Writing Time & the Angel with a Flaming Sword

“Waiting for the muse” is how many of us start our writing lives. We wait for inspiration to strike, then rush to the page. At that stage, the idea of planning to write feels workaday, even distasteful, a betrayal of an enraptured state.

I believed in this approach, sincerely, for years. It just doesn’t really work. Stories peter out. Novels inch along so slowly that we’ve outgrown them before they’re halfway through. Poems are rare as hen’s teeth. And as adult responsibilities build up around us, it gets even less viable.

I thought it was impossible to write at set times. It’s not: it’s hugely inspiring. I thought it was unromantic to have set writing time. But I found a new romance: writing time is the Garden of Eden. And like the Garden of Eden, it needs an angel with a flaming sword to protect it.

The truth is, writing will never be urgent – not unless you get a two-book deal, and you have to put in a lot of non-urgent time to get to that point. Meanwhile, the rest of life is clamouring with urgency. So it’s up to us, and only us, to prioritise our writing.

This isn’t about “should”s and all those ghastly shouldn’t-you-be-writing memes. Writing is play, a joy, a delight. We do it because we want to. I believe in never setting plans or goals based on “should”s: drill down from the “should” to find the “want to” within it. If you can’t find any want-to at all, is it even worth keeping that plan? If you do want to, then like a relationship, you can commit to it and set clear boundaries for that commitment. Because you want to.

And the best commitment you can make for your writing is writing time: to set, protect, and use the time.

Setting the Time

Setting the time means calendar time. Block the time off in your calendar; talk about it as a fixed calendar plan: “I’m writing on Thursday evening.” When the time is, and how much time, is completely up to you. Some people work well in small sips: one of my students catches the bus to work half an hour early and writes in a coffee shop opposite. Some people (me included) can’t concentrate with other tasks rapidly approaching and need a swathe of time: the whole of a weekend morning, or all the time from finishing work until bedtime on Tuesdays. Some work best early in the morning, while the world’s asleep. Some (like me) are stupid blinking owls in the morning, but can write on into the evening. Some people like to write every day; some don’t. Set the time that works for you.

Once you’ve set the time, keep checking in with yourself regularly, to see what’s working and what’s not. If it’s not working, don’t just blame yourself: dig into why it’s not working and see how to fix that. If you’re too lonely to lock yourself away that evening, then your writing time needs to be when you’re already socially topped-up. If dinner prep stole two hours of writing time, then look up some quicker or batch-cooking recipes. If you felt despondent and uninspired because you had PMT, consider writing around your cycle. If you were too overstimulated to settle into it, think about ways to soothe yourself, like spending time near water.

And if all the adjustments still fall short, check if your plan is realistic and fair. For ages, I tried to write two evenings a week, and consistently only managed three evenings a fortnight. Eventually, I deduced that with the best will in the world, that was how much I could actually fit in, so I changed the plan: three evenings a fortnight.

As I explained in Writing Habits Are Like Punting, it’s about gentle continuous course correction, not Big Pushes. Bit by bit, tweak and adjust when, how often, and how much time works for you. To start, I suggest you check in with yourself weekly. Take five minutes to look at what worked, what didn’t, and what you can tweak.

When you have your writing time, the rest of the time is not writing time. This is equally transformative. So many of us live in a constant fog of “I should probably be writing” guilt, which in turn sours our relationship with writing. Deciding when we’re not writing means we get to look forward to writing and enjoy all the rest of life in the other time. No more guilt.

Protecting the Time

Once you set the time, everything comes rushing in to try and steal that time. It’s like blood in the water for time-hungry sharks: chores, work over-running, interruptions, tiredness, overstimulation, even very lovely people and people you dearly love.

That’s why you need to protect the time like an angel with a flaming sword. As Lucifer says in the TV show, “the Flaming Sword, the weapon that guarded Eden, the weapon that can cut through anything, even the Gates of Heaven itself,” – yes, that sword. Or to continue the Lucifer metaphors (I’m watching it for the first time and just love it), like the scene where Amenadiel has to block the hospital door to save Lucifer’s life, and remain completely immoveable no matter what. We’re writers; we’re storytellers. Go mythic with your metaphors; go Gandalf “You shall not pass”; whatever works for you. Remember what I said at the start: writing time will never be urgent. It’s up to us to protect it.

