Starting Over

Who here has written every day since they were a kid?

I've been a writer since I was young. I don't really know when it started exactly. But the urge to tell stories and hear stories has been with me since before I knew how to write. My mum got me a book. I would draw the picture and tell her what it meant, how it told a story, and she would write it down. I must have been about four or five.

Throughout my school years I was always scratching away in a notebook. Making notes. Plotting. But I never wrote what you would consider a manuscript. I collaborated on the odd short story in high school and my horizons were expanded. I wrote the same poems and stories in English class that everyone else had to.

Then, studying arts at university, I came to see what good writing actually was. And it wasn't me. I shudder to think how bad those undergrad essays might be. (Well, it's not really a 'might'. I'm certain they're barely readable.)

Around that time I started writing movie scripts. I bought screenwriting software: MovieMagic Screenwriter. And I spent the next ten years banging out one screenplay per year just for the hell of it. I never tried to sell one. Never seriously considered getting into the movie business.

I bought books about screenwriting. I still read Goldman and Mamet and Syd Field and Robert McKee.

Then something happened. I got a bit older. My tastes changed. I started reading fiction. No longer just screenplays by the Coen Brothers or Chris Nolan. But novels by Hemingway and Faulkner. I had always read, but mostly history and biography and science. I'd not grown up reading literary fiction (only a little science fiction), but now I was hooked. And pretty soon I thought about writing my own novel.

I started tinkering. I started reading about writing fiction. I, like everyone else, read King's On Writing. I wrote my first fiction. (Never to be exhumed from its rightful resting place by the way). Eventually I had something going. I finished my first manuscript. I considered it a trial run. The next one would be sent to publishers. Then something happened.

Nothing. I got busy. I put my notebooks away.

Several months later. I picked up my writing again. Got into it. Big time. I finished a book. Edited it. Submitted to a couple of publishers. Heard zip. Silence. I'd stopped again.

I got busy again. Life got in the way. Again. I started a family and a business. I'd sometimes write a couple of pages on the follow up novel. Then it would peter out. A few months might go by before I wrote more.

I realise that means I wasn't 'a writer' for that period. A writer writes. Published or not published, don't care. But writers write.

If you're not writing, you're not a writer. That's how it feels, anyway. But that doesn't mean you can't be a writer once again. Just pick up the pen, or typewriter (remember those? Keep an eye out for a future post on all my antique typewriters) or keyboard, and you're a writer once again.

So how to you maintain the momentum? How do you stay a writer when it's not your full-time job?

For me, part of it is seeing the muse coming and feeling the momentum when it miraculously returns. As it always does. I don't know why it returns. I'm just glad that it does.

When it comes, I take advantage. I leap into the writing before the motivation is gone. Before the moment has passed. Because there is a price. Other parts of your life get less attention. But writing for me is like catching the wave. If it comes and I catch it, I can ride that wave for months. I can get some really good work done. I can finish a novel - or at least a draft.

Then I wonder when the next wave will come. Without it, I may never finish that third draft. That can be scary.

So here's a question. Do other writers have bursts of inspiration and motivation? Or do they chip away constantly throughout the year? What happens when you become big and successful and can quit the day job? Does your writing method change?

Part Two of this thread will be an exploration of my day-to-day writing routine.