On Writing
Try-fail cycles across two decades — learning to become a writer
WHERE’S my mystery? George Orwell wrote, “all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery”.
Let’s skip the vain, selfish, and lazy mine-riddled valley. I’m not going there. Instead, we’ll skirt up over these shallows, up, up into my soup, my Fog. That place up-there and tell stories.
My Fog has its hazards, cast as it is over hills, some steep-sided. Most lying unseen in that white soup. Sometimes it’s a fair slog as I lean into a hill, even groping on hands and knees. Breathe coming fast. Nails digging in. Show me the top, you bastards!
Other times I’m running downslope, the path clear, rushing to embrace strangers and landmarks as they appear. Once or twice I’ve jumped. Words just flowed, and I glided a little.
Typically I get airborne when I’m world-building. It’s intoxicating like any recreational drug. But I can’t share it like that. It needs characters with motivations, a narrative, and a bloody plot. My plots have left me for dead so many times.
So why do I write? Not just to step back into my Fog. I can do that whenever. What I want is to see if I can tear a story out of it. Like a 1990s-me, dancing to Acid House making boxes in the air, I want to compact it and shape it.
Last year I wrote down why I write (I’m sure to put off writing for another hour). It states:
- craft a story that’s engaging
- have creative freedom to do it my way, not as a team sport (very much my day job in design for the last two decades)
- explore an alternative way to visualize my ideas that’s not drawn, painted, or sculpted
So why’s it taking so long then? Let's discuss my try-fail cycles.
It was the early summer of 2021. We were all still pandemic-ing, some more than others. What had started as a bit of fun before the Christmas break with my daughter — building a fantasy world on the kitchen whiteboard — had grown legs after six months of prodding and playing. And then that thought scratched across my mind: I might have a story here.
So what did I do? I reached for the plot stick and beat it. And beat it until a five interconnected plot-line of a story turned up. Well obviously, why wouldn’t you. Leaving behind my daughter, my abilities, and senses, I’d got it nailed and bolted down in spreadsheet-barred columns. Look!
I was pleased. And fucked. I started to try and write it. Where, the beginning? Good God no that was way too hard. OK, how about the middle? Any part of it? But I couldn’t write it. I didn’t really know how to write prose.
But I liked this world we’d made. It seemed to have all these little legs, like a tiny drunk millipede. Especially the Dieselpunk dwarves under the mountain in their halls of stone, with all their crops failing on the other side of the mountain. They had motive.
But I left scared and despondent. Again.
This time I’d even done an online course halfway through on creative writing. Insightful and simple, I learned stuff I could use. But it didn’t help me write the sentences and paragraphs I needed.
This was my sixth attempt at writing a story. Let's call it 6.0. And lo, it had gotten out of hand yet ahead. All these times ‘writing’, what had I been doing?
The time before last (4.0), I’d had a serious go-at-it. The story I’d dubbed My Dog the Hard-Drive, about a boy and his AI Dog set in a near future world, after the AI singularity point we’re all seemingly waiting for.
The trigger? I had read Save the Cat², a foolproof story plotting approach used in Hollywood. When I read this book, I saw so many of my favorite films unlocked. Their structure laid bare. What could go wrong? It even recommended using little cards like post-its. In my day job — where I can design new government services with a few post-its, honest — this was seemingly made for yours truly. I loved that little book.
You can probably guess what happened. This time my failure was made clear in bright, blank post-its. The Save the Cat method showed me I had no real characters, no ending, and no middle really. Just a string of scenes. With Act 3 a wasteland that couldn’t be bridged.
All I’d really actually written was the log-line:
A boy’s father dies, leaving him his virtual dog in the will. This dog can store your memories. One day the boy notices the dog is becoming central to his memories. Or is she? He decides to go see the one person who can tell him the truth.
I stopped writing again.
About a year or two after this my brother-in-law came to my writing rescue. “I’m joining up artists with writers to make up a little anthology called A Dog’s Wet Nose. Want to get involved?”
I decided that wet nose had to be Ripley, the AI dog from my story. And I was gonna be one of the writers. For 5.0, I wrote an easy section of my little AI story, just an action sequence from the middle somewhere, in screenplay mode as I’d originally determined to write the story. It looked like this:
INT. MALL — STORAGE ROOM / ROOM 101 — NIGHT
Before opening the door he checks his weapon again. As quietly as possible, he opens the fire door and steps through. It’s another store room, bigger than the last. Sat in the middle of the floor is a medium-size dog looking directly at Joey.
RIPLEY
(directly through Joey’s neural interface)
<Hello JOEY>As Joey stands staring at Ripley, the fire door closes behind him, clicking loudly in the stillness.
RIPLEY (CONT’D)
<Your FATHER has died>
Writing this was fun, I found a shape with easy corners. Though by the end, it just reinforced the story’s gaps. The lack of any real characters driving the events. But I had skill at world-building. I found this out. Whoever I described my Greyworld to friends — a post-Singularity, Logan’s Run type place — they liked it.
But I needed to do something else before I tackled My Dog the Hard Drive. Something simpler. So I ran away again.
