With only 9 days left to subscribe for Niyati Keni’s ‘evocative and richly populated debut novel’ Esperanza Street, we asked her for a piece on the trials and tribulations of creative writing, and she responded with this humdinger, with tried-and-tested tips for all you budding writerly types!
For most writers, whether they’ve turned out one or a hundred projects, there will inevitably come a point (perhaps many points) when it seems as if there’s suddenly nothing left in the pot. It is so very common an experience that much has been written on the subject of creative block over the years and there are some excellent books out there about recovery from it. Some of what follows is certainly not new advice, nor of my own invention. It is simply what I have learnt, worked out, or appropriated over the many years of a hands-around-the-candle-flame writing life. By which I mean a somewhat secretive writing life that I’ve had to both nurture and shield during the long years of apprenticeship.
My first novel, Esperanza Street, is due for release by And Other Stories in February 2015. I wrote the first draft of it whilst pregnant with my daughter in 2006. During the almost eight years that it took to reach a final draft, like most writers, I squeezed the book into the gaps left by a demanding day job and parenthood. This is, of course, the day to day reality for most writers. For me, this constant juggling of priorities has meant that over the years I’ve had quite a few episodes of creative block, often coupled with a deep sense of despondency. What has worked for me may not work for everyone but, for what it’s worth, these are my preventatives and my remedies!
1. Find your wolf-pack! I think this is probably the most necessary task for a committed writer. Committing to writing, or any creative path, necessitates risk. One has to have the courage to gamely follow a path that may in the end lead to nothing. Because most people are naturally rather risk-averse, this is hard enough to do without the scepticism that the decision can sometimes be greeted with by friends and family. I trained and still practice as a doctor. I doubt there is a group of people more risk-averse than doctors! Medical training, like many careers, is a very clearly defined, well-trodden, structured, and more or less linear life path. Achievement, status, income and security are all built in. Writing on the other hand, like many creative paths, is often full of crazy detours and sometimes dead ends. On top of that, most of a writer’s effort is invisible because it’s solitary. I’m sure that to most of my medical friends I’ve appeared at times to be an aimless loafer. And because for writers it can take years for any evidence of success or even progress, there is a constant sense of falling behind one’s peer group. Over the years, most of my doctor friends have been more than a little uncomfortable with my choice to write a novel over finishing specialist training. I had to be pretty firm in my intention and there were plenty of times I wondered if I’d made the wrong choice. I also believe that the same sensitivities that drive people to create, fuel their artistic insight and equip them with the means to refine their work, can also make them pretty thin-skinned. A simple question like “So have you actually published anything yet?” asked by someone who has absolutely no idea how long and hard a writer’s road actually is can be excruciating. For me, finding a support network of other writers (and artists and entrepreneurs) was essential. If I hadn’t, I would probably have quit long ago.
2. Don’t fill up on cultural junk food. Clichés are everywhere in popular culture: woman-in-peril, good guy versus bad guy, feisty female sidekick. If you don’t want to just rehash the same formulae, it’s probably best not to ingest too many of them (although I should confess a bit of a penchant for cheesy sci-fi serials in my down-time). There is no point in dulling your creative palate and then expecting to produce something great. I noticed a while ago that what I surround myself with while I’m writing often permeates my work. When I was writing Esperanza Street, I had a postcard of the following painting by Guiseppe Pelliza Da Volpedo pinned above my desk.
What on earth does an Italian neo-impressionist painter have to do with a fictional street in the Philippines, you might ask? The painting was called Fiumana (The Flood) and was of farm workers on a protest march. I had seen the painting at the Brera museum in Milan when I was briefly on holiday with my sister back in 1998 and my first glance of it made me think not of a protest march but of the way the shape of a story emerges as a collection of individual narratives woven together. This was many years before I even conceived of Esperanza Street, let alone started work on it, but all of that time I kept the picture pinned to the wall over my desk. In fact, Esperanza Street started off in my head as a completely different story to the one which it eventually became. The moment Joseph’s narrative voice emerged, the story refused to behave itself, taking on a life of its own before the end of the first chapter. When I’d finished writing it, I started clearing my study and I took down the picture of Fiumana and it was at that point that I noticed how much the picture is Esperanza Street. To me, the figures in the foreground are Joseph, Dante and Lorna with the baby, Marisol, ahead of a mass of people who march forward in order for their stories to be heard. It made me realise how everything around me infuses my work, whether I realise it or not.
3. Learn to tolerate boredom. Writers have to bear their own company and frequently endure agonizing boredom. I remember sitting at my desk on a beautiful late spring day working on the second or third draft of Esperanza Street (it hit 11 drafts in the end) and receiving a text from my daughter’s dad with a picture of my then two year old wearing a sun hat and most of her ice-cream down by the seafront. I felt a profound sense of futility and despair and I remember thinking ‘here I am trying to write about life and instead I’m just missing it.’ Since then I’ve had hundreds of moments just like that. Apparently it never gets better. And worse still, every project is a mountain all of its own that one has to start climbing from the bottom.
4. Treat yourself. Reward your bravery. I really believe a little luxury for writers (for any creative) is essential when the external rewards are so few and far between. I put fresh flowers on my desk (and in my daughter’s room) every now and then. The flowers are not for visitors, they’re for us. It is part of showing reverence to my creative space which is the only bit of the house that is truly mine. Which brings me to….
