How to write

Everything is interesting. Absolutely everything.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

OK so first of all, I've really no fucking idea at all how to write and I doubt anyone else does either. Plumbers know how to plumb. Drivers know how to drive. They can wake up each day and do the thing that they are good at, and it really won't make much difference whether they're feeling rusty or inspired. They can just get the job done. 

That's not how it works for writers. Sometimes writers sit down and it's all pouring out of them. Each word - exactly the right one - is just sitting there, juicy and bursting with potential, easily within reach on a nearby branch. Every idea flows naturally from the last and in an order which provides a neat crystalline structure to the whole endeavour. 

And then the next day, despite the fact that you slept well and are in a perfectly good mood, the words are all gone. They fucked off. You are alone, more biped than man, grasping dumbly for ways to articulate. You realise that you are entirely unable to express yourself, and indeed will never have a worthwhile thought again for the rest of your life, doomed as you are to lose all spark of inspiration, reduced to eeking out a meagre living through the use of reduced-price-near-expiration meal deals as your creative journey comes to a bitter and ignoble end.

This is why writers have no idea how to write. If we knew how to do it, we could do so on bad days. But we can't, so we don't. But we do know perhaps one thing. It is this: Writing is about being in touch with your feelings. At the absolute core of it, it is about feeling something yourself, realising others may do too, and basing your work around that moment. It's about having confidence in your feelings and the manner in which they might be shared. It's a process that is conducted entirely on your own, but which demonstrates the extent of your bonds with those around you.

We rarely talk about this bit. We talk about style. We talk a lot, pointlessly, about when the best time is to write, which makes no more sense than discussing when the best time is to yawn. But we don't really talk about the defining emotional impulse of it.

For non-fiction, the initial feeling must be curiosity. This might be the most underrated of all sentiments in modern journalism. We're awful at it. Many producers and editors seem so petrified of boring their audience that they have lost all contact with the fact that their audience wants to understand the world. 

At the origin of all good non-fiction writing is someone who thought: I want to know more about that. I want to understand how it works. I want to know where it came from and who was responsible for it. I want to understand its implications. It is a child gazing at the stars. And I'm not saying that in a cunty way. I'm saying it as an expression of all that is best and most honourable in the human tradition.

Most of us are extremely curious. We want to know what probation is and why it fails. We want to know how the bond market operates and what its consequences are. We want to know about the complex reality of private sector provision in a national health service. We want to know how someone writes a pop song. We are just seriously ill-served by a current affairs ecosystem which presumes far too little from its audience.

The honest truth? Everything is interesting. Absolutely everything. Sewage systems, the psychology of UFO sightings, the effect of school testing, the behaviour of cells. If it's approached correctly, every single aspect of life is potentially fascinating. But once your curiosity is in play, it's crucial to pay careful attention to its opposite. You have to notice when you're getting bored.

For me, this happens very quickly. It's really difficult to understand policy areas. They are the product of complex modern societies, have decades of pre-existing legislative layers on top of them, like a kind of age-old statutory sediment, and are full of contorted, difficult details which impact on and caveat whatever it was that you thought you had just understood. I hate hard work. I hate things that are difficult. I am the most basic of all the basic bitches. I would happily spend the entire weekend eating stuffed crust pizza and playing video games. So all of this is very inconvenient. 

But here's the thing: that boredom and frustration are not a hindrance to good writing. They are a guide. If it bored you, it will bore others. So your job is to get past the boredom, find a way of understanding the thing, and then present it in the way that would have appealed to you if you had first discovered it that way. The boredom you feel is a warning sign about what not to do when you are explaining the topic. It tells you how to write about it, which bits are hard to grasp, and the point at which all the information just becomes a bit too much. Each moment of resistance from your brain indicates where you need to clear the path for readers.

When you write about the subject, your task is to remember with crystal clarity how bored you were when you first tried to understand it. The frustration, the urge to check your phone, the way your mind desperately tried to scramble out of the subject matter and onto any other topic at all, no matter how banal. And then it's to deliver the information in the most arresting way possible: through storytelling, the use of metaphor, and dynamism. 

You'll often see a form of praise which goes something like this: The writer made it intelligible without being patronising. But the whole idea that this would be a problem is bizarre. If you're wondering whether you're being patronising, something has gone wrong. You’re not supposed to be helping the reader become more intelligent. You are supposed to be helping them save time. You are there to serve their patience, not their intellect. You're there so they don't have to go through what you went through. So there really is no question of patronising them. They are you - in the past, before you understood the subject. And you are going to give them the thing you wish had been available when you were in that initial state of ignorance. 

All of this requires a strange state of emotion. You are incredibly aware of your feelings, because you are basing your writing on the manner and extent to which you have them. But you are also kind of outside of them, because you are constantly assessing them as they happen. It's as if you're watching yourself experience these things.

But there is also something deeply reassuring about it. Writing is a lonesome business. You sit on your own, day after day, typing into a machine, gradually losing all colour in your face and any ability to socially engage with other people. But it is powered by that really rather beautiful thought: If I feel this, others will too.

Writing is solitary. But it is also a form of communion. All good writing is an expression of humanism. And that is ultimately the most important reward it offers. 

Odds and sods

Sorry this arrived so late. I fucked the writing. Turns out it's really hard.