Making It Up Off The Top Of My Head; Or, How I Learned To Go Off-Script And One-Up My Muse - Part I

 

I honestly don't know of any other group which seems to loathe what it loves. Ask your bog-standard writer what he's doing these days (not that there is a bog-standard writer, we're generally really weird people) and the odds are that he'll reply, with a roll of his eyes and a look of resignation, 'Oh, trying to get things done, I guess. Words aren't coming, but life sure is. Christmas just went past, you know.' 

Hold on. Before you nod or chuckle in recognition, take one step back. Isn't this, well, odd? 

Imagine another creative. A painter, for example. If you saw a painter staring at her canvas, hard white specks flaking off her bone-dry palette, eyes positively limpid with apathy, the portrait two strokes away from not existing at all - would you nod sagely and conclude that she just needed that one spark of inspiration to get things going? Would you grow very quiet and tiptoe out the door, so as not to disturb the great Artist In Contemplative Rest? 

Or would you tap her on the shoulder and ask if she needed smelling salts/and/or CPR? I know what I'd do. 

You see, it seems we writers get a free pass when it comes to this whole writing thing. Everyone assumes that Good Writing can only happen when the moon is full, blue, and shooting fondue out of every crater. Everyone assumes that a writer must wait for the Muse, proffer himself dutifully, and then, when struck in the rear by her elephant-gun, labor assiduously over the scattered bits of soil and trouser, arranging the remnants of the shock just so. 

But no other creative is actually held to this standard. An artist who only released one charcoal sketch every ten years, a singer who only recorded one single every five? They'd be forgotten about in a year or two, and yet somehow writers are not only expected to write slow, but are told, expressly, that Good Writing cannot be fast. That fast writing is Bad. That Good Writing is hard, and must be labored over, like a sapling planted in a tub of Cheetos and Coke. 

Well, if that really is the case, then let's look at some of our literary lights, our shining stars of the firmament. If you had a childhood like mine (unlikely, but hey), you will no doubt be very familiar with this signature.

That is the maker's mark of the queen of children's literature, Enid Blyton, and when I was a young and voracious little Troy, I was completely convinced that she was either a) male or b) non-existent. You see, Enid Blyton was literally everywhere. She was in the fantasy section. She was in the mystery section. She was in the school-story section. She wrote books about goblins and sleuths and schoolgirls and everything under the sun, and I found it impossible to believe that all those books were the output of a single human being. 

_{And besides, Enid was probably a boy's name. I didn't even know anyone called Enid. (image source)}

Unfortunately, as I discovered later to my everlasting shame, no, she was not a boy - and yes, she did write all of those books. Sometimes, she even wrote forty-four a year. Yes. Forty-four. 

_{Not so harmless now, is she?}

How on Earth did Enid Blyton achieve this level of output on a regular basis, year after year, for decades?

Was she a hack? Clearly not. Children have an instinctive nose for schlock, and when you feed them derivative mush they tend to push away their bowls and look angry. Enid's stories were as fresh and charming as any I'd ever read, and I was a very picky reader. Her legion of fond fans across the globe will attest as much to their enduring quality.

Was she secretly a hidden cabal of writers? There were rumblings to that tune in the 1950s, which upset Enid so much that she tracked them to their only proven source, a rather hapless school librarian, and had the rumor-monger make a public apology in open court. Clearly not a charge with much legal weight behind it. 

Was she in possession of some hitherto-unknown technological secret? Well, Enid wrote on a portable typewriter, which, despite being faster than pen and paper, also has the distinct disadvantage of being clunkier and much less forgiving than your average computer, and pen, and also paper. Also, everyone had a typewriter in those days. They were pretty much like pocket calculators. Boring. Safe. A pain. 

(Trust me, I have one of those typebarred clunkers beside me right now. But more on that later.)    

So, how did she do it? How did Enid Blyton do what she did? She once wrote an entire 60,000-word novel, The River of Adventure, in five days, starting from scratch. That's more than one NaNoWriMo in less than a week. No plotting, no outline. She just sat down at the typewriter, and, well, typewrote. According to Wikipedia, the fount of all modern knowledge, Enid said this in a letter to a psychologist researcher:

"I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee - I make my mind a blank and wait - and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in my mind's eye ... The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don't have to think of it - I don't have to think of anything."

This is all mildly alarming, until you realise that by this point, 1953, she'd been writing for more or less thirty years, her first novel being published in 1922... and that in just the two years prior, 1951 and 1952, she released a whopping total of 83 books. 

What I'm saying is that she clearly had a lot of practice.  

"But Troy," I hear you cry at once, "what do you mean by practice? Writing isn't the piano, or a bicycle, or even kissing! I can't even write one book a year! She was just a freak of nature!" 

Well, first off, the good news is that I can't write one book either. Yet. I'm trying, okay. But there was a time in my writerly life where I was really stuck in the hopeful phase, feeling desperately bogged-down whenever I wrote. I didn't feel like the words were good enough. I would delete words, phrases, entire sentences, so that sometimes at the end of a session I'd undo everything I had from one whole hour of work, leaving me with a grand total of forty words. I was utterly convinced that the prosody, the phrasing, the everything, had to be perfect - if not for the readers, then for myself. Style was everything to me. 

I am very happy to say that I was utterly wrong, and those days are now far behind me. I'm now writing far better, far faster, and far easier than ever before. You see, Enid Blyton's secret isn't actually a secret at all. If you happen to be the type of writer she was, you may actually be holding yourself back from your highest form of expression. You may be unaware of - nay, actively blinding yourself to your full potential.  

What I'm saying isn't anything new, but if you're struggling to see the light, this might just help you get that wool off. It may also not, but hey. It worked for me.

Stay tuned for next post. It could be of use to you.