Oh, Christmas! The big day is right around the corner, and if you are anything like me you have failed to get a Christmas tree, do any present shopping, or buy your turkey – yet have managed to attend at least three slightly boozy Christmas lunches, watch Elf twice and eat about 17 million mince pies.

However, it’s best not to panic. It is the season to be merry after all, not the season to run around like a headless chicken (or turkey) panic purchasing terrible, generic or just insanely expensive Christmas gifts to make up for your lack of organisation.

If you are feeling a bit guilty about not getting the most thoughtful of gifts for your loved ones this Christmas,  one way you can still redeem yourself is by writing excellent Christmas cards.

I know this may be an unpopular idea.

It seems that sending and receiving Christmas cards isn’t as prevalent as it once was. Many people nowadays prefer to smugly announce on Facebook that they won’t be sending Christmas cards this year because they want to save the planet or donate the funds they would have spent buying and posting cards to charity instead (aka – they can’t be bothered).

Now I’m not belittling giving money to a good cause, but out of all the consumerist wizardry that manages to turn us into glazed-eyed, pot-bellied, Christmas jumper wearing zombies who happily hand over wads of cash for giant shining piles of rubbish that we don’t need, the humble and recyclable Christmas card is one of the least offensive customs.

But I get it, I do. Sending Christmas cards does seem like rather an expensive waste of time. But perhaps that’s because we don’t put any effort into writing them.

The sending of Christmas cards is a tradition that dates all the way back to 1843 when old Sir Henry Cole (I’m just assuming he was old, he’s definitely old now) came up with the idea to promote the use of the Post-Office to more ordinary folk. So together with his artist friend John Horsley, he designed the very first Christmas card and sold it for the highly reasonable sum of 1 shilling.

Before this time only rich people were able to use the Post Office (known then as the Public Record Office). However, with the development of the new railways meaning post could be sent in bulk, and further, the Post Office was able to offer a 1 penny stamp, and suddenly sending cards and letters to one’s far-flung family and friends became imminently more affordable.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that sending Christmas cards to your nearest and dearest is worth it if you view it as an opportunity, at the end of the year, to tell them how much they mean to you.

I know, I know -it’s easy to say, but when you’ve got 50 cards to send out to everyone from the boss you don’t really like to your great aunt Sally, or is it Susan?*[texts mum who responds with an admonishing ‘you ask me this question every year'] to do anything more than just hastily scribble ‘Merry Christmas!’ is asking too much. Then when you hit card number 23, and your wrists are beginning to burn it becomes just ‘Love, [name]’ then by number 38 – a scribbled hasty signature as if you are at an embarrassing book signing where only ghosts showed up.

However, taking the time, at least for the people you love, to actually write something meaningful, something personal, something that will make them laugh, maybe cry poignantly, and feel all warm and fuzzy inside, is undoubtedly worth more than unwrapping yet another set of ‘posh’ scented candles or some ‘hilarious’ novelty socks, and isn’t that is what Christmas is all about?

Christmas Cards – A Writers Time to Shine!

Writers particularly have no excuse for a poorly written Christmas card. In fact, they should use Christmas card writing to show off their talents. If you consider writing Christmas cards as a writing exercise, you suddenly have greater motivation to go deep, use your imagination and really think about what you are saying in them.

You don’t have to get all gooey if you don’t want to, but you do have to get creative. Write the shortest of short stories, include a fabulously wintery poem, jot down a haiku, tell a joke -is it a Christmas cracker? Is it a Christmas card? – Who knows?!

Oh, the fun you could have.

The thing that makes Christmas cards pointless and wasteful is by not bothering to write anything meaningful in them. I don’t know about you, but I could do without pieces of card adorned with the signatures of my family and friends littered about my home, even if some of them do have pictures of puppies wearing Santa hats on them. However, receiving cards from those I love, or those I work with, or even my distant relatives (hi great aunt Sally/Susan!) full of words of love or laughter or something silly or witty or fun to read – well then I’d happily receive Christmas cards every day of the year.

Top Tips For Writing Christmas Cards

Ready to write your Christmas cards? Here are some things to think about:

Write more than a swift one-liner – make it worth the effort of loosening their grip on the tv remote/mince pie to open the envelope.