I didn’t pick up writing again till a Christmas chat with my daughter in 2019, some years later. Ironically, My Dog the Hard Drive had itself been in reaction to an earlier story attempt, to do something simpler.
In that previous story, things had really gotten out of hand. I got so lost I never wanted to try again.
This was 3.0, three-times-a-lady. It did have a female protagonist called Mona Lisa. I definitely feel more comfortable with a female lead I think (and no I don’t know why. Probably something to do with my mum. That sequence from Bladerunner comes to mind and I’m Leon. I’ll tell you about my mother!³ Yes, let's leave that one there.
Anyhow, the story was called the Conversation, based around a conversation between two angels living among us. With a secret Catholic order, listening and tracking them down through the centuries, to try and open (see control) communication with Heaven. Yes, now there’s a church thing too from my childhood. Well, they say write what you know.
It was going to be a shiny graphic novel, and after countless storyboarding sessions, I’d managed to find a load more world to build. It was getting rich, but no real character depth or even a real story beyond a very extended and awesome chase sequence. I got lost down the jumbled threads of storylines, none of which I could neatly join up. A big old fail, again.
The Conversation followed Alfred (2.0) a rip-off of Get Carter, which saw Batman’s butler Alfred head back to south London to find his brother’s killer. On the plane heading over the Atlantic, he shoots up with the same stuff Batman uses (care of Wayne Corp), and by the end of the flight, he’s a jacked monster, ripping across London in his old jag. Pretty sure at one point I nuke Catford. Around the same point in the story, my drawing skills finally fell over. Pulling Story from the Fog was always wrapped up with drawing for me.
Ironically this was before Michael Caine — the lead in the Get Carter film — did play Alfred in the Batman films.
This brings us back to where this all began for me. The forgotten moment which I should have taken more seriously. But I didn’t.
My 1.0 moment, my first try-fail cycle, wasn’t at school. I didn’t get on at school, and certainly not with writing at school. Or I’ve no memory of this. Back then the only way into the Fog for me was via drawing. Wouldn’t have even crossed my mind to try writing.
I worked at an internet start-up, managing a content team. It would have been 1999 and I was 29 years old. We’d got this guy in — Renato let's call him — to teach us writing. Just for a day. He was a proper copywriter. He knew what prose and writing really were.
About ten of us signed up. We were sat around a big table in one of the bright meeting rooms. We’d recently moved offices from behind Oxford Street to Victoria, just down the road from Buckingham Palace in London. I don’t remember much of what Renato taught or said about writing, but one exercise he did i remember well, was to get us all to write a short story.
I didn’t know her then nor later, but what she said acted as my trigger. “This will be easy, I’m really good at this,” she said. My memory is shaped like this made me uneasy. But I don’t trust my memory as I sit and write this now. I think I thought, that’s arrogant. Don’t do that. Take it seriously, take this moment seriously and have a go.
I did have a go. I wrote a simple story about a boy and his mum. By the end of the story, you realize the boy is a tea cup and the mum his saucer. That lady, well she didn’t take it seriously. But for my efforts, Renato the teacher told me “this is very good.” Afterward, he stopped me and said “you can write. You really should write eh.”
Shortly after that course, my career really took off. I started designing stuff at work: systems then websites then experiences and more. I could mine the Fog through work and so my creative itch was well and truly scratched.
For many years I forgot about Renato and his words.
Jumping forward twenty years to these pandemic times, I’m not designing so much. I’m doing that leading thing, a different team a different company, and trying to change things. But my itch isn’t being scratched.
The Fog is back. And I want to swim in it, float in it and build a huge fucking ship and sail in its seas. I don’t need a pencil anymore I’ve realized. I guess that’s been one lesson learned. Finally, I can just draw shapes direct in your mind.
Before we step forward into today, I want to make one last step back to 7.0. After the 2021 summer fails at writing that plot of The Gatekeeper (see above), I read On Writing by Stephen King³. I really didn’t want to give up writing again, but I didn’t know what to do. Reaching, flailing I grabbed at a self-help book.
Let's get the obvious out of the way. It is an incredible book on writing. It talks about the bolts and nuts of writing like paragraphs and grammar. There’s plenty of auto-biographical writing too. Which neatly shows off how-to-really-write, as King really can. I’ve wondered since the difference it would make for a kid like me in their English class being told, to read this book.
The biggest lesson King showed me was another way to write I’d always thought was off limits. A self-imposed limit it turned out.
King eschews the need to plot upfront. He says a big fat no and you should Just. Start. Writing. This felt very odd. This wasn’t me, I told myself. I needed to plot and just learn how to plot better. But as a famous physicist put it once “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”⁵
What if I just sat down in front of my laptop and started typing, without plot like King said? What would happen?
So I did. I had a simple story idea I’d told the kids when they were little, about a Dad who goes to London to fight Dragons (I’d been going to London in the week to work in government, designing new services with post-its).
