Hey, it’s my birthday!

Now that I’m officially une femme d’un certain âge (45 – whoop!), birthdays have a tendency to make me look back.

Today, something put me in mind of family holidays when I was a kid.

Once school ended, my parents would pile everybody into the car, stuff suitcases and bags into every crevice, and drive all the way from Dublin to France and Italy (via Great Britain, where we’d stay with my aunt and uncle in London).

Here’s me, stretching my legs on one of those long, long journeys, and showing off the most delightful treasure: some snow that had lingered on this alpine pass. Snow! In July! Could life get any better?

I’m nine in this picture.

I was a busy child, writing my stories, making my craft projects, press-ganging small relatives into my all-singing-all-dancing theatrical productions.

It was simpler back then. The blank page held no terror: I just grabbed hold of a passing idea and hung on tight. The raw materials for anything I wanted to sew or knit or crochet could be found among my great-aunt’s fabric remnants, my grandmother’s yarn ends.

Playing (and, by extension, plays) flowed naturally, without anguish or hesitation. Creatively speaking, I often didn’t know where I was going, but it didn’t matter because I was having such a good time getting there.

My nine-year-old self would have been pleased, I think, to know how passionate I still am about all these creative pursuits more than three decades on.

My general approach to art-making feels a bit different now from hers, though. I’ve been wondering what advice she’d give me – what have I forgotten in the intervening years?

Here are, oh, let’s make it nine things she might say … or at least, she might if she spoke in the idiom of a 45-year-old, 21st-century mother of two.

1. Experiment

Take an idea and run with it – try things out.

You don’t have to know how the story ends before you begin.

Make a sampler piece. Doodle. Improvise.

Work small or dive straight into a full-scale project: it doesn’t matter.

Don’t be afraid that it’ll all go wrong. If it all goes wrong, you can probably fix it anyway, or turn it into something else.

2. Use what you have

Just because you’ve used something before doesn’t mean you’re finished with it. There’s no need to start completely from scratch if you don’t want to.

What did those characters do next?

Could that scene you cut grow into a story of its own?

What’s worth photographing on your way to work?

What would that paint look like on this surface?

What does this blue silk need to set it off?

And while we’re on the subject of tangible art, please don’t forget that you possess an almighty stash, some of which has been around since before you and I were born, and I’m not saying “don’t buy more until you’ve used all this up” (my god – you actually have money for supplies?!) but maybe just … think about it first. For any given project, you probably already have something that can be used.

3. The right tool may make things easier, but the wrong tool can often do the trick

This is related to “use what you have”, but it’s more about inhibitions.

Now that you’re a grown-up, you know so much more about what’s theoretically available that it’s easy to fall into thinking that there’s no point in starting until you have the perfect setup.

But you don’t need that special software to write your novel.

The mental tic that says, “I don’t have any coilless safety pins – I can’t possibly think about making a quilt!”? Not helpful.

Cobble something together. Start on the back of an envelope. You’ll be fine.

4. Produce lots

Make art, then make more art.

Trust the process – and trust that creative failure is as much part of the journey as creative success.

Don’t be afraid of wasting time and resources if a project doesn’t work out how you planned. The experience is always valuable.

And for god’s sake, stop worrying about making “too much”.

Make what you feel like making. That way, you’ll get better at what you love, and you’ll have more beautiful things to send out into the world. Win.

5. No need to shake the universe with every project

Simple is good too.

The old stories still pack a punch. Sometimes a small song is enough. Traditional designs survive because they have a quality that endures.

The well made pieces that you enjoy every day will bring you at least as much pleasure in the long term as the bedizened creations that see action only rarely.

6. Capture ideas

Get back into the habit of sketching designs, noting scraps of dialogue, copying down patterns that strike you, building worlds, tracing and doodling and planning.

As well as your trusty notebook, you carry a camera these days – use it!

You don’t need to do something with every one of these ideas, but catching them as they whoosh by you can only be a good thing.

7. Go with what YOU find beautiful and satisfying

Don’t worry about fashions and trends and what people will think.

If you make art that causes your pulse to quicken and a wide grin to settle on your face whenever you encounter it, all kinds of good will ensue.

Aim to have as much beauty in your life as will fit – I mean real beauty, the stuff that makes you feel alive and aligned.

8. There’s no moral obligation to finish

I think you probably still have projects kicking around that I abandoned in the early 1980s.

You know what? That’s fine.

Keep them if you want, or get rid of them, or repurpose them, but whatever you do, don’t feel a shred of guilt.