Make it personal – no generic sweeping statements, say what you really mean!

Tell a story – everybody loves a good yarn at Christmas time.

Make them laugh – laughter is the best medicine (except when in a turkey-induced food coma, then you just need to lie really, really still and let the meat sweats wash over you – they will pass, eventually).

Share a memory – take a gander down memory lane.

Tell them why you think they are great – give them the gift of a fabulous compliment!

Make a promise to them for the new year – I’ll definitely call you every week next year mum.
Definitely.

Never Write A Boring Christmas Card Again!

The end of the year is nearly upon us, and whatever has unfolded in 2018 there is still a few days left where you could make an effort to bring a smile to someone’s face. So, writers, why not put those creative talents to good use, pick up a pen and crack the art of writing the perfect Christmas cards this year?  I can’t think of a better way to spread a little festive cheer.

Whenever I read writing advice, one thing that comes up time and time again is writing confidence – and the fact that writers don’t seem to have any. That our lack of conviction is our biggest obstacle and that only if we were able to believe we weren’t entirely dreadful at what we do we’d be on our way to fame and fortune in the blinkety blink of an eye.

Now I’m sure you’ve heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that’s what I think is happening here.

The more we writers read about how scary it is to be one, how bitterly cruel rejection is, how we will have to keep picking our broken, battered, soppy-eyed egos off the floor without any real hope of it being better the next time around, the less confident we get, the more hopeless it all seems and the more helpless we feel to take back control.

I do not deny that writing is hard, but so is any job that’s worth doing. Writer’s need to shake off this assumption that we need our hands held and our fragile egos massaged or that we’ll retreat to a state of miserable, tortured isolation if things don’t go our way. In short, people need to stop treating writers like children and instead like the smart, creative businesspeople that they are.

Imagine a writer telling you that they are good at writing. Imagine it! How very daring that someone who has been practicing their profession for years and who dedicates themselves to learning and improving has any sort of impression that they might be competent at what they do. How arrogant! How obscene! Why do writers have to be seen as these shy, rather pathetic little creatures, “oh please sir would you kindly mind just taking the very briefest of glimpses at my manuscript? No? How very silly of me for asking sir. No problem sir, thank you very much for your time.” [backs into the shadows weeping softly].

Writing confidence – why the shortage?

So who is to blame for this continued infantilization of writers? In short, it’s everyone.

There’s all this talk of how we should be more self- confident that we should believe in our dreams, and not let that blinding b’tard of an inner critic take over and ruin our potential to be the next big thing. But the reality is, it’s not necessarily writer’s themselves that are to blame. Instead let’s point the finger at the people in the industry, our teachers, our colleagues, and yes, even our nearest and dearest family and friends.

People who mock or patronise you when you tell them what you are trying to achieve are particularly guilty. You know the ones whose eyes glaze over, and voices go up a notch when you tell them you’re a writer — the ones who sigh ‘ohhhhhh good for you” while peering over your shoulder desperate for a conversational escape.

Then there are the teachers who smirked when you said you wanted to be a writer and carried on pushing you to make decisions and study subjects that you hated because they would get you a ‘real’ job. Or perhaps that delightful individual at a dinner party who thinks it is ever so helpful to start telling you the depressing statistics of how unlikely it is that you’ll ever be published.

Oh, then there is the person who once said to me ‘the best thing you can do for your career is to die.’

Thanks for that, I’ll think about it.

People don’t ask us questions; they are afraid to. What if we’ve been writing for 20 years and never been published? What if we ask them to read our book and they hate it? We’re like a kid who’s done a crappy finger painting that you have to put on your fridge for weeks on end or that feigned interest you must conjure when your child presents you with a bottle of homemade ‘perfume’ they’ve created from rotten flower petals and puddle water. It’s just easier to pat us on the head and say ‘well done you’ and then move on as swiftly as possible.

Then, of course, there is your nearest and dearest. The friends and relatives who refuse to take you seriously or never quite get round to reading anything you’ve written. Of course, they find it perfectly acceptable to force you to listen to them droning on for hours on end about a spreadsheet-related disaster and what an idiot Sandra from HR is. But dare you ask them for a few hours of their valuable time to share something that’s truly important to you and suddenly they literally don’t have a spare minute. How convenient.

