Plant yourself some seedlings

I want you to plant seeds for your writing – metaphorically, but also literally.

When I named The Writers' Greenhouse, I spent months hunting for a concept that would express exactly how I see helping writers. It's not about giving rigid rules, as anything around “school” suggests, and it's not about issuing formulae or dot-to-dot like a colour-by-numbers art kit. When I explain the principles of teaching creative writing, I usually reach to fine art for my metaphors. But when I explain my approach to writing, images of plants growing and of gardening start to sprout. A greenhouse isn't a hot house – it isn't an artificial environment to force fragranceless blooms – but rather a place to tend plants, a safe place for seedlings to get a good start before they're planted out into the garden. That's what I want to help people do with their writing.

The plant metaphors are often most powerful when they're unspoken or when they run alongside actual, physical planting. That's why I want you to literally plant some seeds, actual literal seeds in actual literal soil. And here's how, alongside some thoughts of how this embodied metaphor can help how you approach your writing.

If this seems very odd, think of it as that bit in the story where the sensei insists you scrub the floor with sand at dawn every day and that turns out to hold the secret at the heart of all martial arts!

You'll need a wodge of newspaper, a glass (ideally a tumbler), some soil, and a packet of seeds.

You don't need much to start. You can just start. Now, for instance.

Start with a flat piece of newspaper - tabloid sized.

 

Fold it in half.

 

On the closed end, fold a cuff of about 3 inches.

 

Get a tumbler and lie it on the cuff. (This tumbler has a thick glass base, so I leave that poking out. That also gives me a grip on the glass later.)

Not all planting is putting seeds in soil and not all writing is putting words on paper.

 

Roll the glass in the newspaper, with the cuff at the bottom. (Don't cover the thick glass bit at the base of the glass.)

Turn it upright, holding the loose bit closed

Start pushing the newspaper into the glass, starting with the loose end

Keep pushing gently and firmly - the newspaper will give, so don't push too hard and tear it. The easiest way is to keep pushing the central spike downwards, while your fingers press the sides more against the glass

The more pleasure you take in the process of what you're doing, the more patient you are and the more beautifully you do it.

 

And still gently pushing it in – as the newspaper gives, you can make the sides straighter and straighter

Push the inside down as flat as you can. The smoother the sides and base the better

Loosen the glass from the newspaper and pull it out.

Tada! One little plant pot, next to the proud glass.

Many little plant pots! The glass is very proud.

Take pleasure and pride in what you create.

A tribe! A tribe of plant pots! The glass is clearly outnumbered.

Don't just plant one seed and wait for it to grow. Plant LOTS. They have a high failure rate. That's okay. Not all seeds grow. Some of the others will.

Put them in a tray – one without holes, or put clingfilm inside one with holes.
You can write what they are on the newspaper, with a permanent marker (felt-tips will run when the pot gets watered)

Fill each pot with soil, to an inch below the edge.

 

Here are all the pots, with their soil

Sprinkle water over the soil (a waterbottle makes it easier to do this gently without sloshing water all over the little pots)

Soil is whatever you need to be creative. Don't be surprised if you need some quiet, peace, and space. Don't worry if you need support, warmth, and encouragement. Neither of these make you more or less a writer.

 

Here's the soil, dampened down.

Seeds at the centre of each pot, on top of the soil.

Eventually we want plants to survive outside, but don't put your seedlings out into the snow and declare that if they don't grow they were never any good anyway. Don't expose your seedlings to the snow. Some people are snow.

Fill the pots up with soil so the seeds are underground. (Your seed packet will tell you how deep the seeds like to be - some want an inch depth, some want to be just under the soil.)

Wet the soil again, nice and drenched (and this time you really do need to do it gently, or the soil will loosen too much and the seed float up.)

And...

Wait.

“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.” The same is true for writing. It's never too late to start.

And water.

And wait.

You can't make seeds sprout up overnight or guarantee they come up, but if you stop watering them, they'll definitely die.

And water.

And wait. 

All seedlings look the same, at the start - the same as everyone else's seedlings and the same as weeds. Don't judge them yet. Let them grow.