Keep checking in with yourself, reflecting, and adjusting. Keep looking for practical solutions. Did work overrun? Well, if your writing time is earlier in the week, work doesn’t have a chance to overrun yet. Did people interrupt you? Maybe you can write somewhere they’re not. The more you practise protecting the time, the better you get at it.  

Using the Time

My complete saying is, “Protect your writing time like an angel with a flaming sword and within the time be free.” Once you’re inside the writing time, there’s no clock-watching, list-ticking, word-counting. I think of it as a clock without hands: the time is contained and protected; inside, it’s timeless. You are under no pressure to use the time as productively as possible or to be efficient. Writing doesn’t respond well to those, anyway. The measure of good writing time is time spent writing.

Time spent writing doesn’t even have to mean you produced new words: heaps of valuable writing activities make no difference to our word counts. If there are writing-things you need to do “before you can write”, like research, brainstorming, plot musing, character invention, etc, do those in your writing time. They’re part of the writing. So long as you’re protecting the time from all non-writing things, you can use it for any writing-y thing at all.

To make it easier to use the time, and to stay inside the writing time, think about your writing space and sensory cues.

Your writing space

Lots of people find it easier to write away from home, especially if they’re responsible for the bulk of chores and mental load of home. Plus being away from home means that you stay in writing-space even when your concentration span lapses and you need a break. See what your area has to offer: cafés, pub gardens, community spaces, libraries (if you’re in Oxford, we have lots of libraries available), etc. In good weather, you can write outdoors in parks and meadows.

If you’re writing at home, set up your writing space so it works well for you. Maybe it needs tidying and decluttering, maybe nicer lighting. If it’s the same space as you work at, how can you change it up? (In my twenties, when I worked from home and home was a single room, I switched on fairy lights, lit a candle, and sat on the opposite side of the desk, for writing time.) The same way you’d make an effort with the space to delight someone you fancy, for a date, make it special for your writing. And part of that is..

Sensory cues

Sensory cues make it so much easier to slip into writing headspace, and into flow. A writing playlist. A candle that smells of freshly-cut grass. A mug of Lapsang Souchong, which you only ever drink when you’re writing. An age-soft sarong thrown over the table. The side-lamp and the fairy lights instead of the big light. Think about sounds, scents, textures, lighting.

Whatever sensory cues work for you and your space, use them whenever you’re writing, and only when you’re writing. As the association builds, they become more and more effective as a shortcut into your writing state of mind. I’ve been using that writing playlist since 2020, never playing it unless I’m writing or rereading my writing, and at this point it activates me like I’m a sleeper cell. Music on: Megan writes. Choose your sensory cues and let them develop with time.

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Writing time is your Garden of Eden and you’re the angel with a flaming sword. You’re not on your own with this, though – the obstacles, the need for practical strategies, the delight.

Want more writing advice? In The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get expert advice on tap, help developing your writing, and the chance to connect with your writing community.

Find out more and join here.

Happy writing!

Write by Hand if You Can

Before I launch in, a big caveat: write by hand if you can. If you can’t, don’t even bother reading this. I vividly remember a phone GP telling me in 2016 to “go for more walks” – clearly missing the bit on my notes that I needed a wheelchair to leave the house. No-one needs to hear the benefits of something they can’t do. So if that’s you and writing by hand, read The Joy is in the Doing instead!

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Still here? Then I’m assuming you can write by hand, so here’s why you should!

Why writing by hand is such a wonder

The research I used to quote on this showed that people wrote faster, better, and more by hand than typing. But that study looked at children and was in 2009. We’re adults and we’re even more digital now. So should we still write and plan by hand?

Yes! This 2025 research round-up shows an astonishing array of benefits:

• You process information more deeply.
• You retrieve memories better.
• You’re more creative.
• You can regulate stress better.
• You’re more mindful.
• You draw out more nuanced feelings.
• You increase your agency.
• You increase your focus.

Exactly what we need for stories, especially novels, and poems: full focus and concentration, a clear memory, creativity, subtlety. Everything we want from and for our writing: immersion, mindfulness, a sense of agency, a flow-state.

(Btw, that article’s written in a weird “Well done you for being a Better Person” way, but you don’t have to be Already Superior, you can just write by hand more and enjoy the benefits.)

And this 2025 study, The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing—Who Wins the Battle? found that “Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.”

