What do you do when you feel utterly empty of words?

I read, and I daydream.

Daydreaming only happens if I get absorbed in a repetitive task like walking, or painting skirting boards (as I’ve been doing this week), something that requires very little high level thought from me, but produces something close to a kind of trance. Thoughts get the chance to rise up and roam around of their own accord, without too much input from me.

It’s a treat to have daydreaming back in my life. Modern life is so full of distractions (hello Twitter) that I’m finding it harder and harder to create the kind of dreamy state I seemed to live in almost permanently as a child.And as a grown up with a house to run and a child to raise, justifying time where you’re simply staring off into space is really hard.

On the plus side, having discovered that decorating is a great way to get a bit of thinking time, I now want to paint the whole house, since it means I’m technically doing chores.

Reading is much easier to justify, and this week I’ve been visiting a couple of very interesting blogs, and getting my fiction fix from a brilliant collection of short stories:

Do subscribe to The School of Life’s blog, which is run by a modern philosophy club of sorts. I was a philosophy major, so I know full well how the word philosophy can scare a person, but philosophy is only thinking about how we ought to live, why things are the way they are, and how we can make things better. Academic philosophy has become so specialised and (dare I say) insular that this essential truth gets lost in translation.

The School of Life has some very interesting classes, weekends, and ‘sermons’ to attend, just to get you thinking outside your usual tram lines, if you’re anywhere near central London. I’m completely excited by a sermon on Cosmic Connections, because I am blown away by the knowledge that we are made of stars every time I think about it.

I’ve also been noodling around Brain Pickings, a collection of really cool, interesting things, encompassing everything from five creative manifestos, to a map of a woman’s heart. I love this site already, and we’ve only been friends for a week.

On the Kindle this week I’ve been ploughing through The Best British Short Stories 2011, from amazing indie publisher Salt (also available in paperback). I promise you, never will you spend 86 pence more wisely – it is an utter bargain for some of the most arresting fiction I’ve read this year.

What’s been filling your well lately?

If so I could really do with it, just to take the pressure off. I suspect I’m not alone.

Oh Money. Let’s not be all airy fairy and pretend that we don’t think about it. We have mortgages, and bills, and children who need shoes, and pets who need vaccinations, and relatives who live a weekend visit away because you had to move to get work.We could all do with a little bit more.

You don’t want to be defined by it, I know. Neither do I. But we are. “What do you do?” is one of the first things you get asked by a new acquaintance. You know you’re supposed to respond with what brings in the dosh, not the things that bring you joy, like old letterpress restoration or tap dancing.

Pity those of us, who, for whatever reason, have no definable monetary role, and therefore no easy way to answer the question. The mouth thickens, the tongue stumbles into teeth, the apologies for your existence begin to flow, because your questioner has already glazed over, having made a subtle calculation, unconsciously no doubt, that you can be of no use in their own career, and therefore cease to be of interest.

No, of course it’s not like that every time.

But enough of the time, it is.

I have my own in-house careers service in my best friend (not strictly in-house, but she’s like family, so good enough). In the summer we lay on the grass in St James’s Park, staring at the clouds, and she helped me work through my anxiety about saying that I’m a writer.

“It’s because I’ve never been paid to do it,” I confessed. “I feel fraudulent.”

“So the money would make you legitimate?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“How much would you have to earn to call yourself a writer?”

“I dunno. Twenty quid?”

We laughed. But it raises a serious point, in that many of us find it difficult to take our work as writers (or artists or photographers or whatever) seriously, until we’ve been paid. How much money something is worth is how our culture places value on things, and the corresponding creed we live by is that if you haven’t been paid for it then what you do has no value.

Galling.

And so we struggle on as artists, because we feel strongly, and rightly, that there’s more to this life than just making money, but until we’re published, or sell a picture, we have to keep afloat the idea that what we’re doing has value. It’s very tiring. It can also feel lonely and shameful, when there are so many other things you could be doing.

