1.5 There is no writing cop

We hope by now you are beginning to feel less daunted by the task ahead; that you are beginning to understand that a lot of the 'magic' is achieved by hard work using methods that you too can employ. It is of course, still an intimidating idea to share creative work on the forums (or in any space). But you will know from reading your peers’ work that some is more or less to your taste, but there’s something to like in everything posted - and that that element can be found and developed further. If there is a secret to writing it is, perhaps, that there is no secret, just ordinary people with talent in varying degrees married to a great deal of determination.

Very often, the finest writing emerges unexpectedly as part of the process. Not intended, it can be the result of happy discovery, of chance or of serendipity. The trick is to make use of whatever comes your way. Consider the following allegory of novel-writing which elucidates this principle:

Imagine your novel as a voyage to Australia. You acquire a ship and hire a crew; you spend months in port tarring and caulking and provisioning; and then finally, one day, you set sail. During the voyage, some of the crew swap jobs; some are promoted; some are born; and some are thrown overboard. The ship steers a wayward course, beset by typhoons and sea monsters. After countless months of hardship you land on the shores of a beautiful, honey-dripping paradise. It is wonderful and it is called ... Brazil. OK, it’s a long way from Australia, but it seems just as nice. So now you go back and rewrite the ship’s log and make it seem that you always intended sailing to Brazil. That is how you write a novel.

It really doesn’t matter how messy the process is to get to a finished story. Not one single book you see on the shelves was written like that as a first draft. All writing is rewriting.

Group activity: Don’t Get it Right, Get it Written

So let’s try it - a start to writing, messy and not for anyone’s eyes apart from your own and completely without expectation.

To do this exercise, find yourself a writing space. Choose some music if you like. Now set a timer for fifteen minutes and … write.

What you write does not have to be good; it does not even have to be coherent. The only object of this exercise is to practise the feeling of getting words onto the page. Even if the only thing you can think to write is a narration of your own thoughts ('this is a silly exercise, why am I still doing this, I can’t think of anything to write'), keep going without stopping until the timer goes off.

Don’t post the result of this exercise to the Free writing forum. Instead, afterwards, discuss the exercise in more general terms with your peers. Do you feel that anything of value came of the exercise? Were there any ideas or turns of phrase that you liked that came from it? Was the exercise fun to do? Maybe you feel primed and ready for some more focussed writing. Discuss other people’s experiences with them on their threads.