Writing by hand has other practical benefits, too:

• You can write anywhere. Leave your work desk and write somewhere else in the house. Leave the house, if chores / people are distracting, and write in a coffee shop or pub garden. If the weather’s lovely, write outdoors. (My Tips for a Summer of Writing has heaps of suggestions on that.)
• You escape digital distractions. Paper has no incoming notifications. No tempting buttons just a click away. No thesaurus, search engine, or (heaven forefend) genAI as a flow-stopping crutch for every momentary doubt. It’s just you, the ink, and the paper.
• You can’t word-count. Word-counting is the enemy of focus and flow: it takes you from the joy of doing into measuring the worth of writing with a ruler. When you can’t word-count, your focus stays inside the writing itself.

The immersion, joy, and focus of planning and writing by hand transforms the experience. I bloody love my laptop, but it’s not for composing on. I will hammer through my inbox on the keyboard, for speed and convenience, but for poems, stories, even this blog post, I pull out my pen.

Your pen

You absolutely need a good pen to write by hand, but that doesn’t mean forking out a fortune. As I wrote in my Top Ten Tips for Students, ballpoints rely on friction to pull the ink out, which is why they tire your hand so much. Fountain pens don’t use friction: they just glide, and they don’t have to be expensive. With the pricy ones, you’re often paying for a brand name and a more expensive case: even the cheap ones have perfect nibs. I use a £10 Helix and it’s a dream. 

If you’re left-handed, try fineliners or gel pens. To test a pen, hold it lightly between two fingers and drag it gently across the page. If it leaves a clear line, it's a good ’un: it doesn’t need friction to work.

Your paper

What you write on is completely up to you and will often vary from project to project. For novels and short stories, I write on A4 lined paper, which I staple together as I go. For extended freewriting or poems, I use hardcover Paperblanks or A5 notebooks, which fit in my handbag. (I like a hard cover to press on.) People with pockets often like Moleskin journals, as they fit easily and comfortably into pockets.

If you use notebooks, make sure they’re ones you’re not afraid to use wantonly. I used to stick to “Black n Red” notebooks or the plain-coloured WH Smiths ones, as the pretty ones felt too special to use. These days, whenever someone asks what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I say “A hardcover Paperblank notebook, just a bit bigger than A5, with lined paper, ideally one of the Medievalish designs”: I now have plenty, so I can use them fearlessly!

If it’s an artisanal notebook, make sure the paper is hot-pressed. Often, handmade and craft-fair notebooks use cold-press paper: the fibres will catch on your pen and the ink will bleed. Apart from that, write on whatever's easy for you to write on and to carry where you want it.

Typing up

You want digital versions of your writing, of course. You can type up whenever suits you. You can type up when you’ve drafted a scene, then print it and redraft or edit by hand, or write the whole story then type it up. You can use typing to warm you up at the start of a writing session or for low-brain parts of the day. (I have a 4pm brain-slump I often use.) You can plan your typing around your hormonal cycle or moods. Whatever works for you and your process.

Just as you want a pen that doesn’t hurt, you want a typing-up arrangement that doesn’t hurt. At minimum, that means putting the handwritten text vertical: use a recipe-book holder or balance it against a heavy jar with a crocodile clip and cardboard to hold it in place. If I have lots to type, I also raise my laptop with a couple of thick books, so it’s at eye level, and use a separate keyboard at desk level, for maximum ergonomics. When I was too ill to sit up at my desk, I contrived a cunning armchair arrangement with a lap tray, side-table, recipe stand, and a very thick book.

You can make your typing-up easy and enjoyable, too:

• Put on a playlist. It’s entertaining and also helps with the rhythm of typing. Ideally, a playlist with no vocals in a language you understand, so the words don’t distract you. I love it as a chance to listen to all the music that I’ve still got stashed on iTunes which I can no longer carry about with me.
• Hide the screen distractions. Switch off any notifications and switch to full screen, so you don’t see that familiar task-bar with all its workish associations. In Word, you can also hide its distracting bottom bar that keeps counting words, pages, etc, so you can just focus on typing.
• Type fast and free. Change your settings to not underline any spelling or grammar errors. Switch your autocorrect on and let it autocorrect misspellings. Don’t backspace if you misspell something: just do a spell-check at the end.
• Add your own autocorrect shortcuts: I have dozens of these now. Pa = pirate accordionist. nihs = New Inn Hall Strait, and so on. As well as phrases you type often, you can add your own regular spelling mistakes: my most common one is “catpain” for “captain”.
• Make templates and shortcuts for easy layout. You can follow my techie tips to make your own or download my templates for novels and stories.

