what i am writing
I've spent hundreds of hours writing with luka now and I've learnt some stuff despite the fact that he is amazingly arrogant (which is probably 99% justified by enviable natural talent), refuses to be told anything and has a desperate need to win every argument. He's got some good advice but to be any good at all, I had to go the long way round.
I only started writing
anything about seven years ago. Before that I spent my time making electronic sounds (which seems like another lifetime now but anyway) and reading more or less anything I could get my hands on. Good, bad, difficult or remedial, fiction or non-fiction. Of course I had my favourites but I would read anything. That was step one I think. Before that step zero was four years of university so shut it luka. There's more to the individual person or writer than whether they went to fancy uni or followed the exact path of life as you.
I started to write after reading in a book called The Artist's Way that an artist in any form should try to
write three pages longhand every morning. This was absolutely crucial for me. The Artist's Way tells you to fill the page even if you are only writing "I can't think of anything to write about" over and over. I did this for two years - not hitting three pages every single day but that's your goal.
By reading like that and writing like that I think you pick up many styles and voices and vocabularies and use them and discard them until you are on the way to a style you like as your own. No time reading is wasted. This maybe also helps you get over the recalcitrance, or reluctance, to write in any way you like, which is an obstacle wasting your time. The Artist's Way even recommends you draw a picture of a 'censor' figure with a big cross through him her it and stick it up next to your desk which I did and should make a new one. The rest of the book was mostly self-help wetness but I liked these two tips.
I also found writing every morning seemed to be beneficial for my state of mind, aside from whether anything of literary worth emerged, what ever that is.
After two years of that I felt ready to start something so I started getting a novel together, writing around a very loose structure of a single day, developing and discarding ideas as I went. Once into the thick of it this was some of the best fun I've had in my life as I remember. Getting the first draft together took a year.
Step three was starting to write poems, at which time I also set myself to read as much (English) poetry as I could stand (the best stuff is very hard to read especially for long periods). After I showed him some of my first poems I thought were any good, Luka gave me some amazing advice:
You're saying things you know how to say. You have to find ways to say things you DON'T know how to say. This is amazing insight I think.
I went through a patch of trying as many different (strict) poetic forms as I could, if only to try to internalise rhythm, metre, scansion or however you like to call it. I find it helps to practice as much as possible, which means write as much as possible, and if I write a bad one I just start another one. Liberty!
Read all the writing tips and style guides writers-write-about-writing books and interviews and ignore them. (you probably know the kind of thing - adverbs, "don't use alternatives to said", Hemingway's 10-dollar words, etc. etc. As one of my writing friends once said, there are probably so many of these because they are in the form of writing themsleves. Unfortunately the Paris Review interviews are behind a paywall now but they are great.
Try as many writing exercises as you can think of, description in intense detail, dialogue, movement, there are quite a lot of these out there. And have a look at
this website.
That's all for now except to say I have written more books than luka
