testingdistance

If you only write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count and those words aren’t going to wait for whether you’re inspired or not. So, you have to write when you’re not inspired and you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And, the weird thing is, that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back on them and you won’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.

The process of writing can be magical. There are times when you step out from an upper floor window and you just walk across thin air and it’s absolute and utter happiness. Mostly, it’s a process of putting one word after another.

It’s like, out in the peak district in England and up in Scotland, there’re people who make drystone walls and they’ve been making drystone walls for generations and the way they make these drystone walls is they have lots and lots of rocks and they put one down and they put another one down that fits and they put another one down that fits and they know how to do it. And somehow they create these walls that are absolutely stable. Just by putting one rock down after another and eventually you have a wall and that’s how you make a novel. You put one word after another and then you repeat.

So when people come to me and they say I want to be a writer, what should I do, I say you have to write. Sometimes they say, well I’m already doing that what else should I do, and I say you have to finish things because that’s where you learn from. You learn by finishing things.