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Writing by hand and then typing up may seem like a waste of time when you “could’ve just typed it in the first place”. But when the writing itself is faster, easier, richer, and more joyous, when you can hold onto so much more of the story, be more creative, and write with so much more nuance, when you can write anywhere, when uncapping your pen becomes stepping into flow, it’s so, so worth it. 

What's more, when you discover how much more freely you write by hand, how much more you  produce when you’re focused and in flow, you realise this actually is the faster way. As so often, the scenic route of the path of joy ends up much more efficient than the “efficient” way.

And yes, I did write this by hand!

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If you want to dive into writing by hand and you’re looking for a regular practice or a notebook project, the 30 Days of Writing will be just perfect for you: inspiring writing guidance for poems and/or flash-fiction (very short stories), to use daily or at whatever pace suits you. Including suggestions for how to manage the word-count of flash-fiction when you’re writing by hand!

You can start here and try the first three days for free. Happy writing!

 

Writing for Wellbeing

Writing is a quiet wonder for mental health. There’s a reason so many teenagers dive into writing journals, diaries, and poems, during those years of so much hormone-and-identity upheaval. As we emerge into adulthood, though, we mostly ditch that. We forget what a wonderful help it can be, and we think everything we do has to be “good”.

Here’s a secret: writing can be good and good for us. Sometimes turn by turn; sometimes at the same time. Sometimes just good for us and we turn it into something good later.

I’ve written here before about how much writing can help our wellbeing. In The Wheelchair and the Cushion of Art, I described how it’s helped me navigate heartache, depression, and living with a chronic illness. In The Joy is in the Doing, I wrote about how process-focus brings back the joy (and the productivity!) and how I wrote myself back to health from a massive stress crisis. You Are Not Ark Fleet B explored how during the pandemic, everyone took refuge and respite in the arts – the films, TV, books, music, that helped us hold on: ”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…” And why “even if no-one ever reads what you write, society is better for you writing.”

That’s because writing is amazing for wellbeing.

• Writing gives us respite. Whatever we’re dealing with – stress, heartache, grief, anxiety, illness, crisis, or even high-octane brain-fizzing excitement – we need a break, so we can be strong again tomorrow.
• Play, creativity, and flow-states protect us against stress. They literally physically protect our brains, and help us grow new neural connections, so we can respond more flexibly.
• Writing helps us process things. Instead of staying stuck, writing can hep us move through the emotions and thoughts, and emerge from it.
• Making something supports our sense of self. Crying on the sofa because you’re in so much pain that you can’t even put a ready-meal in the oven sucks. Writing a poem about it doesn’t get the ready-meal in the oven, but now you’re someone crying on the sofa and someone who’s written a pretty spiffing poem. And where the emotion is, there’s also a poem or story there now, as a container to help hold the emotion.
• Writing offers us free self-expression. Our full, varied, and wild selves can emerge on the page. That’s especially useful when our inner self feels constrained by work, by public face, by caring for others first, all the things that adulthood requires of us. From the page, it can even creep more into the world: a freer more playful sense of self.

All of this is good for us, and good for those around us. We’re not being selfish or indulgent by taking time to write. How much better, for our partners, families, friends, colleagues, even people who cut us off in traffic, if we’re rested, unstressed, flexible, able to process our feelings, and whole in our selves? (And it’s easier to ask for help with the ready-meal if you’re not a snapping resentful ball of rage. IME.)

Writing’s not a cure-all or a replacement for all mental-health support. After years of writing a poem a day, when “the blue curtain” kept cropping up, I finally booked therapy for my medical PTSD. Six sessions of EMDR therapy sorted that out, but its presence on my notebook pages took it from the shadows to booking an appointment.

Writing is an amazing power tool in our tool box. So here are my best tips for writing for wellbeing, from an amalgam of research, my experience, and my students’ experiences.