They stay inside being carefully looked after, for now, while it might still frost outside and the nights are chilly. But as it warms up and they strengthen, you can put them outside for a while, to hardy them. Let them get used to the cold rather than going from a sheltered windowsill to fullblown Weather all at once.

If you want some ideas of what seeds to plant this month, here's a lovely guide for the UK. And if you want to plant some writing seeds alongside your literal seeds, you can join the Meddling with Poetry course this Feburary to plant heaps of seeds and start growing them.

Place is memory

We are physical, sensory beings living in physical sensory bodies and that is how we navigate the world. If you want your readers to live inside your story, not just be told about events from a distance, you have to give them a physical sensory world to live inside. And that means describing it.

Description often gets a bad rep in writing, accused of "bogging the story down" or "swathes of unnecessary description" - as if description had no part in story or were always, by definition, unnecessary. We might feel like that now about some nineteenth-century novels. When I was sixteen, I taught my brother and his two best friends their final-year setwork, Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (oh, the things we do for love, or at least for teenage crushes on brothers' friends) and the endlessly eloquent descriptions of fields drove all three boys beserk with frustration. Even for the literature-loving younger sister, three pages on one vista was hard to stomach. So yes, all that rhapsodising about a single "featureless convexity of chalk and soil" may well feel unnecessary and bog the story down, to a contemporary reader, or at least in a contemporary book. A total lack of description, however, is just as bad, if not worse.

New Year's Writing Resolutions

A friend on Facebook is talking about what writing resolutions she might take, to take herself more seriously as a writer - and how on earth you can measure that. I made a similar commitment to myself ten years ago, and over the last ten years have set myself multiple different challenges, with varying levels of success. I've also learnt a lot more about goal-setting and creativity than I knew ten years ago. So here are some ideas for New Year's Writing Resolutions, to inspire you.

Making the Plot Matter

Supposedly, we read stories "to find out what happens" – but in most stories, especially genre stories, we actually know the ending.  Anne Boleyn gets her head cut off. The romance ends with the couple together. The good side wins in fantasy. Yes, people play within and against a genre – "grey" characters in fantasy don't split into good-vs-evil - but still, the central rules hold. What if Mrs Coulter had "won" in His Dark Materials, Lyra's quest failed and Lyra dead? Or if Katniss was killed in The Hunger Games?

We know that's not going to happen. So why do we keep reading? Why do we care? Why does it matter?

Part of the reason is that the reader and author have a secret contract: the reader pretends not to know the ending, in return for the ending they were promised; the author will deliver the promised ending, and "hide" it from them for most of the book. The secret to that is plot-layering: the plot is rich enough to distract the reader from the ending. (That's where many genre romances fail, incidentally: the plot's too thin to hold the happy ending at bay and there's only so long that two rational human beings can sustain a misunderstanding.)

Often, in layering the plot, writers pull back from "big events" – they're "too melodramatic", "too unrealistic" - but in real life, people do die. (Everyone dies. Eventually. As George RR Martin is so intent on reminding us.) Friends do turn against each other. Shocking revelations do come to light, whether through the old trope of the box in the attic or the newer style of seeing inside someone's computer, or phone. The "unrealistic" / "melodramatic" defence is often a cover for being nervous of the big stuff, the good as well as the bad. But the story needs its chiaroscuro: its moments of bright light and deep dark.

That said, one can easily go too far: "A really BIG problem is one that affects THE WHOLE WORLD! There's a nuclear bomb in Rome!" Fine if you're writing action thrillers, perhaps, but you don't always need to make the problem bigger: sometimes you just need to zoom in closer and make it matter more. What's more, throughout this quest for obstacles and plot-layers, we often forget the ordinary stuff. We give our characters one giant problem to solve (Ebola outbreak! Raiders on the coast! The man you love is dying!) and make everything else in their lives trouble-free. Their fairy godmother takes care of everything else, from their clothes to their home to the reliability and health of everyone around them. 

Restoring normal, practical domestic / relational / financial / etc problems does two powerful things. First, it's a great source of material. It's not a distraction from your plot: make it part of your plot. Second, it's verisimilitude in a bottle: it grounds the story to make it convincing, realistic; it adds that grainy texture of real life that makes us believe even more strongly in the character and hence care even more about their story. 

