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?

I thought that I had used all the procrastination excuses in the world.

“My Curtains look creased – I must iron them immediately.”

“If I don’t send this scratch card I got in a newspaper which says I have won £100,000 (or a mug with a picture of a fish on it) then I might miss the deadline and be poor forever.”

‘I think today… I really need to focus on my feng shui.’

Oh yes, I had come up with many excuses over the years, as I proudly convinced myself to be about half as productive as I could be each and every day. ✨

However, all those excuses paled in significance when a new little bundle of joy came into my life.

If you ever want to do no writing, get a puppy. Get a puppy now.

The great thing about using a puppy as an excuse for writing procrastination is that you really do need to focus a lot of time and energy on them. Otherwise they will chew through your laptop cable, get electrocuted and die. Plus they are super cute to look at, and cuddle, and dress up in hats.

Obviously, you can’t BLAME your puppy for being the reason why you are doing no work; it’s not their fault they are so adorable and helpless. And of course you can’t BLAME yourself either – the puppy needs you, the puppy must be watched at all times, the puppy was incredibly expensive and is non-returnable, so you need to make sure it stays alive.

Of course, the problem with a puppy, unlike curtains which will always need ironing, is that it grows up. What used to be a gorgeous dopey-eyed bundle of fur becomes a scraggy pudgy bag of farts – with fairly severe halitosis to boot. Plus they kind of stop needing you all the time (how fast they grow up) and so the whole ‘I’m doing this to keep it alive’ theory starts to feel pretty unconvincing.

The problem with writing procrastination is that as long as we are doing something we deem to be necessary and worthwhile, we can keep those feelings of guilt at bay (for a while at least). It’s only when you get to the end of the day and note that you have achieved nothing apart from creaseless soft furnishings that you start to feel as though there were probably better things you could have done with your time.

So how do we combat writing procrastination?

To get to the bottom of why we procrastinate our writing, we need to understand why we do it.

There can be several root causes:

We actually don’t like writing (and that’s OK).

You don’t have to like writing, you know. In fact, if you want to, you can stop doing it altogether. (She says, eliminating the competition one article at a time). Sometimes people keep writing because they think they have to. They believe that if they give up on their ‘dream’, they are letting themselves down and can never truly be happy.

But it is OK to take stock from time to time and think to yourself, ‘do I actually want to do this anymore?’

Dreams and passions change. What we wanted for ourselves when we were 20 isn’t the same as what we want for ourselves when we are 40. If you are always looking for excuses not to write, maybe it’s because you don’t want to anymore.

Fill your time with things you love to do, and you’ll know you are doing the right things for you. Just think how freeing it could be to say ‘Oh I actually don’t want to do this anymore, what do I want to do?’
We are scared of writing.

Writing can be painful and frightening. When you write you are basically being vain, self-indulgent and self-obsessed.

You are also incredibly vulnerable.

It’s an odd juxtaposition because if you share your writing with the world, you are basically saying, ‘hey! Look at what I did! It’s good, right? Is it good? Umm hello? Someone, please, tell me it’s good!’

It’s kind of needy when you think about it, and so it’s understandable that we sometimes shy away from sharing our writing in the first place.

However, if you don’t, you run the risk becoming one of ‘those’ writers, you know – the ones who talk incessantly about writing yet are too precious to share it with anyone. The ones who seem sullen and irritating and weirdly arrogant, despite the truth being that they are probably crippled by insecurities and fear (and just wear those tartan suits and rainbow loafers because they are comfy, not because they think of themselves as an ‘artist’).

We need to believe in ourselves enough to think that writing should be a priority.

Writing might mean facing up to who you are. When you write you can’t help but explore emotions that you’ve felt, and situations that have meant something to you. Even in the most fictionalized books, an author reveals something about themselves through the story and the characters they create. So it’s tough to put that out there. The potential for rejection is brutal and relentless – kind of like being beaten up and then getting on a bouncy castle over and over again. You might be fine, just don’t fall ov…oh.

However, you also need just to stop being a big baby. Doing things that scare you is part of what makes life exhilarating, what helps you grow, what makes you feel alive.

As the great comedian George Burns rightly said: “I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.” Or, as the great* writer Bethany Cadman said: “just stop being a big baby.”

Is Writing Procrastination Just Laziness?

Writing isn’t easy. It’s kind of like a gym session. The good stuff comes at the end after the hard work is over. Getting yourself in the mindset to go to the gym is hard, especially if there are those two little devils Cake and Netflix whispering in your ear.

Being at the gym makes you self-conscious, sweaty and out of breath. But post gym, oh sweet post gym! You feel elated, proud and totally committed to doing it all again tomorrow as you wobble your slightly less wobbly self all the way home.

Writing is the same. We try all sorts of bizarre methods to wriggle our way out of it. When we’re doing it, we feel self-conscious, sweaty, and yes, even a little breathless at times. But oh my! The feeling once we have finished that next chapter or written that extra 1000 words – it’s pretty unbeatable, and the more we do it, the more we want to.

So really what you need to ask yourself is what would you rather be doing? Following your dreams, writing your little heart out and finishing the day feeling like your own personal cheerleader? Or giving in to Norman Netflix and Cassandra Cake and ending the day beating yourself up while berating your chubby, crumb-covered face and softly weeping into a pillow?

My beautiful puppy is old and fat now. No one has ever complimented me on the straightness of my curtains. I have moved my furniture around so many times I think it’s the same as when I started.

I love writing, even though sometimes I wish I didn’t. So now it’s time to get down to the writing gym of life, stop procrastinating and just get on with it! Will I see you there?

