

It's not that I didn't take my poetry as seriously as my fiction. I took it very seriously. I spent hours editing my poems; I faithfully entered and re-entered the few I had to competitions; I attended poetry events; I painstakingly assembled a chapbook and submitted it to a few publishers; I got a paid critique from a very experienced and kind poet.

I wish I could say my poems were better for that near-religious respect and all that work, but they weren't. They were stiff and stilted. Their imagery, so painstakingly sought, was dull. While my fiction leapt from strength to strength, my poetry languished behind.

In retrospect, I was like a lonely person hungering for company while keeping myself locked indoors away from people, never so much as picking up my phone. I genuinely didn't know that I could step out, in every weather, to go and meet some poems. 

Then one year I tried the April Poem-a-Day challenge. That was the year that everything changed. Every day, I wrote a poem, regardless, and it turned out all the poems were there, waiting for me, all along. Suddenly my stiff stilted over-worked little oeuvre was swept aside by this bright new tide of lively vivid poems, bursting with surprising imagery and unexpected thoughts. I learnt to stop Taking Poems Seriously and get to know them playfully, instead, trying out new forms with doggerel, seeing what happened if I set myself a particular challenge, letting the words themselves decide where things went. And my poems vaulted in quality.

I continued writing a poem a day for 32 months. Rather than poems being tremulous fragile things that I had to create the perfect moment for, I discovered types of poems for every possible moment. Whatever I wanted to do, there was a poem for that. So here, for whatever moment you're in, is a poem that's waiting for you.

Are you in love? If it’s yearning and secret, try a tanka or katauta. To go more in depth, a sonnet of any kind. (There are many kinds beyond the Shakespearean sonnet.) If it’s obsessive, lustful, or tantalising, the drumming repetitions of villanelles, pantoums, and triolets await. If it’s joyful, go wild with the repetition in a roundelay.

If you’re grieving, haiku are there to hold the frozen moments. The ghazal is ready to be added to as long as you need it.

If you want to write a poem for someone else, try a chant, a charm, an ode, or a shape poem. If you want to write about a place, a haibun, a pastoral, an Old English poem or a Pleiades all fit perfectly. If you want to tell a story, you want a ballad, a terza rima, or anything in anapest. If you’re in the mood for something funny, try common measure, Skeltonic verse, a rubliw, or monotetra – though monotetra’s also quite happy to turn creepy, if you want it to.

If you want to explore an idea that’s clearly outlined in your mind, try a list poem, a fold poem, a sonnet, a cinquain chain, or a quatern. If you just have the starting point of an idea and want to write to discover, see what you find out by writing an  Old English poem, a chain poem, a rondeau redoublé, a golden shovel, a Pleiades, a terzanelle, a treochair – and if you really want to explore it in depth, a sestina.

If you have no idea what to write about or you’d rather rub chilli in your eyes than spend time with your thoughts right now, there are heaps of poems that will still let you write, which only need a word, a phrase, an artwork, or a short extract, none of which need be yours, to kick them off: ekphrasis, a coupling poem, a golden shovel, a Pleiades, an acrostic poem, a glosa, or a Venn poem.

If you’re determined to write a poem but you only have a few minutes, no problem. Dash off an elevenie, a haiku, a lai, a katauta, a nonet, a tanka, a lune, a rubliw, or a cinquain. If you want to spend hours on an absurd poetic challenge, try an acrostic wreathed sestina. (I've only written one. It nearly broke my brain.) And if you just want to write a poem about drinking wine in the evening, there’s even one for that: an anacreontic!

You don’t need to know any of these types of poems, yet. Before I started the poem-a-day practice, I could probably have listed only sonnet, villanelle, and haiku, off the top of my head. You meet them by writing them. You don’t have to wait for them: they’re there, waiting for you.

If you want to explore heaps of types of poems, in friendly supportive company, the Meddling with Poetry course is running this Feb – March, with both online and in-person options, and bookings close on 31 January. Each of the eight weekly sessions is themed around a type of poem to explore aspects of poetry: fresh language, musicality, and rhythm. Plus your bonus weekly booklets gradually assemble into a fantastic little poetry bible of 56 forms, complete with contemporary examples, which you can constantly dip back into. Find out more here.

How to feed your creativity

If you need a creative boost – if you're feeling a bit humdrum and low, if you missed out on your holidays with that rest and fresh stimulation, if you want to feel more bubbly and blossoming again – how about a Creativity Project? Here's how.

When I designed the Starting Points course, I decided it was vital to include an introduction to creativity as well – not just at the outset but to run that throughout the eight-week structure. I was thinking of students who might be entirely new to creativity, who might need permission to "squander" time like that, who might not yet know how those seemingly unrelated activites feed our creativity, who might be so habituated to efficiency that they accidentally cut out of their lives the exact stuff they need for their writing. So alongside the whistlestop tour of types of creative writing, I put together a whistlestop tour of essential creative practices to give my students each week, as "Creative Activity vouchers". Actual little vouchers, on coloured card, that they could tuck in their purse or pocket.

What I didn't expect was what an amazing boost this would give me, every time I run the course. As any good teacher would, I give myself a voucher too and carry out the same activities across that week. Suddenly, my life and my creativity blossom. I thought I was pretty decent at maintaining my creative practices... but what a tonic those vouchers and that little extra commitment are!