The short answer, King’s way worked for me! I wrote. I wrote paragraphs, third-person prose, and narrative. And after listening to a decade’s-worth of the Writing Excuses podcast series⁶ and armed with that short course training, STORY JUST CAME OUT. with bits of plot auto-generated.
I just had to stop plotting. Fuck, I was a discovery writer. A pantser writer. Well, I never.
I loved it. I just had to walk naked into the Fog. No upfront map-making. Definitely no post-its. And the word plot was banned. I had no idea what was good and what wasn’t. Some, but early feedback surprised me. You liked that bit, but not that bit. Wow, OK…
I dropped down to four days a week. My life’s hectic: work, family, house building, blah blah. But the writing I decided was important.
Here’s a clip of the Epilogue from that Dragon story. This popped out almost in one go:
A cold wind blew, hitting his face. His eyes stung. Lying, he told himself it was because of the wind.
The stone in front of him said nothing. It had stood here for twenty or more years. A silent witness. Like all the other tombstones. Words telling you nothing beyond a name and dates.
No one wrote on these stones what death really meant. Why didn’t they tell the true story he wondered. The guilty story. The love story. The angry story. The hopes dashed story. The cut short story. The wasted story.All it said was Miles Lucas Devonport. And two dates which accounted for ten years. A mere decade.
It didn’t tell the story of that summer. It made no reference to the sticker book conversation. Nor the films they’d watched. Nor the stolen sweets from the machine on the ward.
The only rule now was to walk into the Fog. And so The Tall Train, which became after 20,000 words, Project Brimstone, got almost written. But eventually, the plot had to turn up. I couldn’t hold the narrative together. The post-its were back. Seven-points, try-fails, Save-the-Cat. I did try to slide around the plot, or not take it too seriously. It’s just a guide!
I found writing to plot hard. In the next chapter, these three things must happen. Start writing. Aahhhh. But this really cool character just walked into the scene. What, he’s an AI? In a story with Dragons. OK, he’s a baddy now and he wants to torture the girl. Where’s that in the plot eh?
OK so now I’ve got to re-write the story with a new central character Dian, who’s awesome. I was shocked by this new side to writing: second drafting. I hadn’t even written to the end of the first draft (breaking another golden rule of writing: write through to the end of your first draft). And I was blocked again.
So here we are, in fail cycle 8.0 of my writing. This latest round was started when I thought fuck it, what if I do another King thing, and write a short story? It’s how he started. Just like that, take a break.
So I did. Really it was a return to 1.0, back into that room with Renato when I wrote a little story about a teacup and a saucer.
The story again, popped out in one sitting! Lot 27, is a short story. Needed editing. But bang. It was done in four or five hours. It isn’t brilliant. But it's got a character and pace. And an ending! Things I desperately wanted to be able to write. It starts:
THE note said simply, don’t open it. It was dated and signed E. Sirté. The paper had faded blue lines and a single pink margin line. It looked torn from a notepad, the kind you don’t see anymore.
So I did another short story called What now about a thief and food critic. Same thing — wrote it in one sitting. And it’s probably better. Not much better, but tighter.
I realized I could use writing short stories to learn to write. Which was really the point of writing The Tall Train story. To learn to write. But with much less to lose.
With the What now short story, I was testing writing a first-person narrative. First-person is great fun! Voices came out. Really quite sweary voices. Who the hell they are, I don’t know. Parts of me and caricatures were true, but their voices were there in my head as I wrote them. Straight out of the Fog. Here’s the start:
WE all got to eat, but some wanna make more than a meal out of it. I’m not talking about those special occasion meals, like your birthday or at your sister’s wedding. Mine threw a great bash. Shame she didn’t see what a waste of fucking space her fiancé was till too late. Could of told her if she listened to me, but that’s another story.
Both Lot 27 and What Now are 1500-word stories. Today, I’m going a little bigger, into 3000–5000 words. And it’s time for some sci-fi. This time, just to juice things up, I’m having a crack at bringing in one of the big concept pieces I was wrestling with in a previous novel story. Here’s the opening lines to Chase’ End:
Staring over the edge into the dark void, Chase hears his brother’s voice echo his own thoughts, “why not just jump.”
Standing in a dead man’s spacesuit on the hull of a derelict spaceship, Chase finally stopped laughing and looked out towards where his brother sat. In my chair, aboard my ship, he can’t help thinking.
With writing like so much in life, it is as King puts it:
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair…you can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: *you must not come lightly to the blank page”³.
I stand looking up into the hills and the Fogbank is rolling. Same old thoughts run ahead, what’ll I see when I walk back in? And more importantly, what the hell will I bring back out? My helmet slips forward. I push it back up off my sweaty brow, shoulder my pack, and try to still the chatter.
Recently, I’ve found a few new paths in the Fog and I like them. That’s all I know right now.
I’m heading back in. Bye.
References:
- George Orwell’s Why I Write article.
- Save the Cat by Blake Synder.
- Stephen King’s book On Writing.
- Leon sequence early on in the Bladerunner film (Youtube clip).
- The quote is attributed (and potentially misattributed) to Albert Einstein.
- The Writing Excuses podcast series.