*I am great at writing, my mother told me so.

What are the weird and wonderful ways that you procrastinate? Or your tricks and tips to combat procrastination? I’d love to hear them!

I spoke to someone the other day. Someone that wasn’t there.

Now before you reassure me that talking to your characters is OK. That, in fact, every writer from time to time has a held a little tête-à-tête with the people in their book just to check how their doing, and make sure they are still on the same page, it wasn’t that. I just said something, out loud, but there was no one else in the room.

It took me a while to realise the gravity of the situation. My partner was away on business. I’d done a big food shop before he went, so the kitchen cupboards were stuffed full of supplies, and apart from grunting merrily at fellow dog walkers when going on a daily jaunt with Bert (the happiest cocker spaniel in the world), I realised I hadn’t actually spoken to another human being in three days.

So when I said something aloud in the kitchen that day, it worried me. It wasn’t so much the fact that I had spoken, more that the sound of my own voice startled me. Like I, for the merest of moments, had forgotten what another human being sounded like.

Looking back I realised it wasn’t the first occasion something like this had happened. Since becoming a full-time writer, there have been numerous times when I have accidentally failed to leave the house for a few days. Washing has also become something I consider far less necessary than before. I get up at 6 am, have a nap after lunch, and work into the night – becoming increasingly disheveled, wide-eyed and skittish-looking as each hour goes by.

But perhaps this is something that I need to change before it’s too late.

Madness in literature

There have been plenty of instances of madness in literature. It’s not just wildly insane characters, but rather the many authors who created them that have suffered an unquiet mind. Look at Plath, who became so depressed she put her head in an oven and succumbed to its deadly fumes, J.D Salinger, who spent much of his life cooped up inside the buildings and grounds of his estate which was heavily guarded by dogs and enclosed by high walls, or Charles Dickens who, in his later years, became rather obsessed with the occult.

Yes, there are plenty of examples of writers going mad, and I wonder, was it because they just forgot to talk to other people?

Writing is, by its nature, a very solitary experience. This is particularly true for the novelist. It is rare that one requires the services of anyone else. Especially now, being able to access information about anything and everything as quickly as your fingers can type it into Google, you don’t need to actually talk to anyone to research your book. You can find out everything you need to know online, and the rest of it, well you’re just making it up, so communicating with anyone becomes an unnecessary distraction.

There is, of course, a danger in this, and not just because it is all too easy to find yourself having gone three days without changing your pants. Or because your dog is pawing at you for a walk as you sit, hunched and pungent, typing furiously away, without stopping to look up, and pause for a moment to appreciate the disgusting reality of the situation.

No no, the price one pays for this voluntary solitary confinement is far greater – it can make you a worse writer.

Getting too wrapped up in your own little writing world can be tempting. When we are truly immersed in our writing, the universe outside our front door can all but disappear. This is both a gift and a curse. To be so involved that hours can pass like seconds is a sure-fire indicator that you are onto something great. However, if you become too detached from reality, how can you hope to improve?

Surely it is by communicating with others, by meeting new people, by having different experiences, and traveling to different places both near, and far that we get inspiration for our writing? Without keeping our feet firmly on planet earth and getting out there and exploring all it has to offer how can we expect to write stories to which other people can relate? Writers ask their readers to trust them, that they will guide them into a world that is believable and tell them a story that they have not heard before. But if they have no experience of the world, and what it is like to live in it, how can they expect to achieve that?

The same goes for writers who refuse to share their work. If you keep your ideas, your creativity, and your work all to yourself you deny yourself the opportunity to get better. Sharing your work with the outside world, and getting feedback can change and improve your writing more than you ever thought possible. If you never let anyone see it until it is perfect, you run the risk of it becoming so precious to you that the day never comes.

In short, don’t be a Sméagol.

Sméagol found something beautiful, bright and shiny and instead of sharing it with others, he kept it a secret, a secret that led him to live a life in the shadows, deep underground where he grew increasingly pale, straggly of hair and mentally disturbed. Writers may find themselves clutching onto their ideas and their writing and snarling at anyone who gets too close. But if we don’t break free of that, it can be all too easy for our ‘precious’ writing to become something we cannot relinquish, and all of a sudden it’s too late – and then one day we find that we are living in a cave, talking to ourselves and shoving still-alive fish into our insane, dribbling mouths.

Creativity and Madness

Of course, lots of people think that perhaps creativity and madness go hand in hand. There has undoubtedly been a lot of research on the subject. The notion of the ‘mad artist’ has been mentioned by thinkers as early as Aristotle, who wrote:

‘Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.’

Many Shakespearian plays also allude to this fact, for example, this line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.’

Does creativity require a certain loosening of one’s grip on reality? Perhaps. Certainly using one’s imagination, at times, requires a suspension of disbelief. Many writers travel through eras and into worlds that are not wholly their own. In fact, they don’t travel through them; they create them.

Creating believable worlds, however, does mean you have to live in one. Writers are weavers of unique universes and tall tales, but keeping our feet firmly on the ground is important.

Because of this, perhaps next time I find myself jumping at the sound of my own voice, I will make sure I switch off my laptop, get out there, and go and have a conversation with someone. I’ll look at something ace in nature, sit on a bus and eavesdrop on conversations, or just talk to a dear old friend. Just be out there, living, breathing, and taking it all in.

This way the next time I want to create a fictional world, I’ll be able to take all the things I have seen and done and design one that I genuinely believe in, and, really, that’s what it’s all about. Because if I don’t believe in the worlds I create, then why should anyone else?