I know a lot of people have found it hard to get motivated in the last couple of years, with the pandemic and other issues weighing them down. 

I was watching this little video by an Aussie guy whose advice I really like, and it made me recall a story told to me by a US author friend some years ago. She and another friend in her writing group, both multi-published with major publishers, had lost their writing mojo and hadn’t written anything for over a year.

Month after month, they’d turn up to their writers’ group meeting and watch everyone else produce some writing to be read and discussed, and each month as they muttered “pass” their shame would increase. And they’d go home determined that next month they’d have some writing to share.

But still, they couldn’t write.

Eventually they decided to make a writing pact. It wasn’t the first time they’d tried this, but they’d failed so often it had to be something they couldn’t possibly fail at.  So they came up with this: Write one sentence of their story a day.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? One sentence. But after so long failing at writing—and these were published authors, remember, beating themselves up again and again—any success, no matter how small and apparently insignificant, was important.

Of course they didn’t tell anyone else they were doing this. They knew people would laugh at such a small daily goal, not understanding or empathizing with the shame and agony of being unable to write.

So they began their pact, and every day they wrote one sentence. And after they’d written that one sentence, they were free for the rest of the day.

Free from what? you wonder. The thing is, the longer you put something off, the more you fail to do something you know you need to do, the heavier it weighs on you. For writers, this can mean a whole day worrying and fretting and being ashamed and not-writing. Yes, that’s a verb — not-writing.

But one sentence a day set them free. 

Some days they wrote more than one sentence —  at first a couple of sentences, then a paragraph, and even occasionally a page or more. But for more than a year they kept to their pact — a new sentence every day. And of course, soon they were back, writing, bringing pieces to their writing group, and finishing books and being published again.

The video I referred to above has several nuggets of gold advice in it. You need to listen to the whole 10 minutes—it’s all good — but in particular the bit about lowering the barrier to entry, as well as his observations about motivation are gold. If you can’t see the video below, click here.

Today I’m answering a question that came up in another context: How did you decide or know you were good at writing? 

At school I knew I was pretty good at writing essays, and once, in American history I wrote a “creative response” to an essay topic that my teacher really liked. But generally, creative writing was not something my very academic school encouraged, and when it did, it took the form of “exercises”. Never stories. 

I think the particular teachers I had for English were generally not very imaginative, and didn’t encourage that kind of thing in their students. I remember one exercise where we were asked to write about a rainy night, using as many colors as we could. I did it of course, but struggled — it contained traffic lights, as generally colors don’t show up much at night and in the rain.  I passed, but it was made very clear to me that I wasn’t very good at “creative writing.”

I also remember being shown some examples of “excellent” final year exam pieces (in the state-wide exams) from the previous year.  They were lively and sometimes funny, and entertaining, and I recall thinking, “Wow, are you allowed to write like that in an exam?” Because we were strongly encouraged to be serious and earnest in all things. And when I queried my teacher about it, she said, “No no no!  You should NOT try anything like that.” So I didn’t.

I travelled a lot during university holidays, and wrote lots of letters to friends and family, and when I got home people said how much they enjoyed them, and that I’d made them laugh, etc. But I never thought, “Hey, I could be a writer.” 

Then I started full time work and was so busy I never thought about writing for myself — only work related. But then I was asked to write some non-fiction pieces for an educational magazine. The editor not only liked them she said something like, “These are great. You really can write.”  

My response was, “Can’t everybody write?” — it was an educational publication after all. And she said, “No, you’d be surprised how many people can’t write to be clear, interesting and educational.” That was an eye-opener.

Some years later I took a year off work and went backpacking. I went solo — the friend I’d planned to go with had pulled out. So there I was, in countries where I didn’t speak the language, with nobody to talk to, so of course I wrote lots of letters. But also, stories started to spin in my mind. I bought an exercise book and started to write them down, and by the time I got home at the end of that year, I’d filled several exercise books and had a firm resolve to try for publication. (That photo above is of Quebec, where I bought my first exercise book (cahier) and started writing.)

I’ll talk about that in a future post.