• Write by hand if you can. This has so many benefits that I’ve written a separate blog post about it.
• Don’t wait to feel okay – do it anyway. The same way we don’t wait for a headache to pass before we take a painkiller, you can sit down to write joyfully, grumpily, relaxed, or stressed. It still works.
• Make it a little treat. You don't want to drag a notebook onto a table cluttered with breakfast dishes or open another document straight after work for yet another chore to tick off: treat yourself a little. Sit somewhere you like, make your favourite drink, maybe put some music on. Take yourself out for coffee in a café or pub garden, if writing outside your home helps. Whatever modest effort makes it nicer, even if that's just putting the dishes behind you where you can't see them!
• Drop your standards. This is always true for writing: we need to let ourselves write badly and go for quantity over quality, not so we churn out rubbish, but so we let ourselves experiment. You can still develop as a writer, try new techniques, and write amazing stuff that way. You’re more likely to, if you’re not rigidly demanding perfection from every word. It’s even more important to drop your standards when you’re writing for wellbeing. In that stress-state, I literally muttered “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” on repeat while I wrote. The measure of good writing time, here, is time spent writing. Stun your inner critic with “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” and just write. That’s where the flow lives. It might turn out good later, but let it be rubbish now.
• For fiction, don’t write about you. The more clear blue water between you and the main character, the easier it is to step through the magic doorway into writing-land, as I wrote about in The Characters That Let Your Stories Fly. Try out new characters, new genres, new approaches: variety breeds joy and creativity. It will always be self-expression, because it’s still you writing, the self will out, but of a much freer kind.
• For poems, mix between you and not-you poems. Sometimes you need to blurt or to shape acidic little ditties about exactly what you’re experiencing and feeling: that’s healthy and good. Sometimes you need to take a break and write about spores: that’s also healthy and good. As with stories, the you still emerges; the self will out. My spore poem ended up actually being about my tenuous relationship with hope and a disappointment I feared. It was a stronger poem for being ostensibly about spores, and when the disappointment came, I had the exact poem I needed.
• Try poems with formal constraints: syllable counts, rhymes, metre, specific end words, a refrain to work in, and so forth. Something marvellous happens when you’re excavating a grief but also counting syllables: new objectivity, a you inside and outside the feeling.

In early 2020, I was planning a series of thirty daily Poem Skills to coincide with national poetry writing month (NaPoWriMo) in April. When the pandemic hit in March, I redesigned it to support mental wellbeing, to help people find respite in calm absorbed flow, and ran it on the blog for free. I took all my experience of writing for wellbeing and made sure every topic offered people somewhere interesting, relaxing, or uplifting to put their minds. (The other things we need to express will emerge when they need to – like spores.) I alternated between poems with formal constraints and free verse (with optional forms), for the best of both worlds. I got so many lovely private messages from people who were finding, as I did, how much writing helped. In 2023, I ran it again, inside the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, this time adding flash-fiction (very short story) options in the same spirit of discovery, fun, and mental wellbeing.

And I’m thrilled to offer it to you now: reworked, spruced up, and expanded, as 30 Days of Writing. Whether that’s 30 days in a row, or every few days, or whatever works for you. It’ll teach you loads about poems and stories, because it’s me who made it (I’m a teacher: the self will out), but the sunlight flooding it all is writing for wellbeing. Because writing can be good, and good for us, and a joy.

So if you’re looking for something to write, or an added regular practice, and especially if you want to write for wellbeing, you can start here and try the first three days for free.

I hope it brings you joy, peace, and delight.

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.

This is the time that is no time... Dark Matters

I’m baffled, too, why they accredit Me with such a cheerful personality.  Even the pagans, who at least knew when I rule.  I come between Samhain and Yule.  The time that is no time.  Between the last harvest and the first planting; the barren time.  Between the sun’s slow, agonising death and its much-vaunted rebirth.  (You’d have thought that would be a hint.)  The wheel of the year always keeps turning, and between Yule and Samhain it stops.  And not but: that’s the nature of paradox.  Burn your mind with contradiction like a brand.  Don’t think you can smooth it over with a pat explanation, or it wouldn’t be paradox.  Don’t think you can sit and contemplate it like a fat man under a tree and get around it that way.  It has to hurt: it’s two ideas at war. – "Dark Matters" by Megan Kerr, Astrologica

The finished story, novel, poetry collection, always seems a smooth and perfect thing, as if it just emerged as its full self in steady loops of the pen. The process behind writing is a wilder and more chaotic thing. When writers say in interviews, "So the idea just came, and next thing I knew, I'd written 80,000 words" I want to throw things at the radio: they're lying, they know they're lying, I know they're lying, what I don't know is why they're lying. Why pretend the process never happened? Why kick ladders and make other writers feel like they ought to be able to "start at the beginning, write to the end, and stop" like some Alice in Wonderland fantasy?

Of course I want to share the process: I'm a teacher. But I also think process is a magical, intriguing, and endlessly fascinating thing, and always changes for every story. I originally wrote the post below in 2014, a year after I'd finished the story in question, to share that process – and, ever the teacher, to offer some fun writing springboards for you to enjoy your own process of creating and discovery. Process is messy: embrace it.