The obligation to finish everything you start is a real creativity-killer. Don’t yield to it.

9. This stuff is important!

What art-making means for you – all that complex edifice of memories and skills and emotions – has genuine value in your life.

Don’t downplay it. Give it the space it needs, and allow it to nourish and sustain you.

It’s about maximising joy.

You know that’s your number 1 priority, right?

Right.

I was at my voice lesson and we were working on an aria from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.

(She said airily.)

(As if this were totally ordinary.)

It was Cherubino’s tasty little number “Voi che sapete”.

This music has been inside me since I was a small girl.

It comes from Le Nozze di Figaro, possibly the very first opera I was ever consciously aware of. When I was maybe seven, we visited an old friend of my parents’ in Florence, and her partner had just finished assembling a miniature theatre made of card, all hand-painted in diminutive eighteenth-century swags and curlicues. He played Figaro on the record player (this is back when they were mainstream, you realise) and used the painted paper puppets in his theatre to put on the show.

I was bored, obviously (I mean, sure, I was an odd child, but I had limits). Somehow, though, Mozart’s music went in amongst me.

I gather it has that effect on a lot of people.

I’ve felt enormous affection and nostalgia for it ever since.

Meanwhile, back in the twenty-first century

The minute I started sightreading this aria for the first time, the headweasels started screaming.

“Nooooo!” they fulminated, as only headweasels can fulminate. “You are in no way allowed to learn this piece! There can be no excuses! Just no!”

They presented me with a list of reasons why I am categorically banninated from learning this aria:

1. You have nowhere to perform it, so what’s the point?
2. If you ever did perform it, someone might hear you! Specifically, those girls might hear you — the ones who said you sang far too loud, far too often, and flat!
3. You are shit. Listen to you! What makes you think you’re good enough for this?
4. Need we point out that you would not be our first choice to impersonate a teenage Italian boy? Look at the cut of you!
5. You are fooling nobody!
6. Who do you think you are?
7. You smell.
8. QED.

Pretty conclusive, I think we can all agree.

So I’m learning it anyway

…I’m learning.

If you’re a seasoned novelist, you probably already have an answer to the standard question of whether you’re a plotter or a pantser. If not, read on…

A what or a what now?

Let me explain.

Writing a novel is no small thing. In fact, when I was studying text linguistics at university I learned that writing a long coherent text is the most complex cognitive task most of us will ever undertake.

(This explains why there are so many long incoherent texts out there. Turns out this stuff is hard – objectively, like. In case you were wondering.)

Obviously, there is no single Best Way to produce a novel, but many people argue that fiction authors can be divided into two camps: the plotters and the pantsers.

Plotters

Plotters plot.

(Yah. You’re welcome.)

This means that before they write down a word of their story, they create an outline (or possibly several, to increasingly fine levels of detail), they work up character histories, and they place their list of scenes into a traditional story format – often, the three-act structure that gets attributed to Aristotle although these days it’s mostly used in Hollywood.

My father, for example, plots his crime novels like a screenwriter, using the step outline method described at length in Robert McKee’s classic Story.

Before he ever writes a sentence for publication, he has achieved a cartographer’s grasp of the contours of his book, he knows who his characters are, what his inciting incident is, where the reversals will happen, how the tension is going to build and build and build, and what the payoffs are going to be.

This means that when he eventually starts to write, he can see where he’s going. He has been able to iron out plot issues and refine his characters and situations, all before investing any time producing large chunks of fiction.

Not much changes after this point: he works through his plan, following the instructions he’s laid down for himself until his draft is done.

Then, like practically all novelists throughout space and time, he rewrites until his head explodes, elbows aside the bloody debris, and rewrites some more. I’m afraid that’s unavoidable.

Pantsers

Pantsers, by contrast, fly by the seat of their … pants.

Yes.

(Any phonetic similarity to the German Panzers of World War II is entirely coincidental, I’m reasonably sure.)

They grab their main characters and a couple of interesting ideas for situations, and they dive right into the drafting, working intuitively, allowing the story to develop organically and going wherever it takes them.

I pantsed my first novel. (Belay that joke.) I started with my protagonist and some vague details about her milieu and what was going to happen to her, but I knew nothing about the mechanics of the plot, as such, until I’d extruded a complete draft.

(Here’s something I don’t like admitting: getting to “The End” that first time took more years than I could have believed possible. I fervently hope and intend that my future first drafts will have significantly shorter gestation times.)