One reason I’ve been thinking about this, apart from the question I started with, is because on the weekend I listened to a TED talk on schools and creativity by the late Sir Ken Robinson. Wonderful talk — funny and entertaining as well as educational and really, really important. If the video doesn’t show up below, you can watch it here.  https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity/

A gift from the muse can be a two edged sword — wonderful and dangerous.

Some writers start with a scene in their head — a gift from the muse — and no idea what it’s about or where it will go from there. They will write the scene down and push on, trying to work out what the story is about. This can work brilliantly, but it can also be a source of much angst. A writer I know often starts this way, then gets a few chapters in and wails, “I’m stuck!”

And that’s where the real work of writing starts — working out what your story is about, and how to make it work. This is the problem for most  “pantsers” — people who write (or plot) by the seat of their pants — or as some people call it “writing the discovery draft”, where the writer writes the full draft to discover what the story is about.

I, too, often start with a gift from the muse. There are days or nights, when I’m drifting off to sleep or slowly waking in the morning in a semi-dream state, and I will find a scene unrolling in my head, almost like a movie, with dialogue and all. I’ve learned to write those scenes down and to this end keep a large notebook by my bed. It can end up as three or four A4 pages or more, and will often contain  long dialogue exchanges.

The times I haven’t written them down — usually because it was such a brilliant idea that I knew I wouldn’t forget it — it’s gone by the next day, even within an hour or two. All that’s left is the conviction of its brilliance and the frustration with myself for not writing it down at the time. 

Sometimes what comes is a scene or dialogue exchange from the characters in the book I’m working on, and sometimes it’s a scene completely out of the blue, where I have no idea what it’s about or who these people might be. This last doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it has usually sparked a book or even a series.

And some of the scenes or dialogue exchanges I scribbled down in my notebook are almost identical to the final edited scenes in the books. Here are some examples:

a) The ballroom scene in Gallant Waif. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know it comes toward the end — it’s the heroine’s black moment, and it’s a scene that people always mention when they talk to me about that book. I started with that scene in mind, and worked backward to decide where the actual book would start.

b) The scene in The Perfect Rake where Prudence first meets Gideon, and thinks him someone else. That book sparked a series.

c) The scene where Harry in His Captive Lady, sees Nell riding on the back of a wagon in the rain, and gives her his hat.

d) The scene in To Catch a Bride where Rafe finally captures Ayisha. All I knew from that initial scene was that was here was a very cool, uptight, elegant regency rake teamed with a spitting, fighting, furious little guttersnipe. And the combination made me smile.

e) The scene in Bride By Mistake where a young soldier finds a young girl being attacked and saves her. And then doesn’t know what to do with her, because he can’t leave a thirteen year old to fend for herself in a war zone.

f) The scene in The Autumn Bride where Abby first meets Lady Beatrice. The scene was about a girl (who I knew was a good person) climbing through a window to find something to steal —she was desperate and this was her first time — and instead of some small object to steal she found an aristocratic old lady in a desperate situation. This sparked a series.

There are more — in writing this I’ve realised how many times this has happened — but you don’t want to read a list of my books and how the muse helped me with each. These posts are about your writing and how to get started — and keep moving. 

A gift from the muse is not a random accident — you can train the muse to appear on command. Or at least to turn up regularly. 

The thing is, you don’t have to be wildly lucky to get these gifts from your muse  — I believe any write can develop a state where it happens regularly, but you have to work at it. It’s partly about allowing yourself to dream, and partly about developing a habit, and in this I’m going to encourage you to follow the advice of Dorothea Brande — or Julia Cameron if she’s your preference. I go with Dorothea because she was first, and I found her book early in my writing career. 

Dorothea Brande was a writer and writing teacher in New York in the 1930’s. She wrote a slender little volume called Becoming a Writer — and it’s still in print today, which shows you how relevant her advice still is. If you’re interested in the quick and easy version of how I “follow Dorothea” there’s an article on my website you can read.

Dorothea Brande talks about training the muse to perform on command, and lest you imagine its some magical mystical airy-fairy way approach, the tone of her book reminds me a little of a dog trainer’s instructions. ;)  She’s very down to earth. But, she says, follow her method and the magic will happen. And it does.  

Try the method I outline on this page, and see how  you will gradually get better at tuning into your muse. And eventually having her turn up at your command. I’ll talk some more about this  process next week.