Author: Joanne

Habit Forming: how long does it take?

~ Joanne ~ 2 Comments

What happens to time? I could tell you where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, but the time I lose track of is the stuff that falls down between the cracks. The half hour while you’re waiting for the washing machine to finish, or channel hopping on the TV, or surfing the websites you last looked at an hour ago to see if there’s anything new (hint: there isn’t). All those half hours where you’re not doing any writing.

I recently identified the thirty minutes between half eight and nine as the most reasonable chunk of time for writing. It’s after the dinner has been made (probably) and the dishwasher done (possibly), and before I begin to feel too tired to wrestle with words (about 9.15). The trouble is that just identifying the time is a little like setting your alarm for the exam in the morning: it makes you feel ahead of the game, but you’ve still got to get that shit down on paper before you’re done.

In a quick trawl around the internet I was swiftly disabused of the notion that it takes only 3 weeks, on average, to settle into a new habit (any habit, not just writing). The real number is more like three times that, 66 days to be precise. This is how long it took for participants of a recent study to feel that their new habits were difficult not to do.

This is the holy grail, isn’t it? When you’re climbing back on the writing horse the saddle is a long way off the ground, the leather is creaky and new, and those stirrups aren’t where they should be. What you want to be doing is swinging effortlessly into a warm and worn patch of hide that exactly mirrors your own ass.

The odd day you miss doesn’t matter in the long term (so no need for unnecessary guilt) but it does help if you’re rigorous in the beginning: early dedication is rewarded more quickly with a sense of ‘doing without thinking’. That way any slip ups further down the line will feel more like exceptions to the new regime, rather than falling back into your ‘usual ways’. Or, in other words, yes, you’ll have more enthusiasm in the beginning but hopefully that won’t matter.

We talk about habits as if they’re separate to us, but really they’re just how we are, what we do, how we behave. We like routines (coffee in the morning) and a bit of predictability (Friday is takeaway and a movie) and changing a part of that is an effort. I’m at the point where not changing it is starting to feel like an effort – my routines are tired, and unsatisfying, and it’s affecting everything. I don’t have the energy to do anything, because I’m not doing the thing I really want to do.

So. Effort shall be applied. Habit shall be formed.

The best way to see how you’re doing with something new is to track it – there’s a link to a chart below but I’m just going to use the two pen method in my writing diary. Red means I missed it, blue means I did it. I’ll let you know how I get on. In 66 days time.

Read more: How Long to Form a Habit?

Resource: Habit Forming Chart

Reynolds

~ Joanne ~ 2 Comments

The thing was they could never prove it. That’s what happens when you’re in the business of messing with the future. Sometimes the records can get lost, or mangled, or manipulated, because under the pretty pictures, it’s all just numbers. It’s so mathematically complicated, that if you’re clever enough with the numbers, then it takes someone just as crazy clever to figure out everything you did. And Reynolds never had his Moriarty.

He left the Bureau before they could hire someone to outsmart him. Said he’d had enough of manipulating things, said the technology was infantile and crude. Really it was because he was spooked. She died anyway, four weeks and three days after he’d moved and changed over one thousand four hundred little things to redirect the outcome of that one day. Instead of being hit by the grocery lorry on the corner of her street, her coat was caught in the doors of the subway train, and she’d been dragged along the subway platform into the wall. As if she’d had a marked card. Maybe not that day, but this quarter, or this year. We were trying to prove that there was no fate, no God, no controlling hand, and time and time again, we uncovered these ‘unchangeables’, things that kept playing out in the same way. Was it just maths? You slice a circle and you get pi, every single time. Is it the same? Or is it something else?

No one has any answers, least of all Reynolds, and his desire not to even think about the question anymore is the reason he’s now living in a one room apartment in Soho, under the name of Tom Green, clearing dustbins for a living.

5 things about Jackson Brodie

~ Joanne ~ Leave a comment

Of all the stories of writers who make it, my favourite is about Kate Atkinson. You know, how she wrote about the museum, and some cracking short stories and then turned all the expectation about the writing career she was going to have on its head by turning to crime fiction and inventing a detective.

As it happens Jackson Brodie was an afterthought, created to tie together the lives of some characters she was already exploring. This in itself is a brilliant example of how creativity springs from actually doing things, rather than waiting for ideas to arrive before you begin. So Kate moved easily from literary fiction into genre fiction (actually I’m not sure you’d be allowed to do it the other way around – the other name I can think of is Iain (M) Banks, but the Wasp Factory came first so it’s the same deal) and it’s been so successful the BBC had to get their hands on it.

