The Perfect Job

Have I ever told you that I love my "job"? I mean, I really love love LOVE my job!!

How many people can say that?

Writing is the most perfect job imaginable for me. I love playing with words - choosing the right ones to communicate in the most effective and accurate way, playing with various combinations, musing over the different effects they might have on a reader. The same message can be phrased in many ways, each one eliciting a slightly different response from a reader.

All my life I've loved making up conversations and playing out scenarios in my head.  Screenwriter James Moran has said that writers are the most paranoid people on the planet because we’re always imagining the consequences of “what if” situations – e.g. standing waiting for a train and wondering what could happen if you or someone else got pushed onto the tracks.  Lol :-)  That’s how stories are birthed!  I’m not that paranoid (yet!), but I do love working out all the possibilities and outcomes of a situation or premise.  When you find the one that really works it's a very satisfying epiphany moment!

I’m an information vulture too and love research, another essential part of writing. A couple of weeks, despite being 40,000 words into my YA story, I still hadn't quite sussed where it was set.  I knew it happened out in space, but didn't know exactly where.  As there were a myriad options, I had to get on and pin it down.

So, I snuggled up with Brian Cox's Solar System book and began browsing for inspiration.  What an incredible solar system we live in!  A gazillion beautiful, wonderful and mysterious things. So many possibilities for a writer.  And in the midst of it all, I found my setting.  No, I'm not gonna be more specific than that!  A better and faster writer than me might happen to read this, nick off with my idea and get it published before I do!!  But, suffice to say, it's an amazing setting and I'm SO excited about writing about it.  Plenty more research needed though, yay :-)

People fascinate me too!  If I’d had better career’s advice at school then I might have studied Psychology at uni rather than English Lit and Lang.  I love trying to work out what makes people tick, not that I claim to always/often/ever get it right.  Why do they do – or not do – certain things?  Why do they say – or, more interestingly to me (and drama!), not say – certain things?!  Why do they make the choices they make?  Understanding a character’s personality, background and motivation is essential in making them believable and realistically complex.

For a reformed control freak like myself, writing provides a wonderful opportunity for the remnant of that characteristic to exercise itself in a positive way.  When I was pregnant with my kids, I thought it was awesome to be part of creating a new life. Naming them was a huge privilege. Now I get to do that sort of stuff on an almost daily basis - creating characters, naming (and sometimes renaming) them, deciding what happens to them!  I can base them on real people (names can be changed to protect the innocent…or at least to avoid being sued!), emphasising positive or negative character traits, as I wish.  I can also write scenes that have their basis in reality, tweaking them to produce a more satisfactory outcome, which can be incredibly therapeutic and fun :-)

It's like playing God…on a small scale. But even on a small scale it feels like a serious responsibility to get things right and it can be hard work - almost headache inducing - holding the characters and events together. I'm glad I'm not God!

Loving writing SO much is essential in order to push on through the tough days - when the words that are coming out aren’t brilliant or when my inner critic is shouting me down so loudly it’s almost deafening (more on that next time).  I hope that one day writing will pay and I’ll be able to count it as my “proper” job!  But whether it does or not, I know I’m always gonna write…just because I love it and it suits me more than anything else I could do with my time and energy.

Do you love your job?  If not, what would you really love to do?

Creating Space - Frustration to Inspiration

A few weeks ago I was feeling super frustrated about my lack of writing. Not having the time or mental space while we were Down Under was understandable, but I still hadn’t put more than a handful of words on paper for two months since then.

Fortunately I'm pretty pragmatic, so I started racking my brains to work out if there were any practical steps I could take (apart from just putting one word after another on the page and ignoring the inner critic who was having a field day with me at that point!).

Around this time I realised that every time I saw a picture of a writer’s working space, the green eyed monster would come and perch on my shoulder and dig its claws in. A simple desk with a notice board above it, like this one of D. Savannah George’s could set me off…

http://nowastedink.com/2012/07/13/guest-post-writing-space-d-savannah-george/

…but it’s always Roald Dahl’s cute writing hut approached by this lovely avenue of trees that would really get me weeping.  I would skip to “work” every single day if I had somewhere like that to write!

Photo copyright David Sillitoe (http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/aug/26/familyholidays.culture)

Up until now, I always worked on our large dining room table and struggled to figure out how I could change that. Having recently, almost accidentally, moved to one of the most overpriced areas outside London, our house is a tad more modest than we've been used to and there’s no spare space in it. Having a garden room built at the bottom of the garden was a dream I'd started regularly entertaining, but one that seemed completely unjustifiable at least until something of mine has been published. Not about to happen any time soon. And even less likely to happen if I’m not writing anything.

I need space!  Physical space (perhaps coz I suffer mildly from claustrophobia) but also mental space coz I'm an introvert who gets energised best when I'm in my own little world :-) 

Finally I decided that if I couldn't work out in the garden, the next best thing was going to be the bay window in my bedroom, overlooking the garden.   There wasn’t any space in it, but I realised that with a bit of moving things around - primarily swapping an armchair for a small table - I could create my very own writing space. 

It might only be about a square metre in size, but it's a great start! The view is fabulous and will only get better as plants start to spring into life over the coming weeks. I can leave my notes out on the desk, rather than having to tidy them away so we can eat dinner. There's a drawer to keep things all together in one place, so I stand a better chance of finding random notes-to-self again, and a small column of wall to stick up things to inspire and encourage me.

Small changes can have a big impact.

Since creating this space a month ago, I've written thousands of words.  It's SO exciting!  I love spending time there.  As it’s solely dedicated to writing, nothing else distracts me and I can get totally lost in what I'm creating.  Which isn’t always a good thing if you forget to eat, drink or pick up your kids from school (oops!) :-)

As I gaze up the garden (in between typing, or sometimes even while typing), enjoying the beauty, majesty and intricate detail of creation, it energises and inspires me massively.  But my gaze always carries on, right to the bottom corner of the garden, as I dream about the purpose built studio (with desk, sofa and wood-burner!) that might be there one day!