A selection of my creative activities from a past Starting Points course

On the surface, none of the activities have anything to do with creative writing and most of them seem an indefensible use of time. (That's why I made the vouchers: to help people defend that time.) Efficiency is the enemy of creativity, though. Firstly, to be efficient, you have to be doing something you've done before. I can make a very efficient dinner if it's something I've made twenty times before. A new recipe or a new technique is going to be slow and kitchen-chaos. Doing anything new is "inefficient". Secondly, efficiency relies on routine - you know what you need to do, you rattle through the steps in the right order, you walk the route home you know, and so on. It's efficient, but after a while it becomes stultifying, even deadening, as routine slowly dessicates into a rut. And thirdly, efficiency depends on stamping out that "loose" time. Walking home? Catch up on a work podcast! In the shower? Yell your shopping list at Alexa! Waiting for a friend? Whip out your phone and clear some of those emails!

Efficiency is not a bad thing. I'm unbelievably efficient in my admin time and my housekeeping – so that I can spend the rest of my time more fruitfully. But you can't be creative and efficient at the same time. If I'm writing or creating a course or a workshop, the clock-watching stops. Idea-time doesn't get measured. And of course, in the inevitable creative paradox, the less "efficient" I try to be while creating and the more "inefficient" I allow my creative practice to be, the easier the ideas come, the faster the insights leap.

Even more joyfully, the same things that feed our creativity are also the things that make our lives more relaxing, more interesting, and more fun. I remembered that in the nick of time in April 2021. I had two weeks off, barely able to leave the house much less go on holiday anywhere, and my partner would be working the whole time. I thought, "Oh, I'll just write for two weeks," and then I pulled myself up short. I already knew I was both dog-tired and creatively starved by a long year of pandemic. So I figured, "Physician, heal thyself!" and, using what I teach in the Starting Points course, brainstormed a wildly various list of possible activities for myself, for my staycation.

On the eve of my first Staycation day, I jokingly wrote an "itinerary" on Facebook, holiday-brochure style. The next day, I found having that little plan already set out was hugely helpful. So I kept on with it, the evening before or that morning each day, while my Facebook friends indulged me and cheered me on. Here are four of my Staycation Itineraries:

I tried to make sure that each day included something outdoors and physical, something cooking-based (one of my favourite ways to relax), something new, something I hadn't done in ages, and something where my mind was left to float, whether in its own stories or into an audio drama: in short, variety. I also felt that a bit of effort was necessary. I really was tired enough that without making a plan and making an effort, I could've spent the two weeks drinking endless coffee and scrolling through my phone. But that's not rest, that's ennui. Refreshing rest does, oddly, take a bit of effort. It's the same effort, I reasoned, as when you're on actual holiday and you do bother to look up opening times, to go see that ruin, to climb the hillside to see the fires, and so on. And knowing myself, I made extra sure that I didn't overplan the days: most of the "activities" were about 20 minutes max, with plenty of time to stop for coffee in a "pretty little coffee shop" (the kitchen island). So those were my principles: variety; a bit of effort; not too strict / packed. I also had a fourth principle: I didn't map out two weeks of projects, I only planned one day's "itinerary" at a time, with that initial brainstorm to refer to.

I had a frikken brilliant time. After the two weeks, I felt completely rejuvenated and bubbly. And lots of the little activites I'd returned to hung around in the weeks and months after, continually enriching my days. Some of what I'd done was extremely useful (the gardening). Some, pretty mystifying. (The covered boxes are very pretty, and completely mystified my partner, who kept asking unhelpful questions like "What are they for?" They stayed in the conservatory, very pretty, and empty, for several years, and have since began to house assorted student materials: 12 little staplers with googly eyes; 6 one-minute sandtimers; colourful dice; vital creative-writing-teaching stuff.) Some of it was useful (learning to make pies) but with time pressure, would have been absolute hell. The point was giving myself the freedom to play. Sometimes playing means we're allowed to do stuff badly or we're allowed to do purposeless things. Sometimes, playing means allowing enough time: without the pressure of time bearing down, everything can feel like play.

I've returned to the subject of time repeatedly, but you don't actually need swathes of time to feed your creativity. The Creative Activity vouchers are each for one hour, for that week. That might be an hour in one chunk. It might be two half-hour sessions, or three twenty-minuters. It might be ten minutes a day each day except class day. And yet those brief sips are enough to be transformative. Within the classes, I try to allow a bit of time to think about each activity in advance – a couple minutes of brainstorming, loosely coming up with ideas rather than Assigning Tasks To The Week. A menu, not a schedule.

If you need a creative boost – if you're feeling a bit humdrum and low, if you missed out on your holidays with that rest and fresh stimulation, if you want to feel more bubbly and blossoming again – how about a Creativity Project? You can even name it, Bond-style, Operation Creativity. Set yourself a month, or eight weeks, or twelve weeks: something clearly defined, because that clear definition helps galvanise you to do it. Give yourself an hour a week, divvied up as you please and as suits your life. Brainstorm a variety of things to do, as many different things as possible. Decide what you're doing a week at a time, or a session at a time, not everything in advance, to keep that lovely element of surprise. Join forces with your writing group if you have one, to inspire and encourage each other, or report to indulgent friends, like I did with my staycation. Keep adding to the brainstorm throughout: more ideas of fun things, new things, silly things. And little by little, feel your joie de vivre bubble back up and your creativity increase.

If you want more external structure and motivation, if you need the boost but don't have the energy to give yourself the boost, the Starting Points course will give you exactly that. Plus, each week, a different type of writing to dabble in, a writing skill, a starting point for ideas, and a writing maxim. You can read about it and book here.