I suspect there’s been some handwringing around the country as ladies bemoan the choice of Jason Isaacs, of the ‘oh he’s not my Jackson Brodie’ kind, but I wasn’t one of them. There’ll have been some more handwringing about favourite bits of the books being left out and wotnot too, but I don’t really do that either. Books, tv, and movies are different beasts. They have different conventions, and comparisons are unfair. The fullest and best Jackson Brodie experience is found in the books (obviously), so if you’re going to moan, just read the books again and forget about the telly. If you want. Personally I’m not forgetting Mr Isaacs at all.

But what is it that makes Jackson such a compelling character? Here are five things that helped make us passionate about Mr Brodie:

  1. He has a perfect name. Last name as a first name. Just the right number of syllables. The kind of name you can imagine screaming in frustration or lust. And no, you’d never shorten it to Jack. It’s familiar, but slightly unusual. It says he’s not scary weird, but he is not your normal bloke down the pub either. It’s the kind of name that makes you do a wee double-take, but not the kind of double take that Zebediah Pinkerton would make you do. It’s a succinct lesson in naming your characters – we make assumptions about names, and as a writer you might a well use that to your advantage.
  2. The tortured past that has screwed him up. The sister who drowned. It’s the humanising element of a man who is otherwise ex-military, ex-copper. No one feels particularly passionate about either of those, let’s be honest. But the idea that something so awful drove him to be both soldier and copper in an effort to fix it, and that neither of those things were the answer, makes him vulnerable, and therefore touchable. Without it he’s just a meathead.
  3. He has passion himself. Not just the loved up kind (tho you suspect that would be amazing) but the kind of passion that makes him stick with his clients, even if they’re not paying. It’s in the way he picks up the waifs and strays, and nurtures them, looks after them. The way he loves his daughter. The way he couldn’t stop being passionate about his work (and his past I expect) to the detriment of his marriage. He might not express it openly (and Kate is great at keeping a bit of mystery around him) but you know he cares. Can’t help himself. Who wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that?
  4. He’s got presence. Part of this is his physical body. He gets knocked about a bit, but he can handle himself, even if he doesn’t always come out on top. He’s not afraid of the teenagers on the corner, the lowlifes in the pub, the rude shop assistants – the idiots who infect our modern lives. He might be afraid of the fight but he wouldn’t walk away from it. Because Jackson is always going to fight for what is morally right (even if it falls outside the law). This is unnerving, unusual, and compelling. He makes the choices and fights the fights we wish we could. And he does it every time it’s asked of him.
  5. Lastly, and most importantly of all, Kate Atkinson thinks he’s great. She loves him. He is frustrating, and brilliant, and all of those things I’ve just mentioned, and she clearly enjoys writing every aspect of him. He’s capable, laconic, repressed, dogged. Real. And how much fun to write such a many-faceted person? If we are so passionate about him it’s because he’s written with passion, and with joy. If we’re going to learn anything from Jackson Brodie as writers, it’s that we have to love our main characters to write them well.

Think of those characters that stay with you, the ones you’re convinced you could bump into if only you turned the right corner. My guess is that those characters are the ones loved the most by their creators, flaws and all. If you as the writer cannot love your creation, then how will anyone else? More importantly, how will you stay engaged with the writing over the course of thousands of words?

Case Histories (paperback)
Case Histories – Series 1

[DVD]

Finding time

~ Joanne ~ 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of Urban Writers Retreats. I’ve never been on one, but I’m sure I’d like it.

I’ve never been on one despite having a busy life, & being a perfect candidate, because in the last twenty one months I’ve had precisely two whole weekend days to myself, and I felt beholden to a) spa and b) drink champagne at the Wolesley instead. Taking an entire day of the weekend for myself feels horrifically selfish when your husband (also known as ‘childcare’) works a 45 hour week.

But now I’m trying to get myself writing again, I see Charlie is running an online bootcamp about increasing your writing time. She’s made a nice video about using a week’s timetable to find times when you might be writing instead. I mentally tried her approach this afternoon, while herding a toddler around the park. Most days are the same after all:

  • Wake up too bloody early whatever time it is but let’s say it’s 7. Block off the next 12 hours under Toddler.
  • Consider the possibility of using naptime – potentially 60-90 minutes. Discounted when I realise that 15 mins is spent anxiously wondering if he’ll go to sleep at all, another 10 making a coffee as quietly as possible, 30-45 spent doing email, making calls, paying bills, packing the afternoon bag, hanging laundry, fretting about dinner.
  • Consider the hours between 7-9pm. Am normally far too tired after that to spell own name correctly. Seems like a likely candidate. Decide to test this evening. Results below:
    • Child in bed at 7, begin to make dinner, which will also serve as child’s lunch tomorrow. Collect yet more laundry from around house. Greet husband, discuss day, building work, tiles, child. Eat. Look at clock: 8.30pm

So 8.30-9 it is. It’s time enough. If I remember to turn the telly off.