In fact, I didn’t decide how my novel was going to end until I’d written several full drafts – yes, full drafts, with endings that in the event stayed more or less the same over time. I wasn’t convinced that I wouldn’t change tack completely until really quite late in the process.

Meanwhile, the themes I was working with in the book, the basic ideas I was trying to communicate, started to become clear to me after perhaps the fifth draft.

That’s the beauty of pantsing: you get to surprise yourself, you come up with electrifying insights, or twisty little curls of plot and characterisation, that would have been pretty difficult to articulate in advance.

Which Method Works Better?

Ahahaha, nope.

You already know the truth of this: it’s up to you to choose the method that works best for you and for the work you’re doing.

I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that plotting is probably better for, er, plot-driven books. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most authors of thrillers, mysteries, and crime novels plot fairly carefully in advance.

But equally, there are many who don’t. Often, these are people who already have several novels under their belts and have developed an innate sense of what’s going to work.

My own experience of working without a plan was mixed, to be frank. It got me going, at a time when I’m fairly sure that making myself write an outline before I was allowed to start into my story would have stalled me completely.

Having done it, I can also understand the power of pantsing to uncover story truths that a more analytical approach might leave buried.

All in all, though, it was a frustrating apprenticeship, and I spent literally years wandering in the wilderness of my story before I got any kind of grip on it.

As I say, I suspect that pantsing works better for a more experienced writer than I was back in *mumblewumblecough*. Perhaps I’ll return to it later in my career.

Another Way

Nothing in life is ever neat, is it?

At one remove from the serried ranks of plotters and pantsers, holding themselves more than somewhat aloof, you will find those authors who follow the writing advice of Hamlet’s Polonius, “Neither a plotter nor a pantser be” (actually, that line never made it past Shakespeare’s fifth draft), and opt for a hybrid approach somewhere between the two extremes.

This can take various forms.

Some people work their way through the draft, planning a bit, writing a bit, returning to tweak the plan, writing some more.

Some write until they get stuck and then plan.

Some start with a key scene in the middle of the story and then figure out what comes before and after it.

For my second novel, now in first draft stage, I’ve been following the advice laid out in an occasionally irritating yet curiously inspiring book called How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method, by Randy Ingermanson. If you can get past the Goldilocks-at-a-writing-conference frame story (complete with the Big Bad Wolf as literary agent) – which it turns out I can – this book contains a really solid novel planning system.

Being me, I haven’t stuck rigidly to the system, but it’s been helpful in getting me started.

The idea is that you begin with a bird’s-eye view and drill down in several stages, adding at each stage only the detail necessary to proceed.

This lessens the risk that you’ll faff about writing tonnes of material that won’t ultimately be useful. It keeps you focused on your main aim, which is to lead your reader through your imagined world along the path of your story.

Anyway, that’s the theory.

And that’s where I find myself at present, neither in the Plotter Division nor in the … sorry, couldn’t resist.

Call me a snowflake? At least it’s politically topical.

Imagine for a moment that the course of your life is like a long, meandering corridor. You’re walking down it, in one direction (you can’t turn back), and you have a great view of the two walls, floor, and ceiling, together with some idea of where you’re going and what’s behind you.

Imagine that everything you do, see, and experience is represented within these walls: this is your personal tunnel through the dizzying totality of existence.

Windows

Along the walls of the corridor are windows.

And here we need to get a little bit non-Euclidean, because the windows open out onto myriad other corridors. They allow you to glimpse other people’s experience.

For the people you share your life with, the windows are big – you get a lot of insight into their lives. Other windows are smaller: they may represent a novel or a memoir or a history, something that lets you inhabit a life that isn’t yours for a while – a deeply satisfying thing to do. The smallest windows might be newspaper or magazine articles, TV shows, and social media posts. Brief glimpses into another perspective.

Until the late twentieth century, your corridor was really mostly solid.

Explosions

The World Wide Web has exploded all that.

You are wandering through a world without walls.

You probably carry a multidimensional window around in your pocket, that you can use to access literally billions of human perspectives without a thought.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? To connect so easily with so many people is truly a revolution in human consciousness. In the long run, it might even save us – provided it doesn’t damn us first.

Boundaries

And it can also be confusing and overwhelming.

What do you do when you can’t see the boundaries of your corridor any more? Are they there? It may seem as though you can hop over into someone else’s life just as easily as you can read about it.

You cannot.

The corridor is still there, even if it’s now an opener, freer, more culturally intricate place to walk. You have your life to lead, and it’s important to walk your path, not hanker after someone else’s.

Take inspiration from other people’s lives, visible to you now as never before in human history.

But live your own.