There's a very famous Douglas Adams quote wherein he says that "writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds." By strange coincidence, many years before he wrote that, the American sports writer Red Smith offered a similar opinion: "Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed."
Arguments of originality aside, where do the words come from and how do we get them onto the page? Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Museum of Curiosity, JK Rowling described her experience of a lake and shed. Ideas come from the lake and are worked on in the shed. The lake refills itself through some unknown process, and too much time in the shed can lead to the writing being overdone. There is an ideal balance between lake and shed that has to be maintained. I like this analogy, although I don't personally see a lake or a shed. I'm not that much of a visual thinker.
There is something like a lake though. A reservoir that fills from an unseen source. While I'm finishing one book, vague notions of another begin floating to the surface. And to go back to Mr Adams and Mr Smith, the process of writing isn't necessarily tortuous. Often the difficulty is in starting. One of the reasons I write this blog is that it forces me site down and get something on the page, even if I don't really know what it will be when I'm finished. It's exercising a muscle, keeping my hand in to use the vernacular. Getting used to the idea of starting so that when I've got a more daunting project ahead of me there isn't quite some much inertia to overcome.
Some people have no such inertia, and find writing as easy as turning on a tap. If anything I'm even more curious about where their inspiration comes from. Are they just lucky enough to have a stronger internal wellspring, or is there something they do that the rest of us do now? Maybe it's a simple as eating the right breakfast cereal and avoiding social media.
I will sometimes deliberately go to another place to write. The main advantage of this is that there are fewer distractions than in my flat. Libraries are good. Bars and cafés can be too, provided you moderate your inspiration at the former. Very occasionally, for this is England, I will site in one of London's many parks on a sunny day. In fact I wrote large chunks of my forthcoming book The Gang of Four Ride Again during lunchbreaks in Grays Inn Fields.
I have written on trains, I have written on planes, I have even written on a boat, but that was just a very silly poem about hipster penguins. I've never written on a car or a bus. Well, I did once write CLEAN ME with my finger on the back of a filthy transit van, but that's more of a rite of passage than a literary effort. Cars lurch all over the place, making my already spidery handwriting completely illegible. Buses aren't so bad, but I feel like I'm missing out if I'm not watching the world outside. Things collect on top of bus shelters, did you know that? There used to be one on the Old Kent Road with an old VHS tape of the horror classic Hellraiser on its roof. It can't all be writing. Sometimes to have to be looking too.
My pet theory is that our imaginations come from the bubbling swamp of our subconsciousness. Everything we've experienced is in there somewhere, even if it is no longer a perfect memory, or even our own memory. This is why writing can be surprising, because none of us truly know what's down there and what will float on up next. I have attempted to aid it when writing books, having installed a mood board next to my desk. I find this terribly embarrassing. I bought a load of adhesive-backed cork tiles and stuck them to the wall so I can pin picture of things I want the mood of in my book, along with other photos which are more for reference. It is currently covered in snapshots of the 1990s with no other theme connecting them. It's just as well I don't get many visitors. Does it help? I think the process of putting it together helps me think about the level of detail I want to commit to. Other than that it has become something of a ritual.
Do you have any rituals that help with the mysteries of the creative process, or is it just enough to switch your laptop on?
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