The little blue-green clock of the world has spun back to the time that is no time, and my walks, my thoughts about VATMOSS, and my playlists are reminding me of the short story I wrote last year about the time that is no time – so I thought share the process of it as a collage of music, pictures, research, etc (including its playlist – all my writing projects end up with a playlist), and offer up the character-creation technique I used.

Recommended listening while you read: the full playlist or This Night – Black Lab

Inspiration: The brief

Astrologica is a short-story anthology based around the twelve signs of the Zodiac, edited by Allen Ashley (who always gives great briefs). I don't believe in astrology (nor does my heroine), but I wanted to write about Saggitarius, for several reasons:

I’m a Sagittarius myself and the sign’s full of contradictions, which fascinates me.  It’s described as happy-go-lucky – but extremely ambitious: that creates an instant war within the character. The sign’s personality and time of year also conflict: 23 November to 21 December is the heart of what the pagans call “the time that is no time”, a dead time before the sun’s rebirth, leading right up to the cusp of Yule and Christmas, but not quite part of it. I wanted to work out that contradiction between this cheerful, ambitious, creative personality and this leaden, barren time of year. The symbolism of the centaur himself is also contradictory, a battle between body and mind: he’s simultaneously very intellectual and very physical and sensual, a human head and an animal body.
     As I wrote, I found a fourth contradiction. The relentless ambition implies a strong internal locus of control – that is, you believe that what happens is down to you, your achievement, your responsibility, your fault. Believing in astrology, though, says you have no free will: it is fate. A Sagittarian character might reject astrology, but what about Sagittarius himself?
     The challenge then was to create a character and a story that was all those things, and marry the paradoxes. (interview with Alchemy Press)

Despite not believing in astrology, I do recognise myself in the descriptions of Saggitarius in a way I absolutely don't in the other signs – especially in that relentless optimism. With VATMOSS threatening my business, yes, I cried and panicked for a few days, and found the usual earworm coming back: "I get knocked down! But I get up again!..." and thinking in the terms I used to describe Kate Fletcher:

She’s not the kind of woman who weeps.  She’s the kind who scrubs tears off with the backs of her hands and fights on, who gets up every time she’s knocked down, a Chumbawumba chick, motivation of stampeding buffaloes, focus of an arrow held on a taut bow and aimed at the stars… But if she’s going to do emotion, she thinks wryly, it’s going to be big – and already that thought is a lifting-out.  She’s getting up again.  Fight on, she thinks, through unrelenting hours.

I don't think I'm quite as indomitable as her, but perhaps that's part of what we do, in stories and characters: part reflection, part exaggeration, creating a world more powerful and resonant than the one we live in, and that in turn reflects back and makes this world a more powerful, resonant place to be.

Playlist

The story's playlist wasn't the cheerful slap-in-the-face of Chumbawumba, though; it was altogether darker and more eerie, more "DeVotchKa and Wagner: she has a thing for Teutonic grandeur, Russian pessimism." You can listen to the whole thing here. I played the songs again, and again, and again; evening after evening, staring into the dark corners of the living room or lying in the bath, fathoming out a story that for once I couldn't map out and needed to write through blankness and darkness to find. Again and again, I kept coming back to the contradictions, which I couldn't resolve, and somehow I knew it was critical not to resolve them, not to smooth it over into paradox: it had to hurt. It had to be two ideas at war.

Pctures

Much of the time I listened to the playlist while staring at a particular photo album on my computer, scribbling down thoughts that I thought probably wouldn't go into the story, but might... and many, in some form, did.

Slabs of concrete, like suspended rectangles of gravel: as she climbs those steps again each day, into the Physics faculty, she tramples over memories.  She turns her face away from the view down Keble Road towards University Parks, where bright berries hold their frozen drops.

The dogwood is already bare: stark, fire-red branches in a grey whipped world.  The October leaves had their brilliance, but the rains plastered them into the mud.  A few trees fly defiant flags, unseen from beneath umbrellas.

Someone walking along the canal has had a fight with a bouquet – or an accident, or some kind of wild rite of winter.

“All just running alongside me – as if they’d been waiting, like some kind of equestrian escort –” and within her words, the horses and their mystery catch fire, and burn away in conversation.  They’re horses, after all.