5. Show reverence for your work space!! Make your desk conducive. This doesn’t mean keep it tidy. It means keep it the way it needs to be for you to work. Designers have dreamboards. I have stones from the beach, shells, a wooden elephant, pictures by my daughter, a turquoise crackle-glaze vase, postcards of Caravaggio paintings, an etching by Pradnya Zate, a photograph of a crow, cards of encouragement that friends have sent… Anything in fact that will put me in the mood to create or connect me in some way to the story I’m trying to shape. Of course, all of this requires a place that is entirely one’s own, which I know can be incredibly difficult in a shared household. I have tried and failed to ‘hot-desk’. I would say for anyone who wants to work on a lengthy project, make a shrine to your work and defend it against all intruders!
6. Try switching media. One of the characters I enjoyed writing the most in Esperanza Street didn’t arrive till about draft 3. I knew that there was a harmonic missing in the text but I couldn’t work out what. I got out a large sketch pad and some charcoal and I made a mess. Then I started writing over it with purple ink and a glass stylus that I’d been given some years previously and had never used. Lola Lovely emerged. For me an alternative medium has to be wordless and silent, but that may not be so for everyone. Almost anything can be used to generate a creative idea or product. Funny things can happen when one is forced to create slightly out of one’s comfort zone. The important thing to remember is that whatever is produced doesn’t have to be ‘good’. It just needs to happen.
7. Keep a cauldron on the go and when you feel blocked stir it and see what floats to the top. I fill my file-shaped cauldron with notes and ideas for projects. Some may prove useful as an exercise or challenge. Most probably won’t. Some I’ve culled immediately on looking over them again which is therapeutic in itself. I have scraps of paper from almost twenty years back. I know this is way too long. If an idea hasn’t got up and walked by then it isn’t going to but some of mine, even though I know I’ll never use them, I still find too hilarious to bin. They make me feel grateful that I have an inner editor. And they remind me how far I’ve walked.
8. Build a medicine bundle. This is my favourite remedy. And it can be portable. In my medicine bundle I keep favourable feedback from course tutors, the very first letter from my agent asking me to get in touch, references commending my writing, a letter telling me I’d won an award even though I ended up never collecting it because I moved out of the area… Currently relevant or not, if something has given me a glow and said good things about my work, it gets added to my medicine bundle. More than once, in moments of feeling sorry for myself, I have dug out my medicine bundle and reminded myself that I can write, because someone else who seems pretty sensible says so.
9. Look after your physical health. There’s plenty of evidence that poor nutrition affects behaviour and learning. If it’s true for school children and young offenders it’s true for writers. And as for booze and drugs? The last time I drank way too much was at a friend’s 40th birthday gathering and though I managed to function just fine at work and manoeuvre through everyday life without losing a limb over the following four or five days, I was far too cloudy to write. If you don’t mind losing a few days, fine, but if time is as pressured for you as it is for me, it’s probably not worth it. In my experience, creativity requires clarity.
10. Find your meditation. Something rhythmic, repetitive, comforting. I walk (when I can) and garden. Other creative folk I know swim, cycle, skateboard or knit. For a writer, something that is utterly free from words is often ideal. Or at least it is for me. A two hour walk over the South Downs or some furious digging in the allotment are exceptionally good for clearing the mental clutter so that things can surface from underneath.
11. It’s fine to rest and procrastinate. Just not forever. There is a refractory period between creative projects and that’s just normal, it’s not block. I fill mine with reading poetry, walking, gardening, cooking, spending time with family and very close friends. Writers need to live in order to write about living. I often let ideas brew in my head for a while (in some cases years) before I make an effort to put them into words. When I do, the ideas seem to clothe themselves with words more readily.
12. Run as a pack. If you can, help other creative people out, whether they are your wolf-pack members or not. I had a long fallow period when it was almost impossible to write anything. Life was just too chaotic and I couldn’t find the mental space. I helped out some entrepreneur game-designer friends who were starting their own company and launching their first (and subsequently award-winning) card game. I was one of their unpaid sales team at many trade shows and expos. Watching someone else succeed can be exhilarating. And seeing these guys build a creative company from scratch around full-time public sector jobs and young families was a good lesson for me. When I can’t work on my own projects, I’ve looked about to see who I might try and interview or whether I could help organise an event to showcase someone else’s work or offered to proof-read stuff. It’s better to be productive than to wallow. The reality is that no-one gets anywhere without a little help. In return, it has meant so much when other people have offered potentially useful contacts, introduced me to someone, or offered to help me set up a website and so on. The only proviso is the obvious one: if the effort only ever seems to go one way, remember that your time and energy is also precious.
13. Pay attention to your dreams. By which I mean the ones you have while you sleep. Creating is at least half an unconscious process. Sometimes if they have been particularly striking (and I remember them) I record my dreams and try to look into what they might mean. This is not from a sense of narcissism that my psyche is so terribly interesting. Nor is it because I think my next project might be from a dream image, though I suppose it might. Occasionally (very, very rarely) a story has been triggered this way for me. No, the main reason why I believe it’s so valuable is that our dreams provide insight from our unconscious into what might be holding us back. Writers, like all artists, are pros at self-sabotage!