Ultimately, what matters in the story is what matters to the character. And the more we know the character, the more we care about what matters to them.

The wheelchair and the cushion of art

Note: Originally written in 2014; updated in 2024.

Recently, I've spent a fair bit of time in a wheelchair. I'm lucky in a few ways: in knowing it was temporary; in knowing roughly how long it would last, and in being a writer.

The first two consolations, and the why, are quick to explain. My endometriosis flared up unexpectedly and fast. I went from striding forth every day to working on the sofa and being wheeled about, but I know the drill with endo and I know the timings. I'm now on the upcurve and getting back my strength. [Narrator: Hahahahaha! But don't tell her that, it gave her hope.] As for the third consolation, ahh, that is my soft cushion against all life's odds:

Live with a constant passion,
reckless with your heart.
Refuse to accept your ration.
Throw out the old and start

again, and in your fashion,
rebel, play your own part:
nothing so shit can happen
that you can’t make it art.

I first wrote that poem, with a few variations, in my very early twenties, about heartache. The final lines, though, "Nothing so shit can happen / that you can't make it art" has played in my head through very different difficulties.

I believe it's important to get the order right, here: you don't have to go through shit to make good art, but any shit you go through can become good art. And that glimmering possibility of art makes the shit more bearable: that instead of simply freezing, gut-sobbing, or despairing in the slow erosive forces of banality, you tell yourself, "I will write this," and you observe.

In my similarly early twenties, I was badly depressed and had recently lost job, boyfriend, home, and country. I got a carework job looking after a 95-year-old woman who, unbeknownst to me, was starting to lose herself in dementia. I'd done carework before and loved it. This woman was nit-picking, hostile, insulting, aggressive, dismissive, irrational, and sneering. I was in no place to cope with that. I kept begging the agency for a replacement, but they kept cancelling my request after speaking to her during my two-hour break (the only two hours I wasn't on call and in her home).  I only recognised the dementia years later, retrospectively, when I read, Mother, Can You Hear Me?  by Margaret Forster.

At the time, though, I couldn't cope and I had to. So I saved it. I saved up every insult, aggression, and accusation she threw my way, to write up that evening. I kept a sprawling, barely fictionalised document to which I added each day's nuggets, late at night.  I knew I'd never be able to recreate the seventeen items that had to be on the breakfast tray, on pain of scathing attacks, remember the banana in the bathroom, or conceive a world in which the cooking bowl couldn't be rationally placed on the shelf below its rightful home. Saving it up stilled my tongue and buoyed me up when she mocked my upbringing or accused me of stealing the money I'd watched her give her grandson. Saving it up helped me keep patience with a once-kind woman who was losing her mind in a way I didn't recognise.

I would never wish that experience on my younger self any more than I would wish a wheelchair on my recent self, when I could've cried with longing to go walking and paint walls and plant herbs. But at least I know I can save these things up, and use them for writing, give them a purpose beyond enduring the moment, and for that I'm grateful.

It reminds me of my slow attempts to overcome arachnaphobia. Ten years ago, a housemate's friend, seeing my reaction to a house spider, bought me an illustrated book on insects with several chapters on spiders. If I could start identifying them and realise they weren't dangerous, he figured, it might help. Even the pictures were difficult to look at, but he was right: not because I was identifying the spiders as harmless (I already knew they were) but because through my terror I was applying pure, cooling observation. Interest, intellectual curiosity, is a powerful force.

I'm hesitant to moralise here, even when the "moral" is self-evident. I believe that no-one outside a situation gets to tell someone how they should feel about it at any given point. No-one gets to reassure or well-wish just so they can feel better about someone else's difficult situation. Just as no-one else gets to see me white with pain and mourning my walks and say, "Well, at least you can write about it!" That's for the person in the situation to think. But if one is a writer, or an artist, or writes, or makes art, or has some interesting means of observation and ekphrasis, at least there is that option: to observe, closely, and save it up, to use as art. 

P.S. Wheelchairs are amazing. Needing one can suck, but wheelchairs themselves are brilliant. If you're ever struggling with mobility, for whatever reason, don't wait as long as I did. Use the chair! There are wheelchairs just there for the using in museums, art galleries, supermarkets, garden centres, IKEA, all over the place. And no-one minds that you can walk too: if you couldn't, you'd be arriving in your own wheelchair, and those ones would be superfluous. They're for people who can walk too. A clear moral: make art when stuff sucks; use wheelchairs when you need them.