I’m not going to tell you that you ought to answer the question ‘what do you do?’ with ‘I’m a writer’. Everyone has to come to their own conclusion about when they’re ready to deal with the follow up of ‘oh really? I always thought I could write a novel if I had the time’.

What I am going to tell you is that it’s ok to call yourself a writer in your own head. It’s ok to push the dishes to one side and write, instead of clearing up. It’s ok to take walks through the woods while you mull over your plot. It’s ok to sacrifice haircuts and shoes and work part-time to get more space for writing, if that’s what you want.

It’s ok to live differently.

Which is not to say that you have to give up on the idea of being paid for doing something you love. Just accept that it might take a while, and it might not be as much as you’d like. Me? I’m trying hard to make space for writing anyway, but I’m still hanging out for that twenty quid. Wanna chip in a pound?

 *Obviously this is a hilarious visual joke, but you know, not really, because you can pay for the words if you like. The button really works. But just so you know, I don’t expect you to. Obviously.

As a hangover from our school system we all get that feeling of September being a fresh start – like a bonus ‘new-year-turn-over-a-new-leaf ‘event. Right on cue the Autumn winds arrived, to start whipping the leaves off the trees, and driving rain into my face. Yes, I felt giddy with possibilities as I pulled on my Wolfskin and headed out of the door yesterday.

Conkers.

Crumble.

New pencil case.

Since my other occupation (sewing) is currently impossible (sewing machine buried under stuff that ought to be on eBay) and we have a new table (Ikea) and some functioning dining chairs (new obsession – upholstery), lately I often find myself at the kitchen table, sitting on a slightly rickety chair, with my laptop open and the kettle on.

Surprisingly this is a good place to write for me. I’ve experimented around the house, in all the rooms and all the chairs, and it seems that the place that makes me most productive is the one place you’d think I’d get distracted by all the jobs I ought to be doing. Luckily I’m enough of a domestic slut that I have no trouble ignoring the things I ought to be doing, in favour of things I’d rather be doing.

I know that Virginia says we need a room of one’s own, and that’s all very well, but how many of us can really have that luxury? Better to amend the exhortation to a place of one’s own, because I think this is necessary. In conjunction with the notebook you like, and the special pen, sitting down in the place where you write best helps your brain take shortcuts to the bit you want to get to. And we are all creatures of habit, even if you think you’re not: we run in little grooves, and make routines for ourselves that let us function on autopilot to get things done – imagine the horror of having to think everything through from scratch every day! It would be like starting a new job all the time.

But this is a great time of year to forge a new routine, and breathe some life back into your writing habits. Experiment around the house, and out of the house, until it feels right, until you have a great writing session that makes you feel giddy, and by October, you’ll be back on autopilot again.

So rejoice in the season changing, in children going back to school, in new shoes, winter coats, and rib-sticking stews. More than anything the promise of the new pencil case is that we antisocial creatures are freed from the pressure to go outside and enjoy the sunshine, making terrible small talk at barbeques, and can hole up with books and pens and as much of our own company as we can stand. Bliss.

Gosh, I do love my special pen. Not content with being a Moleskine notebook addict, and unable to write in any other kind of notebook (the paper’s never as smooth, they won’t lie flat) I simply must have my special pen.

I looked for it for years. I tried all manner of disposables, gel inks, rollerballs, fountain pens, ink types, and even pencils. But nothing ever felt right. You need it to have just the right amount of heft when you hold it, so that it’s light enough to hold for hours without cramp, but not so light that you feel you’re trying to pin down a helium balloon. There must be no splodges, nor false starts, where you scratch at the page before the ink starts to flow. For me there had to be no cap either, as I’ve a habit of trying to store them in my cheek like a demented hamster, which is simply unpleasant.

And then I found it.

