In one of English literature’s most famous instances of bemoaning writer’s block, Sir Philip Sidney writes
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
Sidney penned these lines at the end of Sonnet 1 of Astrophil and Stella in the 1580s, but the questions of what and, no less importantly, how to write trouble the writer as much today as in the English Renaissance.
Virginia Woolf famously declared that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” while, as I wrote in an earlier blog post, John Cooper Clarke has recently stated that all you need to be a writer is “a pen, a notebook and idleness.” More Woolfish than Clarkeian, Will Self recommends that writing take place in isolation, away from what Cyril Connolly terms the Enemies of Promise—the eight things guaranteed to distract from writing. In his lecture Twenty Years in Solitary Confinement: Isolation, Solitude, Loneliness and the Composition of Long-Form Fiction, Self describes how he begins writing early in the morning and continues until lunchtime. By the middle of the first draft of a novel, he also works in the afternoon on rewriting, creating a second draft from the start of the novel while he is still completing the first, and repeating this process until he has a fourth and final versions.
This stage of his practice requires complete isolation, often in a cottage in the Devonshire town of Dartmouth, further afield in the Orkney Islands, or by renting rooms in provincial cities in which he knows he will not be interrupted. Complete isolation (and some money, of course) is essential, explains Self, as at this stage the text seems to “acquire a psyche of its own” and needs to be heard above the hubbub of daily life; Connolly’s “pram in the hall”. To hear one’s characters, the author need “enjoy only their company” since the fictive process, Self points out, is the act of bringing the society in the mind of the author “into full voice”.
So isolation (and some money, of course) is key for the novelist (and, famously in Self’s case, so is a typewriter), but the path to what to write is somewhat more winding. In an interview in The Millions this week, Co-Founder/Executive Editor of Dead Rabbit Books Brian Birnbaum suggests that to find your true author authorial voice, you do not need to focus on genre: “I think if you come at a novel from a genre perspective, you are writing from a different place. I think you’re writing specifically for an audience and to disseminate the book. Which is not a bad thing. It’s more of a business approach. My approach is that I’m writing because I love language and I want to tell a story, and whatever that story calls for is what I’m going to write.” Virginia Woolf would certainly have approved. She, after all, ignored the advice of her friend
E M Forster that the characters in her second novel Night and Day were unlovable, preferring instead to develop the technique which made her a leading exponent of Modernism.
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