People act like we can’t handle rejection, and yeah, it hurts, but believe it or not we’ve all got our big boy pants on, and we don’t mind it if someone doesn’t like what we’ve written. We aren’t stupid. We know it’s tough. We know that we’ve got more to learn. That there is loads of competition out there and even if our writing is quite good it doesn’t mean that publishers and agents are going to want to try and sell it to the masses.

Writer’s should be seen and not heard, or should they just disappear altogether?

Being ignored by agents, publishers and the rest world is another way writers are treated as though they aren’t yet old enough to join in with adult conversation. It’s a kind of rudeness that if applied in almost any other situation would be considered entirely unacceptable.

Oh, you are inundated with proposals. That’s fine. It’s great that agents and publishers are managing our expectations and all, but the bare minimum they could do is to take a moment to craft an actual, personal reply. Telling us to wait on the edge of our seats for months on end but to be aware if a certain time frame passes we’ve definately been rejected. Come on. Writer’s spend months, even years writing and editing their work, then spend way too much time fretting over drafting a perfectly crafted, expertly researched proposal just for you, and you can’t even take the time to say thanks but no thanks?

But it’s not just fiction writers that deal with this rudeness and patronisation. Freelance writers bear the brunt of it too. Some of the jobs I’ve seen suggest a wage that equates to a paperboy’s round in the 1950s. Then there are the delightfully condescending job posts – ‘make sure you don’t plagiarise otherwise we won’t pay you.’ It’s the equivalent of telling someone off you suspect might cheat on a test or copy someone else’s homework before you’ve even given them a chance to do it.

Most writers have more going on in their lives than just writing. We have partners, kids, dogs, other interests; you know just other stuff we need to get on with. We are grown men and women with lives and responsibilities, and we can’t afford to lock ourselves in the bathroom and have a meltdown if things don’t go our way.

Writing confidence grows as writers learn more about the craft, but despite this most of them write fully aware that they’ll never get published, but they do it anyway because they love it. Isn’t that amazing? So perhaps it’s time to recognise that, to focus on the courage and strength and general grrrrrrrrr it takes to be a writer and to stop treating them like children and applaud them for being the powerful, determined people they are.

It occurred to me the other day, as I once again lamented not shifting last year’s Christmas wobble to at least give me some leeway for this year’s festivities, that I tend to spend a lot of time and money preparing for things that are ‘definitely’ going to change my life, instead of just plunging right in and doing them.

I decide to get fit. I, therefore, must buy some new trainers, a cool running outfit (if I look stupid when I run people will laugh at me and I will stop running immediately), some new headphones which don’t fall out of my ears, and a Fitbit. I must join the gym and buy a juicer, and a recipe book on juicing, and the 4,000 fruits and vegetables required to make said juice.

I already have many cupboards in my home stuffed with what I like to refer to as ‘shame-shadows.’ You know, those things that follow you around from place to place reminding you of the time you tried to do something and failed. A deflated yoga ball that may have never, in fact, been inflated. Boxes of unopened nicotine patches (who uses nicotine patches now anyway?). A spiralizer that is impossible to clean, or at least so irritating it is certainly not worth the disappointment that comes with a bowl of courgetti. Clothes with the tags still on that I bought when feeling saucy and daring, and sometimes still try on from time to time, but naturally only in the safety of my own bedroom.

The same goes for my writing space. I read several insightful and useful articles on how important it is to create an ideal atmosphere to release my most creative self. A place where you feel tranquil and calm, yet also motivated and inspired. Somewhere you won’t be disturbed, where you can think, feel comfortable and let inspiration dance brightly before your eyes. Somewhere light, probably full of plants, and with the smell of fresh coffee lingering in the air. Somewhere you can laugh in the face of writer’s block because there is no way that you would ever not know what to write in such a perfect setting.

Eureka! I thought. Finally, a logical reason as to why I haven’t been writing as much as I want to – I just haven’t had the perfect writing space to inspire me.

The Perfect Writing Space – It Started With A Desk

I fell in love with a desk once. This desk was going to make me a better writer for sure. It was a beautiful shade of sailor blue, with adorable panels of blue and white flowers on its surface, decorative handles, and teeny, tiny, useless drawers. How I loved it so!

