Count me among the Blockheads: N M Browne

Most years I supervise students doing MA dissertations in Creative Writing. I read their work in progress, meet with them individually to talk over what is working and what isn’t.  I make suggestions  and am always staggered by how much easier it is to have innovative plot ideas when the plot isn’t yours and you don’t have to write it. Ditto for world building. 

  Inevitably we often talk about how to work as a writer, by which I mean how to organise  writing time: the other part, the how to 'work' and make money is an altogether different question to which I don’t have a very useful answer. In all honesty I can’t tell students how to organise themselves with any confidence. I try not to be a hypocrite and I couldn’t organise my way out of my office as anyone who has visited it will testify. I do however try to encourage them to find out what works for them and to ignore all writing advice that doesn't. The harder job is to help motivate them through the bleak moments when their story loses its magic and all they have is the memory of the great idea that was going to make their fortune and a lot of printed pages destined for the recycling.  I assume we’ve all been there?  There are certainly times when I feel like I have upped sticks and settled there permanently on the Highway to Nowhere on the very cusp of Over the Hill. I know it isn’t a permanent abode only because I’ve done a midnight flit more than once. (Furthermore I don’t believe in allowing extended metaphors to become reality.)

 Students don’t always take notice of my genius plot ideas, nor do they necessarily accept all my more insightful remarks on sentence structure and point of view, my opinions on pace and peril, in short all the elements for which the university pays me. What they seem to care about most is my advice on getting through the bad bits, because only another writer really gets it. Only other writer understands the bleak sense of failure when nothing works.
I wish I could say I had a piece of advice that helped make them feel better every time. If I did I could probably abandon writing altogether and become a highly successful therapist to the creative classes, but I wouldn’t because I like writing. And in the end that is all I can tell my students. If you like writing it will be OK. If you like writing enough for its own sake you will return  to your draft even after a terrible day in which you delete two words for every one you write, even when you lose all faith in the story, your idea and your ability to write at all. If you love it you will find a way through eventually becauce whatever hole you have written yourself into you can write yourself out of. All it takes is a bit of belief that the story is worth the effort; all it takes is a bit of belief  that the effort itself  is worthwhile.  

In the end my writing advice is the same as my reading advice. I’m afraid I am a hedonist through and through. I don’t read to improve my mind or my morals, I read because I love it and I write from the same impulse.  For me that is what writing is about, the pleasure of making things up. Perhaps it is true that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’ as Dr Johnson would have it, but I am with the blockheads: I think one should write because you love it or not at all.