Write One Thing.

(Please enjoy a photograph of me in a bikini yesterday, to act as click bait and algorithm lube.)

Click-bait, baby.

So anyway . . . the thing I’ve been thinking about this week and which I want to share with you in case you are experiencing similar things and it helps you, is this:

WRITING IS HARD.

It's SO hard, though.

This SO hardness is especially infuriating and drives many of us who want to write or who consider ourselves to be writers, or who need to write because writing is our foolishly chosen vocation, because it’s also very very easy. Infuriatingly easy, in fact.

What could possibly be easier, than just putting words on a page?!

Most of us know how to do it by the age of five or six. Capital letter, words, full stop, picture of a house and a tree and a squirrel in the sky eating ice cream. Story told (‘one day A magick squirel had ice cream in The sky. He had choclat. It was Nise.) Job done.

From that point on, very little actually changes in terms of what we are doing when we sit down to write.

All it is, is writing down words, to tell some kind of story or just say something.
You can choose any words you like, and put them down in almost any readable order to make any point or say any Thing you want to.

Yes, there are some rules, and we learn and refine these as we go along, read more widely and practise writing, and those rules evolve as language does, and more bastard Americans come over ‘ere with their anyways and gotten and can I gets and we either chose to evolve too or be stickers for may I haves and semi-colons and and “full stops at the end of quotes” on book jackets. [My thanks to the gentleman who alerted me to this infuriating new punctuation horror today, and from whom I have stolen this idea for my blog.]

So what’s the damned problem with writing?

Well, depending on whether you believe Wiki, Mirriam Webster, Susie Dent or AI, there are anywhere from 500,000 to a million words to choose from in the English language alone. Please let’s not go into variants, dialects and non-standard forms, because I REALLY want to go for a run, and you get the point here.

Most native speakers know about 40,000 words, but use only 20,000 of them. (This is quite depressing. Please do better, and use some new ones from time to time, just to see what happens.)

Anyway(s), there’s a fuckton of them. How many more do you WANT? Just pick some and write them down.

And THERE is the point. There is far, far, far too much possibly of what one can DO with these million-or-whatever words. Which order we put them in, how many of them we choose to use to say which things, and what those which things ARE.

The key, the knack, the trick that will save any writer from going completely and utterly MAD is this:

cut that overwhelming possibility down to JUST ONE THING. Decide on that one thing and write ONLY that.

Stop writing all the dazzlingly brilliant intros and starts and lead-ins and killer first lines you were thinking of at 3am.

Stop being paralysed by the 4000 ideas and sentences and side-plots and sub-concepts and witty asides and impressive metaphors and Long Words your brilliant piece of writing could possibly lead to, or the many other ways you could/should/would have started it, had your brain not fucked the whole thing by thinking of too many other words and which are now leading to a migraine and a parking fine and the end of your relationship and piles and LIFELONG MISERY.

Just WRITE THE ONE DAMN(ED) THING.

Trust me, I know how hard this it.

I am a writer who loves beautiful writing. I get so turned on by word-play and the music of punctuation and the hotness of good grammar and the breath-taking eroticism of a perfectly crafted sentence that hits ALL the pleasure centres in its unparalleled FUCKYESNESS OF LANGUAGE (as neatly illustrated by this horrific mashup of words) I rely heavily on the Independent’s instagram feed typos just for their immediate cold shower effect, otherwise I'd be arrested for public indecency when presented with any words of Evelyn Waugh.

But I am also a writer who likes simplicity.

Clear, fuss-free, Ronseal, give it to me straight WORDS. If you can say something beautifully and keep it simple, I’m yours.

I fall foul of my own desire for simplify and clarity on an almost daily basis when I sit down to write, as do almost all writers I know.

It’s the constant struggle of ‘show them how brilliant you are, but don’t be a 5000-word dick about it.’

This blog started as a written internal monologue between myself and me (and I), about why I was finding it hard to start it. It was unoriginal if slightly clever, a bit funny and it had decent pace, but it wasn’t working. It was trying far too hard.

It then became a piece quoting previous columns and features I’ve written in my career, and commenting on how the publishing landscape has changed following the crash of 2008, and how the way we write for publication now has changed completely and thus …and ..and…it got into a complete mess by having far FAR too many ingredients.

In a characteristically measured response I felt angry, depressed, hopeless and hateful of my very existence, then left it alone for the rest of the week and masturbated over some Brideshead instead. I felt much better.

Today, determined to write SOMETHING for you this week, I am writing this. It has one message, and that’s all I’m allowing it.

When you are struggling with writing, just WRITE ONE THING. Say that thing on the page to the person reading it, read it out loud as you type it (as I am doing right now) and write it as if for a 7-year-old if that helps. Or a magic squirrel.

Stay in your lane, put the blinkers on, cull it, cut it, throw any extra bits away. Better still, don t even write any extra bits. BE MERCILESS with your creative itch.

When you've said your one thing, stop saying anything else.

It’s done, it’s perfect. Just leave it alone.

And then hit ‘publish’ and go out for a run.

I hope this helps anyone struggling to get the words down.

I love you. Thank you. Until next time xx