I saw it and knew straight away that this desk was going to be the one I would sit at as I wrote my first novel. The one that, when I became a famous bestselling author, would be taken to a museum somewhere and people would gasp in awe at it and say ‘ohhhhh’ that’s where she must have come up with the idea for [insert title of millionaire making bestselling novel here]. I can see why – that desk is just aaaamazing.’

So I had to have it.

It turned out the desk was actually annoyingly low which meant I couldn’t cross my legs underneath it, not large enough to put the notes and coffee cups and stationery required to have a proper writing session, and did I mention the teeny, tiny, useless drawers?

‘To hell with that’ I immediately thought and resumed my cross-legged Quasimodo position on the sofa. I still used the desk of course. It became a place to hold an ever-growing stack of bills I never looked at and mail I never opened until it was such a mess you couldn’t even see those adorable floral panels anymore.

I moved house recently, and I insisted it needed to have a room we could turn into a writing space for me, only adding a mere 300 or so pounds to our monthly rent. A small price to pay for a writing office where I would now, surely, unquestionably, write every day and get that big money-making book out there for the world to see.

The writing desk, of course, came with me. And it looked great. Did I use it? I did not. I preferred to wake up in the morning and grab my laptop from where I kept it, on the floor by my bed, and then work until so desperate for caffeine I would reluctantly go downstairs.

So I re-assessed the office and lo and behold had yet another eureka moment. It was the desk! The desk was the problem! How could I work at a desk that was too uncomfortable to sit at? It was outrageous, preposterous! What a silly, foolish girl I had been. New furniture was the answer, and perhaps a lovely plant, and a coffee machine and beautiful books to write in. It wasn’t my fault I wasn’t writing as much as I should, I just didn’t have the right space to do it in.

£180 later and the desk is gone, or more precisely shoved in the spare room. A vintage, super comfy tub chair has arrived, a tiny wooden table to put my coffee cup on, a walnut bookcase to stuff with books that inspire me, and a sheepskin rug to add a cosy, slightly Nordic vibe, because, well, why not?

The day after it was all set up I sat in my chair and wrote a few thousand words of my book, occasionally stopped to stare out of the window and generally felt very author-esque and smug. I quickly decided that I should only use this room for my creative writing, not my other writing work. But, of course, as the weeks passed, I sat in the room less and less, and now a few months on I find myself in the same position (that position being hunched on the sofa) as I was before.

I occasionally pop my head around the door of my writing room to admire it. My partner sometimes uses it to make business calls, but it is, for the most part, unused and neglected and completely unnecessary.

Is The Perfect Writing Space But An Impossible Dream?

Writers are dreamers, and so it’s understandable to have visions of oneself looking quietly, unassumingly sexy, probably with arty glasses on chewing a pen in a coffee shop, while scribbling into a leather-bound book – that doing this will somehow make us better writers. However, realistically, how many times can you be bothered to pack up all your stuff, walk outside of your home, find somewhere that doesn’t begrudge you sitting and working for hours despite only buying one drink, and getting paranoid your laptop will get nicked every time you want to go for a wee?

Similarly, there is this idea that writing in the ‘perfect’ writing space somehow makes you become a more prolific, more productive writer. The problem with trying to create the perfect writing space is that it can turn into a dangerous spiral down the rabbit hole. If things aren’t quite right in it (such as a writing desk that’s too low), it becomes your new excuse to avoid writing altogether.

The good news is I feel that I have finally accepted that I am not going to be that intelligent but slightly scruffy, lightly made up, wistful-looking writer in a coffee shop. Nor am I going to want to sit in the smallest room in the house with a chair that gives me a backache and is too far away from the kettle – however tastefully decorated. I write, as I always have done, unwashed and in my pyjamas – and I think I am finally okay with that.

So next time I move there won’t be a writing room, and the writing desk will be passed on to another writer, perhaps one who might use it, definitely one with slightly shorter legs.

I realise now that it’s not about creating the perfect writing space, it’s just about writing. No writing environment, no matter how glorious will make you write if you don’t want to. Besides, just think what I could spend that extra £300 a month on – a home gym perhaps?