Research

I also did obscene amounts of research, especially given that it's a short story (albeit a long short). I stuffed my Evernote and my head and my satchel with research on involuntary autobiographical memory, the scientific absence of free will, the illusion of the self... "You think you’re choosing consciously, but you’re not.  It’s already a done thing.” (Much gratitude to Christian Jarrett of the BPS Research Digest, who always gives good links.) I read a great deal on dark matter and black holes, and the relationship between them. I learnt about two galaxies which NASA had just discovered must be enveloped in dark matter, the position of the pulsar star PSR J1748-2446ad, and WIMPS. I checked the exact weather in 2012, the exact astronomic events visible in Oxford, and the astrological meanings attributed to them. Thanks to the kindness of the Oxford Physics Department, I even got to go into their observatory and have a look at the telescope, while one of the post-docs took time off his research to show me around and answer my questions:

(People are incredibly kind and welcoming to writers. You think you'll never be allowed in to see stuff, but if you just tell them that you're writing about it, they're invariably so generous and helpful.)

And little by little, draft by draft, I wrangled far too much research and far too many contradictions into a story that worked. I also discovered some interesting things about characterisation:

Discoveries

First, "personality systems" like star signs are more useful than I'd thought. I'd dipped into them before, just for fun, but never followed a particular type through to that degree. Sticking to it completely meant I had to keep the contradictions – contradictions I might not have wrapped into the character myself – and make sense of them without negating them. I don't recommend you give every character a star-sign and stick to it religiously, but as an exercise, it's fascinating.

Exercise: Create a star character
Pick a star sign and look up its traits – this is my favourite website for that. Create a character incorporating all those traits: use them all and keep all the contradictions. Use the character's contradictions and flaws to develop their story.

Second, your characters can be the same. Received wisdom is to vary your cast, and much of the time that is a good idea. That said, having two characters who're very alike can work incredibly well: their very similarities can make them clash violently, be each other's downfall, and heighten the traits you're exploring.

If she’d ever imagined meeting a god, which she hasn’t much, she’d have expected things like reverence, transcendence, numinous awe.  Not music, sex, and good conversation.
     “Ah, but you’re one of Mine,” says Sagittarius.  “We get it, the dark and the ferocity and the fun.”
     “Still – you’re more fun than I would’ve thought.”
     “You of all people should know better than that.”
     And she realises.  How she laughs and chatters in company, always off on the next anecdote, burning with ideas – and how she is at home, alone with her aspirations and her thoughts.  How she’ll split her sides laughing with a still-unswallowed mouthful of wine, but the moment pain strikes, she’ll vanish – sociable means never doing the unsociable.  No-one wants to see the tears and the gloomy face, so the sociable reputation is never stained and only the moments alone are pained.  What is He like then, when He’s alone?  What thoughts cripple and blank His flaming mind?
     And the burning arrow.  That, too, is alone.  The outsiders, which is everyone, see the aspiration and the hope and the wild aiming, but never the cost.  And never the secret coal at the heart of it, the private intense desire, the kinetic potential that burns your soul –
     It burns and it hurts, but there has to be something, always.  No Sagittarian could live without some shining unreachable goal, what else is worth living for?  Except, she thinks, except –, but all that was torn away from her, all that has no place in the barren time which is no time, all that burns up in the fires of aspiration.  At least she knows what drove her to destruction now: a force as vast and impersonal as gravity.  Dark matter, bending her to its will as it bends the light.
     “What do you want?” she asks.
     “I’m a god,” He says.  “What’s left to want?”

Exercise: like meets like
What if your star character met someone with the same traits? How would the second character differ as a person? How would they relate / collide / clash? What would happen, between them?

You can read an interview with me about "Dark Matters" here, a review of Astrologica here, and buy it here. You can also read more about the messy and all-important joy of process here: The joy is in the doing.

Things I've learnt: Keep your fragments

To celebrate the release of Rope of Words, I'm writing a series of blog posts about its writing process and the various illuminations that came from sailing straight into the rocks at every turn. At least I have the advantage of hindsight, to know the story did work out in the end. The artist shared her process from the outset, with no such reassurance!

When I was growing up, my mother had a treasure chest. It was a pine box about a foot and a half high, a foot and a half deep, and three feet wide. It was full of jewel-colours - the kind of colour-names I now excise from my writing - crimson, jade, azure, ruby, sapphire... Its textures were equally indulgent: lace, satin, silk, brocade. Some of them could even have been described, perfectly legitimately, as "diaphanous". Dip your hand into that and you could swim back in imagination to any luxurious fantastical medieval setting you wished. Until you were told off for getting your sticky hands all over the fabric, obviously.