When your characters all look like you

It's an easy mistake to make: creating characters too much like you. As you develop in writing, you learn to build a more various cast and include some personality contrast. We're still writing from within our own experience, though, and unless we notice that our experience isn't universal, we just keep on replicating it. I only discovered recently that most people don't see music - so I have to comb back through my novel, checking that my characters aren't all synaesthetic. I'd just assumed that everyone sees the world as I do, including the music. An issue like that can just be idiosyncratic. When it comes to the experience and assumptions of our various identity positions, though, that matters more. We think we're writing a varied cast, but actually every character looks like us.

Beyond writer's block

Some writers, on blogs or in interviews, will grandly declare that they don't believe in writer's block and that there's no such thing. Often, they'll follow this up with scornful comparisons: "Do plumbers get plumber's block? Do accountants get accountant's block?" This makes me cross: if someone hasn't experienced something themselves, they don't get to say it doesn't exist. "Your experience is invalid because I haven't shared it" - an appalling logical fallacy, arrogance, and lack of compassion.

The plumber/accountant/insert-profession example is equally nonsensical. Some work relies purely on carrying out pre-established procedures. You can't get "blocked" about that (though you may get bored). Some work relies on problem solving, coming up with new approaches, and inventing. (I don't know about accounting, but I imagine some plumbing issues fall into that.) That kind of work can hit exactly the same kind of wall as writing does: people get stuck. A cell researcher in a lab can get just as stymied and "blocked" as a novelist wrestling with an intractable plot problem. Scientific research, like writing, requires creativity. Some work also requires more emotional engagement than other kinds. An admin job might not seem emotional, but what if you have a task that you're avoiding, because you don't know how to do it or where to start, and you're afraid to expose your ignorance, and then it's gone on so long that you're afraid to admit you haven't even started... You might even not know why you're not doing it, only that at the end of every day, it's staring out from your to-do list like a bad dream. You'd call that "procrastination", not "admin block", but the result is much the same.

Often, that original gung-ho writer is implying that it's a question of professionalism: professional writers just don't get block: that's an amateur's game. (Sometimes they'll come right out and say that.) That's simply nonsense. Many professional, famous, highly respected and admired writers do get writer's block. Here's 13 of them, including Maya Angelou.

If you read that original gung-ho writer further, though (or the interviewer presses), usually they do know writer's block perfectly well: they're simply giving it a different name. That's where I do agree with them: "writers' block" isn't a very helpful term. (Though I still don't see how the original clanging denial serves anyone.) To get beyond writer's block, you need to know what's wrong. If the answer is "writer's block", it's difficult to find a solution. If you keep asking questions beyond "writer's block", you can find the problem at the root of it and resolve that. (If you read the 13 famous writers' advice on writer's block, you'll find that's what they're usually doing: they've figured out what the cause usually is for themselves, and advising accordingly.) So here are some of the possible causes, some useful questions to ask, and a raft of strategies to use. Writer: here are the tools to heal thyself!

Possible causes

• it’s normal – some days go unexpectedly well, some unexpectedly don’t (remember this when it's short-lived)
• bad day / bad time outside of writing: I’m tired, stressed, distracted…
• I’m afraid of / worried about something in the story / about writing
• I’m stuck on something in the story

Useful questions

• Is it just a bad day? Can I write through this – write now and judge it later?
• Do I need a break?
• What’s happening outside my writing? Am I tired / stressed / distracted? What can I do to ease that or shield my writing from it?
• Am I being perfectionist?
• Is there something I’m afraid of? eg hostile readers, not matching up to what I've already written
• Is there something I’m worried about? eg plot shape feels wrong
• Is there something I’m stuck on? eg need to research, don’t know how to resolve something
• What can I do about that?

Useful strategies

You might need to get the words out, to take a break, or to resolve something with the story. Once you have an idea of what you're stuck on, it's easier to choose which approach to take. Don't worry if the first approach doesn't fix it immediately; try a few different strategies.

