This rather splendid article in the NYT puts its finger on one of the problems of being a modern author – the itty bitty problem of voice. Now that we’re not all writing omnisciently like Dickens or Austen, the aim is to capture the authentic voice of a character, to paint a word portrait as close as possible to the person we’re trying to depict, as they might paint it themselves if they were chatting to you in the pub. The danger is that we try to be too real and just end up writing like ourselves, time after time. This is especially troublesome for first person narrators, who can end up being either too like the author, or oddly like not very much at all (see abandoned novel number one). The best writers can find their characters’ voices without abandoning their own, or over-seasoning with authorial comment. They make you feel they’re in control.

The analogy the article made with method acting is about as close as it gets. We’re trying to write Truth while still capturing a person that is ‘other’. For me, the key to this is to let go, and find those parts of myself I’d rather keep hidden. I let go of my social inhibitions, my shame at some of my emotions and thoughts, and then the writing runs clearer. It’s not always easy, never pretty, and it doesn’t mean I just bash at the keyboard in an angry fashion. You know the feeling when you’re doing it, just as you know the feeling when you’re reading it. Something chimes within you. That’s the best way I have of describing it. A little vibration at your core.

That’s what we’re aiming for. Guess what? Most of the writing day, we miss.

(Thanks to Vanessa Gebbie for the link.)

For the last few years I’ve struggled with the daily practice of words, so much so that it’s often been monthly or yearly practice. It coincides precisely with having a child, and being pulled inside out to live in the physical world, and so discovering that I am not one of those people who can effortlessly slip from the timetabled daily experience of feeding a baby into the frothy netherworld that is my imagination. No sir. I’ve been searching for ways and means to grease the wheels and unexpectedly found another one: colouring in.

And when I say colouring in, I really mean colouring in. (Or if you prefer, coloring in. I can cater for that.)

I was reading the inspiration issue of Poets & Writers, which includes an article on the science of the writer’s brain, and the way our perceptions of failure and threat can cause excessive stress hormones, and these in turn cause us to sit staring at a blank screen. There’s a whole book on the subject, if you’re interested: Around The Writer’s Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer’s Resistance, by Roseanne Bane.

One of the solutions is to cultivate a habit of ‘process’, which means doing something that gets your creative blood flowing without consequence. Something you don’t have to share, work on, or edit in other words, and if you’ve ever done Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, that’s exactly the idea behind them. Bane suggests using other kinds of artistic activities, like sketching, dancing, listening to music or drawing mandalas as well.

Which is how I found myself colouring in thirty or so sakura flowers last week.

We already had felt tips bought from the Tate, and a Dover colouring book given to us by friends, and so I sat down and started to colour. It’s a book of Japanese illustrations, and so is full of intricate patterns and fiddly bits, and after about five minutes my brain stopped screaming about when I was going to do something “useful” and instead started thinking about which colour I was going to do next. For fifteen minutes I was lost in the drawing. You know, like a kid. You remember that feeling, don’t you? Colouring in pattern wheels, or painting by numbers, just enough for the hands to do, but not too much brain involved.

It’s worth a try if you’re having a tough time getting to the words (or whatever creative pursuit you do), and if you have any other way of greasing your wheels, I am utterly open to suggestion.

Earlier this year I took up running. When I say running I mean jogging fairly slowly on a treadmill, since I have knees that make very odd noises when I do things like walk down stairs or bend down to pick things up. Creaky knees. They’ve been bad for years and I’ve always used them as an excuse to avoid any physical exertion. One day I decided to ignore them, bought proper shoes, and got myself on a treadmill, figuring that the shock absorbers in the machine would give me a hand.

And so it turned out. And of all things, it also turned out that I liked running. I went from being knackered after a minute, to running for 25 minutes without trouble. You’d think I’d conquered it, wouldn’t you?

So I stopped going. My husband began to make noises about the ‘stupidity tax’ I was paying to the gym. My trainers reproached me whenever I moved them around the shoe house and I shoved them to the far end where I wouldn’t have to touch them. I felt my successes draining away from me, my stamina receding back into the sofa.

And then, after a two month break, I started running again. I felt like a beginner again, true, but the improvement was faster this time, and I felt I could push myself to do more. I knew I could do more. I had my past success to draw on, knew what it felt like to push my body forwards for just another “thirty seconds”. I’m covering 5K again, and I think I might want to do a race.

Lately I’ve been sitting down to do a writing exercise every night. I feel much better once I’ve done it, though my fingers are still creaky. But it’s getting easier to make the words come, and I know I can do more. All I have to do is keep showing up.

There’s a lovely curated post over on Brainpickings, about the daily routines of famous writers. It’s fascinating to see how other (successful) writers make their marks on paper, and what superstitions and rhythms they create to shortcut themselves to the work. Some, like Kerouac’s, seem affected and contrived. Others, like E.B. White’s, barely exist at all. All of them are effective, because each is particular to the writer in question. There is no magic formula to producing work – you have to find your own way. Nothing is universal.

Except perhaps this, from Don De Lillo: “A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”

Ain’t that the truth.

Danuta wrote a great post this week about finding time to write, which is something every writer I know struggles with. Who knows why it plagues us, but it does. We can waste time wondering, or we can try to fix it, which is one of my continual quests.

I am a convert to the list, and to the planner, and to a planner for all reasons. The simple act of thinking what you want to do in a week and writing it down seems to bring rewards disproportionate to the effort expended.