This is something humans DO

If you'd like to step back in time and across space into that candelit backroom of a pub in Oxford, you can listen to the musicians that were playing the night I had this epiphany here on Spotify.

The first time I came to this event, I was an arrogant little tit.

In the back room of The Gardener's Arms, an assortment of humans curled on sofas and perched on stools. The grab-bag of people included young narrowboat dwellers, embryonic hipster Angry Young Men, retirees, coiffed and courtured North Oxfordians. The point where our curving tangents met was this: everyone had poetry somewhere about their person.

The first time I came, as a rather young and very arrogant little tit, I'd spent several hours choosing my best poetry and had secret fantasies of being Discovered. I mentally evaluated every poem I heard. I listened, quietly appalled, to one person's first attempts at poetry, mortified on their behalf - behaving like a self-appointed opera buff sneering at someone's sing-song. As I said: arrogant little tit. I cringe with shame at the memory. Mortified, at myself.

The next time I came, I was prepared for the unexpected breadth of quality. I read two intensely personal poems, curious how they'd feel read to a roomful of strangers, unsure if they were good enough. I was vaguely expecting some kind of appraisal, praise or condemnation. I got what everyone got: a warm, attentive reception. I puzzled over how to use that to measure my poetry.

The next time, I finally got it, like a clash of cymbals: poetry is something humans do. Like a sing-song in a pub, like cooking food to share, it's not about whether you're "good enough" to take part, no-one is standing in judgement over you, it's something humans do and something everyone's allowed to do. My arrogant-little-tit elitism, my anxious evaluating insecurity, were soundly and happily kicked to the curb. Perhaps the founder's Quaker background helps create this open atmosphere, supported by the fairylights, lamps, and candles in bottles they set up each time. It is, as its website says, a warm welcoming space for the spoken word. This does not mean the quality is bad, far from it. It means this is a space where that's not the only point, where you're not desperately striving, where you're not trying to measure everything, where you can do this because it's something humans do.

I say "Writing is my life" and mean it, absolutely. I believe passionately in striving for excellence, I wrestle with the balance between creative process and product, my perfectionism is alternately a spur to quality and crippling paralysis. And sometimes, I need to chill the hell out.

All of human activity seems to have its artistic heights and its daily use. Cooking at home and Michelin-starred cheffing. Handwriting and lettering art. Singing in the shower and professional opera. When we're little, we're allowed to do all of it, but in some areas we lose our sense of permission as we grow older. Even in the areas we keep, we sometimes forget their origin. When an art form loses its roots in human activity, its blood supply is cut off. This is true for the art form, but also for us, as artists.

Too much time on Twitter and I start to believe the hype: that it's all about publishing, publicity, profile, all the exteriors. My writing withers. Too much time with my own ambitious perfectionism and my writing tenses, hardens, freezes. But it's not about either of those, at its core: it's about this being something that humans do.

Ian Trinder and Josie Webber performing in the music slot in the middle. You can hear the album they were playing from that night here on Spotify. I could peacefully drown in their music.

Every time I go to Hear the Word, it resets me, regrounds me. Every time, I come away floating a foot above the pavement, buoyed with relief, my love for writing resanguinated.

In Walking in this World, Julia Cameron recommends an exercise for the kind of overexposed / perfectionist freeze we can so easily slip into, without those reminders: stop being so bloody grandiose about it and use your precious cultivated skill to do something little for someone. Write a little story for a kid you know. Draw a picture for a friend. Take it from its elevated heights back into the realm of human activity. Whatever the thing you love is, remember, it's not only an art form: it's something humans do.

Keep writing

When you finish a writing project, you need to celebrate, rest, and reflect - and also keep writing. Over the Christmas holidays, you need down time and a break - and to keep writing. In 7 things to do after NaNoWriMo, I talked about how important this is:

Reflect on your writing

I have two twin pillars that have helped me shape my life closer to what I want it to be and make my writing happen. One is Jinny Ditzler's book, Your Best Year Yet; the other is The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Between them, they help me straddle that eternal creative conundrum of product versus process, setting out to achieve something and finish something versus allowing space to play and make mistakes. Both have helped me see the value of reflecting. These are the questions I use to think about my writing practice, for your own use. I've given my own answers beneath each one.