Get the words out

• switch into italics and type highspeed what you want to happen, without worrying about style
• change location - go to a coffee shop with a pad of paper, and write longhand
• stop thinking about your audience, publication, possible film versions - write it for yourself
• morning pages: write high-speed, by hand, for 30 minutes every morning - this is just skimming the rubbish off the top of your head, not a place to produce great prose. It's also a great place to explore your fears.
• procrastination is fear: what are you afraid of, in this story / idea / book / poem? Write down your fears and the opposite positives
• go with it and see where it leads you
• stop while you know what happens next: in a book, stop each session while you know what happens next - mid-scene, even mid-sentence if necessary. Leave yourself a few notes of what will happen to kick-start your next session.
• close down all other computer programs, email alerts, blogs, and so on - go somewhere without wi-fi
• don't google every detail - you can get the precise information you need later. Just add square brackets [like this] and keep writing.
• give yourself a two-hour time-block during which you WILL stay at the computer / writing table, and you WILL produce words. Sometimes it's ninety minutes before it starts coming fluently, but by the two-hour mark it usually is.
• don't delete your false starts - just press enter a couple of times and start again or carry on.
• write helpful sayings and stick them above your desk, so when you stare up you see those reminders.
• cut out all the voices: stop reading, watching TV, and listening to radio talk for a week. It's hard, but without the babble your own voice starts speaking again.

Take a break

• go for a long walk - every day
• collect an image-bank: brainstorm key words and spend a few hours googling and collecting pictures around each one
• collect a music-bank: make playlists to write to - a different playlist for each project
• try a different art form: sewing, painting, drawing, sculpture, music, graphic design…
• clean your house: set an alarm clock and spend ten minutes whisking through each room
• read some non-fiction - fill your head with interesting information
• make your writing space magical: candles, incense, fairylights, flowers, music… Clean it before you want to write, so it's an inviting space to be in.

Resolve a problem with the story

• take a break: all those activities can help you get the distance and non-thinking mulling time to see what the problem is
• tell someone new about the story - someone positive and supportive who doesn't yet know anything about it. Describing your story can rekindle your original enthusiasm.
• talk it through with a friend: tell them what you've got and what you might be stuck on - they might have a solution or (often) you'll come up with the solution as you talk
• reread everything you've got so far: make a book thing, curl up with tea, and read it like a reader, to get an overview
• draw a plot map & some character sketches and character arcs: if either of those aspects are creating problems, it should come clear quickly. (I do this in a coffee shop: it's free of distraction, plus physical distance from your usual spot helps you get mental distance.)

Helpful sayings

I have these pinned on the wall in front of my desk, so that if I freeze and stare up, I'm reminded:

• Everything can be changed, reshuffled, deleted, enriched, or pruned later. Just write what you want to write.
• Stop while you know what happens next.
• I can do anything with the alphabet.
• I am a channel for [your deity/the universe]'s creativity and my work comes to good.
• [Your deity/the universe]: I'll take care of the quantity - you take care of the quality.
• Whatever I want to write is right.

I'd love to know your own experiences of writer's block: what causes it for you, what questions you find useful to figure out the cause, what approaches you adopt to get beyond it, and any sayings you find helpful.

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.

How to make yourself a book thing

The last post talked about how important it is to celebrate our writing achievements ourselves: we need the celebration for new creative energy and we can't afford to depend on other people for it. The most exciting achievement for a writer is often holding the finished book - but that does depend on other people, plus the time between finishing a story and holding the published book can easily take two years or more. The solution: make yourself a book thing, now. Something you can hold, hug, lick.

Celebrate your writing

Thousands of NaNoWriMo writers have just slumped over their laptops, exhausted and triumphant after a month-long novel-writing sprint. (And whether or not you "won", you should feel triumphant if you wrote significantly more than usual.) It's time for all NaNoWriMo writers to celebrate and for all writers to remember the value of celebrating. So here's why celebrating matters and some ideas of what to do, and then on Wednesday the wonders of how to make a book thing out of your freshly finished writing.

Neil Gaiman and the importance of rumpling one's bed: Virtual WFC 2013

Also, on writing for free, whether the money's ever worth it, and learning to write like yourself: Neil Gaiman's interview with Jo Fletcher.