It was the last day in Tokyo, and we’d been saving up a trip to Ito-ya, the seven storey stationery shop in Ginza (reviews in English). Heaven for paper geeks, marked by a giant red paperclip on the side of the building. We noodled around the paints and exquisite papers, fingered the stamps and inks, marvelled at racks of elaborate envelopes for giving monetary gifts, and then I found myself in the pen section.

It’s a serious business in Japan, stationery, and what is stationery without a pen? Frankly, if I couldn’t find a pen in there, I had no hope. They have everything from the cheapest biro to the most expensive fountain pen. As it turned out, it was incredibly simple. I drifted towards the Pilot section, since I have a fondness for their disposables, and picked up a simple ballpoint. Slim metal case, push button action, 0.7 ballpoint. I was smitten almost instantly.

Now, a funny thing happened when I started writing this post. I thought I ought to do a search on the web so that I could point you in the right direction, just in case you were curious. When I was in Tokyo I bought a couple of refills, just in case, but since it really wasn’t an expensive pen, and I knew I could get Pilot pens in the UK, I’d always assumed I’d be able to find a replacement, in case the worst happened, and I dropped it in the Thames or my son threw it onto the train tracks.

Wrong.

No matter how I searched for a Pilot Cavalier I kept coming across fountain pens rather than ballpoints, and pages of people discussing ink colours and replacements. I began to fear that it had been discontinued. In order to track it down I ended up on the Pilot website in Japanese, where I used my rudimentary knowledge of katakana to locate the exact pen, copy the model number and finally do a search that led me to a site where I can purchase a replacement. I spent almost two hours doing this rather than writing this post, and am so tempted to buy several pens so that I need never go through those two hours again.

So my intent was to talk about having rituals, and the way using particular objects is a way of preparing the brain for particular tasks, and instead I became so distracted at the possibility of never being able to lay my hands on this cheap pen that I more than demonstrated that other writer’s cliché, the one where we’re all superstitious and cranky. More about rituals another time. Perhaps once my parcel is here from Japan.

Show me a writer who doesn’t appreciate nice stationery and I’ll show you a baker who doesn’t like cake. People who write love their tools, and nothing gets the heart racing like a new notebook. The promise in the empty lines, the smell of pristine paper, and the smooth feel of unmarked pages; before you write a word there’s a writing future where you didn’t screw it up and you’re not a complete failure as a person. (Show me a writer who never thinks that and I’ll bake you a cake myself.)

But this is why the beauty of the new notebook is also the horror. What if you write a terrible sentence? What if you have to cross things out, make spelling mistakes, use a pen that bleeds? What if you do all the usual horrible things you do when you write because you are imperfect, and a learner, and you can’t craft a beautiful sentence at all? Why bother when you are not Chekhov? Why write when you can’t be brilliant?

And so there the notebook sits, gathering dust instead of thoughts.

It’s the love getting in the way. Did you know that? The love you have for the words, and the way the great ones make you feel, gets twisted into a peculiar reverence for the special pen, the vintage Corona typewriter, the paper that everything is written on, until you come to understand that you are so unworthy you shouldn’t be touching these things until you are a better writer.

Here’s the thing: you will never be good enough. You will certainly never be good enough if you don’t write, but even then…

It’s true. You may as well accept it. You have an ideal in your own head, and you’ll never be quite as good as you wish you were, because no one is. It may be that in among the writing you do today you find one perfect sentence, and you will feel like a giant for a split second until you look at all your other sentences, but this is a common feeling among writers.

I have one trick to offer you, to get you to open that new Moleskine and start writing:

Open the book in the middle, and draw a picture.

It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw. Draw a self portrait. Draw the cat. Draw the house you wish you had. Draw your favourite ever shoes. Draw the view from the window. It’s important to draw because it isn’t writing. It’s not about words, and getting your craft right. It’s about spoiling the notebook and clearing the mental barriers you’ve set up. Look – here’s mine:

Now the notebook is effectively ruined, you might as well put some words in it.