Everything I've worked out about writing

How I learned to write again: a chaotic pile of advice.

I realised this morning that I didn’t do a follow-up to my ‘everything I’ve learned about parenting’ post, which came when my daughter had just turned one. We’re now a year on from that, and I’m sure I have learned quite a lot about motherhood since then, and I do intend to follow it up. But honestly the the last year I think the most impactful thing I’ve learned is how to start writing again.

There were lots of reasons that I stopped writing. In 2019/2020, I spent six months at Grazia where no-one seemed to like my writing (in fact for the first time in my life people seemed to actively dislike it), which culminated in being humiliatingly fired. Then I got pregnant. I was painfully anxious about having another miscarriage, which made being creative very hard. Then I had horrific brain fog during pregnancy, which was miserable and made me feel like I was missing one of my senses. Having been able to bash out a fairly witty column in an hour before, I was agonising over sentences. It felt like I was permanently trying to write with a hangover/head cold, and my work was noticeably worse. There was also the fact that Covid knocked out most my work (no space for feminist whining when there’s a pandemic.) I had no confidence, no sense of inner calm and my resilience was gone. So I did some freelance PR work, taught creative writing classes and pivoted to anything which didn’t involve me actually creating characters or plots.

But then, a year later, I was single and broke and I had a baby. I desperately needed a way to make money without leaving the house, so I needed to kick myself back into touch. It’s taken a while, if I’m honest. Margot is now two, and I am finally writing at a better standard (typos discounted) than I was at 29 when everything went south. So here’s everything that happened to make writing work again, both practical and circumstantial. Some of these you can mimic, some of them are me specific, some of them are stupid and a bad idea, but I feel it’s best to provide the full list anyway.

• Time crunch. When Margot turned six months, I had a nanny for four half days a week. That meant that I had 24 hours per week of writing time, and fuck me did I attack it. The first day that Faye looked after Margot, I got on the bus with my laptop and I fell into that Word document like it was a lost lover. Having less time to write made me want it more, and it’s something that I try to cling to now. By putting perimeters into my own week, like taking some corporate, sensible, paying gigs, I get more done.

• Pressure. I once went to a playwriting class where the visiting writer said that writing is like going for a shit, it’s best to wait until you really need to. While I’m too much of a prude to cheerfully tell people that in person, it’s probably true. I think of it more like when you’re trying to get a child to go to sleep, you need to build what the experts call ‘sleep pressure’ (aka, tiredness). How you build writing pressure is specific to you. Some people do it by reading, pre-writing, free-writing, not letting themselves write, watching something else, talking about a project, writing a synopsis or a plan - the list goes on.

• Non-writing-writing. This sounds so fake, but I truly believe that most of the story is worked out in the back of my brain while I’m doing something else. The skill has been to learn what activities promote that development and which prevent it. Walking, ironing, cleaning, cooking and food shopping all promote it. Watching TikTok, napping, doing admin and looking after my child prevent it.

• Stopping when I want to keep going. I try very hard to stop writing when I’m in full flow, ideally with a sentence unfinished. That way when I pick back up, it’s still there and I’m straight back in.

• Varying how you start each paragraph. This is so obvious, but my once-upon-a-time editor Emma Barnett, who is now a political powerhouse presenter, told me that i had a bad habit of starting every paragraph with the same words. I can now tell that I’m not fully in the zone if I’m starting every par with ‘I’. Similarly, if you’re slipping between third and first person, or present and past tense, that’s also a sign you’re either not in the right place mentally or you’ve picked the wrong framing for the story.

• If it’s hard, it’s wrong. Every time I’ve struggled with a piece of writing for more than an hour, it’s been because something is structurally unsalvageable. Something is wrong if it’s not easy, so delete it. Don’t waste time trying to salvage the problem, scrap it.

• Kill your darlings. Not an original, but I have improved every book I’ve written (and we’re on six now) by deleting my most beloved chapter.

• Less of you, please. Very often the problem paragraph for an article, or problem chapter in a book, or problem scene in a play/screenplay is because I’ve got something of myself in there. An anecdote, an in joke, a little Easter Egg or love note to someone else. That’s serving you, not the plot. Scrap it.

• Jealousy. When I felt like messing about or procrastinating I would force myself to watch either American Bitch, which is an incredible capsule episode of Girls written by Lena Dunham, or read That Face by Polly Stenham, which is one of the best plays ever written. By smacking myself in the face

• Date night writing. I don’t know if this is good advice per se, but I wrote my first play over the course of eleven days because I would sit down every night when my daughter was in bed, pour a fucking massive glass of wine (I have the tolerance of a WASP) and write. Like having a drink to soften the awkwardness at the start of a date, it took away my horror of looking at my own work.

• Remembering what you’re good at. Around the time that Margot was born, I started writing for the i. They commissioned me to write the kind of funny opinion pieces that I’d always loved doing. They gave me my training wheels back, and I got better and quicker at writing funny, joyful opinion pieces - the kind of thing I’d stopped doing because my confidence was gone.

• Finding someone you want to impress. When Margot was four months old, I got a new agent (Hi Charlotte!) I was desperate to make Charlotte think that I was a viable prospect, despite the fact that she already represented me and had been nothing but supportive of my work. Wanting to impress her gave me this new engine for productivity and made me competitive with myself, which I sorely needed.

• Writing the thing I didn’t want to write. When I started writing This Is Me Trying, I hadn’t told the internet that I had a baby, or that I was splitting with my ex. I’d kept these huge secrets and so I couldn’t write about what was really happening in my life. Turns out, that kind of blocked me from writing anything. The moment I put finger to keyboard and admitted what was really going on, it was like a stopper came out. I’m afraid I think you might have to write about the thing you least want to admit to, if you want to get better.

• Writing with someone else. I’d never had a writing partner because I barely had any friends at university and then I was in journalism where there’s not enough money to pay one person let alone two. But my friend Nick (Nick refuses to read this so I’m not saying hi) and I started hashing out ideas, then started writing together. Nick is horrible about most of what I write, which was surprisingly helpful. Knowing that every draft is going to get smacked around makes it much easier not to fuss about getting anything perfect. It’s less ‘there are no bad ideas’ and more ‘most of your ideas are shit so just say all of them out loud just in case.’ Surprisingly helpful, that.

  I also had the good luck to start dating someone (Hi Mark!) who is a beautiful writer, so sharing work became part of our routine. On holiday we write a short story together on the last night or the way home. We swap work, proofread, edit and critique each other’s writing and that’s woven into the fabric of our relationship.

This is not an exhaustive list, and I realise it’s rather chaotic, but over the last two years I have managed to rebuild from a burned out, miserable mess of a person who could barely string a paragraph together, to someone who loves writing more than almost anything else. Next year I have my first romantic fiction coming out - the book that I started when I was trying to get pregnant with Margot, which took me three years to finish. Now I’m about to start writing the second novel of my two book deal with Bloomsbury, as well as having some other things in the pipeline which I can’t talk about yet, none of which I would have believed this time eighteen months ago when every page had to be dragged out of me.

I didn’t have time to proofread this, so my apologies for typos. As internet scandal monger and delight Caroline Calloway used to say, ‘typos are my brand.’