Writing prompt: quick-fire research on... Vikings

Create a richer sense of time in your writing with quick-fire research and writing prompts. This is the first of a bundle, so have fun. HOW TO PLAY: Don't scroll down yet! Set aside 10-15 mins. (If you're reading this at work, book 15 mins of your lunch break to scribble.)

NaNoWriMo is nigh... and THE FREE POSTCARDS ARE HERE

So the question is: where do you want me to put them?

What's NaNoWriMo?

A novelist's writeathon in November, so you can thrash out a first draft of your novel, 50,000 words in a month, and internal editor be damned. After all, you can edit a first draft, but not a blank page. (If you're a chap, you can grow your mo and write at the same time.) Online forums, meet-ups in your area, and general craziness keep everyone going. You can join in the NaNoWriMo party by signing up on the website here - all free.

What To Do When Professional Jealousy Bites

When I was about 21, a family friend of my cousin's, also 21, published his first novel and it soared: gleaming reviews, radio art programmes, vast billboards in Victoria station, everything. That was Richard Mason with The Drowning People. Of course to family and friends, I joined in the "Isn't it wonderful" and "Isn't it brilliant." Inside, to my shock and shame, I seethed.

I had one friend, also a committed writer, to whom I dared expose my real feelings. We met up for coffee in the grungy-chic quarter of Cape Town and vented a witty and spiteful stream of bile, jealousy, resentment, and envy. That sounds like a rash of synonyms, but each has its precise shade of emotion and we were vivid with all four. We knew our feelings were ugly and repeatedly agreed that what we said in the coffee shop stayed in the coffee shop. I don't think we denigrated Richard himself or insulted his book, but I might be remembering my 21-year-old self too generously. We both realised that logically, our jealousy was absurd - neither of us had even written a book yet! - but it stung. It even burned, quite literally, like the feeling of too much coffee on an empty stomach.

Professional jealousy is ugly and we're not supposed to feel it. The quick-fire ego-self-defence responses are crude, unhelpful, and unworthy: I don't even want that! It's not even that good! I could do better than that! They only got that because [insert reason unrelated to their talent or the worth of what they did]. Putting an emotion off-limits doesn't help resolve it either, though. So what does one do, when jealousy bites?

Jealousy is a map

In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron talks about jealousy as a map. Instead of churning over resentment, treat it like a map which shows you what you really want. Unpick the different aspects of that success and look at it: what precisely about that do you want?

When I was younger, I couldn't say "I want to be a writer" because that implied there was a role, Writer, that I wanted to play, when actually I just wanted to write. Saying "I want to write" made no sense - "Well, write then," would be the obvious retort, and I already did. So why be jealous of Richard's success? I wanted to write and I already did. I realised gradually that I wanted to be published because I wanted readers. I wanted acclaim because I wanted to really, genuinely, be that good. I wanted the high advances, the two-book deals, because I wanted to write all the time.

Under the ugly jealousy was a more sincere self dating back to the three-year-old who discovered reading: a writer who just wants to write all the time, as well as she can and better, and have other people read and enjoy it. The jealousy gave me nothing to do but bitch. Underneath it, was something genuine I could act on.

Doing your own work

At my most blocked and frustrated, I'd switch off Radio 4 when the arts programmes turned to the latest dazzling new author. Surely that's insane? I love books! Hearing an author my own age interviewed on Woman's Hour made me feel sick. Beneath that jealousy was a kind of despair: why aren't I there, yet? An unanswerable, paralysing question.

When I was working hard on my own novel, though, those programmes didn't bother me and I could once again enjoy hearing about new books and other authors' writing experiences. Hey, she writes better in the evenings, like me! Ooh, what a lovely knotty problem to set out to solve. I stopped feeling jealous of their novels, because I had my own to work on and loved it, even when it challenged and frustrated me. The question, "Why aren't I there yet?" had clear, definite answers. Because my book isn't finished. Because I need to find a way to imagine, tangibly, a five-dimensional world. Because this plot arc here, ooh, what if I tried this... and the answers led me back into my work, the joy of it and the doing of it. This applies just as much to submitting work as it does to writing it (though you should always keep on writing while you submit).

When you're doing your own work, you don't need to be jealous of other people's. Your own work absorbs you and excites you.

