How To Have A Writing Practice
N.B.: This is how I do it. There are many other ways to do it - this is not the best way or the worst way, it’s just one way.
Have a loud and boisterous inner monologue (preferably formed either through trauma, a genetic predisposition to sensitivity and emotional volatility, or some incalculable combination of the two.)
This will form the beating heart of what you write. Note, though, that documenting what this voice says at every possible opportunity is essential, to ensure it doesn’t take on a life of its own / accidentally start trying to kill you.
If you can consistently document this voice, then congratulations: you have a successful writing practice. It’s not always an easy task, though. If you struggle, keep reading.
Try writing your way out of pickles (difficult situations).
Can’t get out of bed? Try finding the nearest piece of paper and writing down all the thoughts in your head, even if it’s just pages and pages of “I can’t get out of bed”. Watch in amazement as you eventually get out of bed. Do you see how powerful this is? It’s almost like magic.
Have a complicated relationship with reading books.
The ups and downs of this relationship may mirror those of the world’s greatest love stories: you are Romeo, books are Juliet.
Be obsessed with reading as a means of escape as a young child: spend hours studiously devouring books without coming up for air. Listen to people tell you you’re a bookworm, and that you’ll be clever when you grow up, and be proud of your little self for achieving something. Decide, at a few years old, that you’d like to write one of these one day.
As you get older, watch reading fall by the wayside in favour of sexier, more dangerous methods of removing yourself from reality (sugar, drugs, sex, manipulation etc). Daydream constantly; ditch reading for constructing labyrinthine fantasies in your head about how you’re going to get out of P.E. tomorrow / whether or not the boy you like likes you back.
Fail your exams; receive yearly report cards from teachers claiming that you’ve “lost your spark”. Listen blankly as your loud and boisterous inner monologue takes on a distinctively Eeyore-ish tone: everything is unfair, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Get over halfway through one book in a white-knuckled state of brute force, then make the book a core tenet of your personality, boasting about your new well-read state to smoking areas / pub toilets / anyone who will listen for years to come.
Try properly to pick reading back up at various points during your youth, never forgetting the serenity you once found in it, still grasping at the threads of your childhood dream. Ultimately fail, each time submitting to the conclusion that your brain is simply too fried for it.
Eventually, turn into one of those people who buys books that look very aesthetic and interesting on their bookshelves, but never gets more than ten pages in. Latch onto the fact that you were born in the generation that grew up in the early days of the internet; blame your inability or unwillingness to read on the dawn of shorter, easier forms of media consumption.
After a while, get tired of lugging these unread books around as you’re forced to move from rented room to rented room in a housing crisis. At some dark point during one of the moves, put all your books on the shelf in the communal downstairs hallway for someone else to read, resigning yourself to a life of eternal stupidity.
Experience shame in all its forms. Say things like “the world is changing” and “reading is on its way out, anyway” - even, perhaps, taking as far as “reading books is a classist hobby for middle-class dickheads.” Stick militantly to your stance, all the while stifling the cries of your five-year-old self who found so much wonder on books’ pages. Be resentful and prideful; let hatred consume you for a while.
Write, even though you’re a lawless young sproglet with no brain cells and an ego the size of the moon.
Keep writing. Write things you and your friends would enjoy reading, or write with no aim or agenda; write things which, if shown to an elderly person, would elicit responses like “represents everything that’s wrong with your generation.”
Write for no other reason than to hate; write for no other reason than to laugh defiantly and insolently in the face of hatred. Then, one day,
Put something out into the world
Remove your fragile piece of work from its little protective shell, and see how it interacts with the outside world.
Experience the mind-altering substance of external validation.
Get validation, then get high off it. Start writing only for the pursuit of more of it, then watch as your creative output spirals exponentially downwards. Go completely insane, like Gollum, in search of it.
Write some really good sentences during the insanity, but remain tragically unable to pay attention to a word document for long enough to string them all together into anything coherent.
Experience crushing rejection (the polar opposite of external validation)
One day, have a particularly good idea. Perhaps even let your mind run away with fantasies of where this idea will take you, as a treat. Maybe it’ll make you rich; maybe it’ll make you universally adored.
Carefully turn the idea into a little baby bundle of art, and give it gently to the world, saying “this is my creation, please don’t stamp on it”. Watch, unable to do anything, as the creation is stamped on.
It could be as small as reading a paragraph to your mother and knowing, from the exact tone of her polite response, that it’s not good enough for her. It could be as big as putting something huge out into the public sphere, and it being met with mass disdain or (perhaps worse) ambivalence. Either will do in a pinch, but preferable is a string of several rejections in many different forms. Be humbled from all angles; feel, over and over, the sinking in your gut as the fantasy dies.
Get a boring job
Accept that you might not be a writer, riding the fantasy comedown all the way down into the pit at the bottom. Make a little nest in the pit. Get comfortable: you might be here for a while. Loudly exclaim “I will never write again”, then revel in the sound of the silence as, obviously, no-one gives a shit.
Rebuild your life in reality. Make friends with reality. Accept that your life might look different to how you wanted. Go on little walks; find the joyful moments in whichever menial job you have. Get given a book on one family Christmas and read it out of boredom, just because it grips you. Keep going back to your dead-end, deeply uncreative job: let it teach you boring, unsexy things like discipline.
Find yourself idly chatting to the void underneath your grocery list in the Notes app. Find yourself, on foggy hungover days, writing yourself out of bed again. Find yourself spending half an hour editing an anecdotal iMessage to your best friend - not because they care at all about its content, but just because you want its sentence structure to be perfect.
Read another book all the way through, because it’s stunning and beautiful and could literally have been written about your life, even though it came out decades ago.
Find another book by the same author. Take it out from the library. Halfway through reading it, by some mad stroke of grace, realise that creativity and discipline are two sides of the same coin; feel two fluctuating, frustratingly distant lines on the graph of your soul finally cross paths again, in a way that they haven’t in years, or maybe even decades. Start all over again.
Write every day
Even though it’s hard; even if it’s menial trash that you wouldn’t want to read back yourself, let alone show anyone else (maybe if you had just done this from the start, you wouldn’t have had to go through all the shit above). Watch as, weeks or months into later, beautiful things are born from the trash.
Read every day
Read every day, even though it’s hard.
As you’re building these daily habits, remember that it can take years, and will most probably include large chunks of time where you feel like you’re going backwards. Don’t give up, even - especially - when you come to on your bedroom floor one morning, realising you’ve spent the last two months trying to find the perfect pair of low-waisted jeans on your Safari app instead of doing any reading or writing.
It’s all normal, it’s all fine; just make sure you eventually pick up the pen again.
(Honourable mentions: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, ‘Sunscreen’ by Baz Luhrmann)
Iona xx
I have never felt so seen
I find reading daily a lot easier than writing daily, we'll get there!