We have a weekly planner for the home, which I invented because we found we weren’t getting those stupid DIY tasks done, or communicating what the hell was going to happen this week: when is the grocery shop coming, when are you out, which days have playdates, what are we going to try to fix. We have a quick meeting at the beginning of the week, fill it in and then stick it up. Miraculously, stuff gets done, and everyone is in the right place at the right time.

So I thought, why not have one that can help me get the bigger things done? Things like ‘run a 5k’ and ‘write a novel’. And in one of those internet moments of serendipity it came to me: the Day Grid balancer. There’s a list version and a more organic version, but the basic principle is blocking off time to do the stuff that will make you happy, and not frittering it away because you haven’t got a clue where to start.

If it’s still not working, you could also try the emergent task timer, to see where your energy is really going. That can be a real eye opener. And if, like me, you find the blummin’ internet is eating your life and you are still powerless to stop it, then you might just have to invest in Freedom as well.

I went to a different kind of workshop today, not the ‘bring your work and expose yourself’ kind, but the ‘let’s just think about what makes a good story great’ kind. It was billed as a workshop on navigating the world of short story competitions, and how to give your story the best shot.

In the end, all this meant was reminding ourselves to write the best story possible.

It was useful. It was gentle. Vanessa Gebbie reminded me of Anna Burns – compassionate and passionate, and well able to deal gently but firmly with the crazy writer in the room. (I don’t know why, but there’s always one in every workshop I’ve ever been on. Someone who is only half willing to learn, talks loudly and for too long on the wrong end of the stick. The blessing, as one tutor confided to me, is that if you can spot that person in the room it means it isn’t you.) We didn’t have to share work, but we did a couple of exercises, one of which she called word cricket, which had an Oulipian edge to it. I set it down here for you to enjoy too:

1. Start writing from a short phrase eg ‘The door opened…’
2. carry on writing until the facilitator throws another word at you
3. catch the word, and incorporate it into your writing
4. repeat steps 2&3 for around five minutes.

Obviously it helps if there is someone else throwing the words at you so you don’t know what’s coming next. It was playful, I made myself smile, and it didn’t feel difficult at all.

I wasn’t sure it could still feel like that.

I did have to navigate some internal complications – feeling rusty, out of the game, yadda yadda – but I’m glad I went. It was a step out of my comfort zone, required effort on a Saturday, the quelling of guilt at passing over the childcare, talking to people I’d never met. It was another rung on the ladder, another hop on the way back to writing as a living, breathing part of my existence. All good.

Recommended – Short Circuit, a guide to the art of the short story, edited by Vanessa Gebbie.

The Orange Prize announced their longlist this week, to coincide with International Women’s Day. I saw on Twitter a few grumblings about these ‘women only’ events, sadly a lot of them from young women, who seem to think it’s better to talk about ‘people’, and not single women out for special treatment.

This would be fine, if men hadn’t been having all the special treatment for centuries. If sexism wasn’t still rife in the workplace, in pay packets, in casual pub conversation, on television, in magazines and newspapers. If sexism wasn’t still so institutionalised that it’s sometimes hard to spot it, especially now that no one talks about it out loud.

Last year Vida (Women in the Literary Arts) released their first Count, a tally of book reviews, totting up the gender of reviewer and author. The results showed a gender bias across most publications, weighted significantly towards men. The Guardian ran an article with responses from commissioning editors, where the TLS editor, Peter Stothard, said that he would be very surprised if the numbers of published books were split 50/50 between the genders (and if that’s true, shouldn’t we be concerned about that as well?). He seemed to think this excused the fact that around three quarters of the authors and reviewers of books in the TLS were male, but he revealed his real problem in his next sentence: “we know [women] are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS”.

In other words, “you ladies read fluffy books that aren’t important”.

The inference to be made is that the books we write aren’t important either. Or is it simply that anything that concerns women isn’t important?

I believe in positive discrimination because most people, myself included, don’t much like change. If it worked before, however imperfectly, you’re likely to stick with it. Without the catalyst of offering women and only women for a prize or election, say, the chances are that you will always see the men rise to the top. It’s far easier to stick with what you know – literary prizes are no exception.

Which is why it’s very important that women writers have to continue driving change in the publishing industry.

Sisters in Crime is an organisation founded by Sara Paretsky to specifically combat the gender bias in the mystery genre. When she began she found that “[crime] books by men were reviewed 7 times as often as books by women”. Not only that but books by male authors stayed in print far longer – women’s earning capacity was shrivelled by having not as many column inches and not enough time on the shelves. It’s the equivalent of getting half the pay for the same work. Fighting the imbalance is not a done deal either. As Sara says, everytime they take their eye off the ball, the discrimination creeps back in.

In a moment of serendipity, after I’d written most of this post my copy of Mslexia popped through the door (do you subscribe? If not, why not?), with an excellent article on this very subject. It also included some research into the effects of verbalising gender stereotyping – tell a woman she can’t reverse park and she’ll mess it up, in other words. Women have been told for centuries that not only can they not drive cars well, they aren’t deserving of education, equal pay and opportunities, or property ownership, to name a few small things. We are supposed to be there to nurture the dreams of others, not create our own. It’s no wonder that we are under-represented in the arts.

It is incredible how guilty and selfish a woman can feel for clutching at an hour of time to write, rather than do the laundry. And yes, women are far less likely to offer themselves up as professional writers or reviewers, never feeling good or experienced enough, since we seem to lack the sense of entitlement that some men seem to carry around with them. Yes, I have trouble with all of the above, but I’m working on it, because I know that I am more than a pile of paired socks.

Vida repeated their count this year. Nothing much has changed. We ought to keep shouting about it until it does.