We have colleagues, not competitors

Freelancing taught me to see colleagues instead of competitors, because when you freelance, you don't have colleagues. The only people who can share the intricacies of what you do are your "competitors". They aren't even necessarily competitors. As I make friends with them, on email or in person, we always find enough points of difference that we can swap work that doesn't suit us, cross-refer each other's skills, and share insights.

In fiction writing, this is even more true. No-one will get the joy of what you do like they will. And in this case, we really aren't competing, at all, even when it looks like we might be. In my writing courses, my students repeatedly discover how the exact same story becomes totally different in different writers' hands. No-one else is going to write your story; that's not possible. When someone arrives white-faced and tearful to announce their book's already been written, I tell them to buy it and read it. When they do, they discover it's not their book at all.

But what if it really is very similar? Jim Butcher, Kevin Hearne, Benedict Jacka, and Mike Carey all write series featuring a cocky, likeable paranormal detective-type man in a contemporary city fending off paranormal crime while navigating paranormal power-structures like a true renegade, most of them with an animal sidekick and / or a female assistant / mentee. That doesn't mean they stole each other's ideas and it definitely doesn't mean they're stealing each other's readers - they're cross-pollinating and widening the pool for all four of them. If you like The Dresden Files, The Iron Druid Chronicles, the Alex Verus series, or the Felix Castor novels, you'll want to check out the others, too. They boost each other's readership.

Similar books also make it far more likely that your novel will get published. Of course publishers want something new and exciting, but everyone finds something they can recognise easier to accept - because everyone finds innovation a bit scary. Slipstream novels like Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveller's Wife and Scarlett Thomas's End of Mr Y make it far more viable to publish my slipstream work.

What if the other person writes very different novels to you? Great! Read their books. You can learn masses about writing by reading outside your usual genres. What if it's very different, is selling by the truckload, and you hate it and think it's total rubbish? Fifty Shades of Grey is the obvious example and came in for a lot of flak, but it introduced a lot of people to a genre they thought couldn't ever be for them (cross-pollination) and it made a bucket-load for the publishers, which matters. Publishing houses are struggling and the hefty discounts that Amazon and big supermarkets demand from them (40% as standard) hurts them. We want publishers to do well, because we want them to feel able to take a punt on new and unestablished authors. If there's nothing else good that you can think about the latest bestselling book, think this: Your book is going to pay for my advance. Thanks! When I come to submit, that publishing house will still be doing well - thanks to you.

When we can look through our jealousy, these three remain: faith, hope, and love

If you want to return to the joy of doing your own work, or start doing it instead of just dreaming, and join a supportive community of writers who really are your colleagues, there's still time to join the Summer of Writing workshops in Oxford this August: Characters Unlike You (Saturday 17 August) will set your storytelling free in exciting new ways, Page Turners (Saturday 24 August) will give you the strong-as-a-mast narrative spine that will carry you and the reader through the story, plus all the ways the story plays out along that to keep the reader gripped, and Multiple Viewpoints (Saturday 31 August) will add new dimensions, resonance, and drama to your storytelling. 

On all of them, you'll get fresh inspiration, helpful new approaches, and meet wonderful people who also love writing. You'll also get to join The Writers' Greenhouse Community: ongoing support and encouragement through monthly Writing Boosts, help sending writing out to make your dreams come true, and an online community to share the highs and the lows with. See all the workshops and book your places here.

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Image: Lettering scratched through gold leaf by Lin Kerr of Limetrees Studio.

Writing prompt: The drowned book

A bundle of ways to approach exposition

In last week's writing course, we were playing with exposition - and coined a new word, "to exposit".

5 questions to ask for your writing style

In my Dead Good Poets Radio interview, Ashley Lister asked me what I thought were the five most important things a writer should consider when putting pen to paper.

Questions for writing buddies to ask each other

The right questions can be better than any advice.

In 2010, I hadn't worked on my novel for almost three years. I'd been writing heaps of other novels, to the point of burn-out, and was very ill with endometriosis. Filip Dousek and I were regularly discussing his novel, Flock Without Birds (Hejno bez ptáků), and every time we spoke on Skype, he said, "How's your writing going?"

Playing with symbols: Basement flat