(Find out more about the bootcamp here, and also how to win a place!)

Doorframe

~ Joanne ~ 1 Comment

Lenton leant on the doorframe, not in, not out. He looked at Julia’s suitcases in the middle of the living room, one large, one small, and thought of the times they had taken them away, together. He took the small, and she took the large in terms of packing, but when it came to carrying things were reversed. Many things got reversed, he thought. He’d pulled both of them off the carousel after long flights and short flights, but he couldn’t even name any of the places they’d been, except for New York. It was always her idea to go.

As it was again.

The plumbing set up its usual hum when the toilet was flushed. Lenton looked over his shoulder as Julia came down the stairs. She looked like she was off on a business trip, with her neat jacket and tasteful but bold necklace. He looked at her shoes. Weekend shoes for Julia were always converse. She was wearing heels.

“I didn’t know you had to dress up to leave a marriage,” he said.

She stopped on the bottom step, perhaps consciously, since it brought her somewhere close to his height. “Lenton.”

“No, I know. No tasteless remarks. We’re having an amicable split. Yes?” He kept turning those words over in his mind, and sometimes spitting them back at her.

She said his name again, and he suddenly thought it was the rudest thing in the world, to keep on using a person’s name when you’d decided to leave them. A name is personal, and if you withdraw from someone’s life you surely lose your rights to use their name. But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t say anything because what he wanted was for her to say his name and take his face in her hands, the way she used to, and if he told her not to say his name then she could never do that. Even if he had been so blind as to not see this coming, he wasn’t so stupid as to extinguish the only hope he had.

On Stephen King

~ Joanne ~ Leave a comment

I was sitting here, thinking that it has been a long day and perhaps I ought to write something, anything, when my thoughts involuntarily turned to Stephen King.

I’ll be honest and say I haven’t read any of the fiction he’s written in the last, ooh, fifteen or twenty years. But before that…oh, before that I was the teenager devouring every scary word, reading until I had to get up for school again. His books were big (always a plus when you devour them), scary (something I cannot do anymore) and full of story.

He also gave me my first taste of how powerful words could be.

My school was a mixed ability, mixed fortunes kind of school. In the last couple of years the classes were separated according to ability, but before that it was a mish mash of bright, capable and throwing chewing gum at the ceiling, sitting in roughly that order from front to back. I was toward the front, not nerdy enough to be right in the front row, but certainly not one of the back-chatting, desk scrawling, terrifying kids from the other village. They took up the entire back row, scraped chairs, answered back, were always last in and first out.

For one English class we were given the assignment of finding a favourite passage in a book we liked, and reading it out loud to the class. My passion for books was so great that I knew I’d find something to read, but would everyone like it? Would I be inviting a kicking from the kids in the back row? What would my friends think? Would I stumble over the words? And this was before I tackled the horror that everyone would be looking at me.

I chose a passage from It. It was too long, but I couldn’t see any way of it making sense to the class if I cut it down. I don’t remember exactly what it was about, but there was some kind of chase and a confrontation, some fear and some resolution. It felt right, but on the day I was still terrified. Most of my classmates read before me, all manner of things: short passages, long passages, but most of them with whoops and catcalls as accompaniment from the back row.

And then it was my turn.

I picked up the book. Found my place. Began to read aloud. And then it happened.

There was no classroom anymore. There was just me, and the book. As I read, I fell completely inside the story. I was reading aloud but I barely had to concentrate, because the words were just tripping off my tongue, one after the other, as natural as can be. I read, and I kept on reading, oblivious to my surroundings. When I finally got to the end and stopped speaking, it took me a moment to realise that the odd sound I was hearing was the dying acoustic of my voice bouncing off the walls of an entirely silent classroom.

Yes, they were looking at me, but I’d been shielded by the words so it didn’t matter. And there were no catcalls because the words had them too, all those kids in the back row. And my teacher, who had looked so disappointed when I had pulled out my ‘trashy’ novel, now looked surprised, but glad. Maybe she’d been waiting for something to shut them up.

I learned two things that day. One: Story is king – if you have story your readers will forgive you almost anything. Almost. Two: I love reading aloud. More about that another time.