Hello,
Another guest blog and I'm really very excited about this one. For those of you who don't know Christina Hopkinson (where have you been living?)she is the author of the bestselling novel, The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs. Her second novel, Just Like Proper Grown-ups, also just came out in paperback. So if you have an ounce of sense, you'll finish reading this blog and then get both books right away. I read The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs a while ago and I absolutely loved it. It's smart, hilarious, thought-provoking and a real page-turner. As well as writing two wonderful and bestselling novels, she has also written for The Guardian, the Daily Mail and The Sunday Times to name a few. And now she is writing for me! I am honoured and proud to introduce Christina Hopkinson.
Another guest blog and I'm really very excited about this one. For those of you who don't know Christina Hopkinson (where have you been living?)she is the author of the bestselling novel, The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs. Her second novel, Just Like Proper Grown-ups, also just came out in paperback. So if you have an ounce of sense, you'll finish reading this blog and then get both books right away. I read The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs a while ago and I absolutely loved it. It's smart, hilarious, thought-provoking and a real page-turner. As well as writing two wonderful and bestselling novels, she has also written for The Guardian, the Daily Mail and The Sunday Times to name a few. And now she is writing for me! I am honoured and proud to introduce Christina Hopkinson.
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| The lovely Christina Hopkinson |
I always find it very self-regarding when those working in advertising refer to themselves as ‘creatives’ (a bit like those on TV who call themselves ‘the talent’). I’m loathe to describe what I do as a creative process. The way I go about my work seems to be far away from any fanciful ideas of muses, inspiration and flurries of frenzied activity.
My first rule of work is to try to avoid the Internet. Whole days, weeks, can be swallowed up in the rabbit hole of property websites and others even more shameful to mention (does anyone come out well on examination of their browser history? To waste time shilly-shallying around the more trivial depths of the net fills me with both self-loathing and a more general depression. If I can’t avoid the temptations of the web to write a book, then what makes me think that readers should do the same to read one?
There is are various versions of ‘internet blocking productivity software’ to download to close off access to the Internet but I find a visit to the British Library (luckily only ten minutes’ bike ride away) acts as one giant Freedom program. The wi-fi there is like a patient in intensive care, flickering in and out of consciousness with the overall prognosis as fatal. I can check email on my phone, but I can’t lose myself in hours of non-productive searching for a hypothetical Suffolk cottage to buy with my hypothetical millions.
Routine is another great aid to creativity. See, could there be a more dull and uncreative word than routine? (The answer is yes, by the way, and I’ll probably be using quite a few of them in this blog, glamorous words like organisation, application, discipline). Again external factors aid me in this in that I have three children, eight and under, who go to school between the hours of 8.55am and 3.15pm. It means if have a very defined working day and one which is ideally tailored to writing. Others may be able to produce great words for 12 hours a day, but my creativity, such as I have it, is spent after three or four. The thinking and the percolating and the marinading of ideas can go on all through the day and night, while I’m stacking the dishwasher or playing cards with my children, but the actual writing needs far fewer hours.
There are other ways in which I’m more like a production-line worker than a romantic artist. I set myself a word count of anywhere between 1,000 or 2,000 words a day. OK, more like 1,000. Much of these thousand words may turn out to be unusable, a fact that I’m conscious of as I type them. But without words written, there are no words to eschew and I’m convinced that even a few terrible pages are better than none.
I have a friend, Wendy Jones, who writes great bundles of words and pages, which she carries physically and mentally in a chaotic yet intelligent way and occasionally throws up in the air and re-stitches, never knowing quite where the book is taking her. I’m much more like a project manager, in that I plan meticulously. I know when I start the book where, more or less, it’s going to end, even if I take some scenic diversions along the way. I know roughly how many words I’m going to write to get to each plot point and how it’s going to arc. I do diagrams, a bit like a child’s number line, in which arrows, numbers and word counts pile up and which I cling to in the dark days between 30,000 and 70,000 words.
If these scribbled diagrams fail to give me succour, then I have other talismanic documents to turn to - the character descriptions, the point-by-point plot summary, the overview. I also try to have a, horrible phrase this, ‘mission statement’ to go back to. It’s very easy to get depressed when you work alone and to keep asking yourself, what’s the point? My one line about the question I’m aiming to answer in the novel staves off any overwhelming feelings of pointlessness (about the book at least...).
The sports journalist Matthew Syed is very good on the tricks and tics of tennis players, the way they bounce the ball the same number of times before serving or use the towel when not sweating, saying that ‘Wimbledon is less a tennis competition than a giant OCD convention’. I’m not an athlete or a champion, but I think that any career/job/vocation/hobby that requires a large amount of self-discipline and motivation probably also thrives on habits that trick the mind into believing that it’s worth continuing.
Whether it’s moleskin notebooks, a favourite cafe or a complicated way with post-its, sometimes it’s the ways into prompting creativity that are our most creative production of all.
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| Her second novel Just Like Proper Grown-ups out now in Paperback Click HERE to see in Amazon store |
