March 2023

Understanding your motivations can provide a solid foundation for writing during times of despair.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the potential impact of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ such as ChatGPT on the literary world, in particular, the potential for AI-generated spam to drown out works by real human beings. Since then, I’ve had a number of interesting conversations with people in publishing and tech about these tools and the ways in which they can be abused.

I have to say, it has left me feeling quite depressed. It feels like the best time to have begun taking my writing career more seriously was 20 years ago, when advances were still reasonable and AI still the stuff of science fiction.

But it has also made me think about why I write.

For me, writing is an expression of a fundamental part of my personality. I know that I’m quite good at it. I know that I’m much happier when I’m writing. But most importantly of all, I know that I enjoy the entire process. I enjoy everything from having the initial idea to working up a first draft, through editing to sending it out into the world to be read. I love analysing other people’s work, whether that’s books, film or TV, and thinking about how they achieved the effect they were going for. I love thinking about character and plot and story mechanics and structure.

Really, I love the whole nine yards. There’s nothing about writing that I don’t enjoy. It doesn’t matter that sometimes it’s like pulling teeth or that I sometimes I feel tremendous self-doubt, because I will always come out of the other side just as in love with writing as I always was.

I get the impression, though, that for a lot of people the aim is not to write but to have written. Given their druthers, they’d prefer to skip to the end, to the bit where they present their book to the world whilst fanfares play and everyone tells them how fabulous they are.

This is somewhat supported by the stat from a decade ago that 81 per cent of Americans want to write a book. That’s about 200 million people who think they’ve got a book in them. A more recent study found that 15 per cent of Americans had started writing, 6 per cent got to the halfway mark and 8 per cent have finished. I suspect that a large chunk of the 85 per cent who have not started writing are people who’d very much like to have a book with their name on but aren’t so keen on the process of actually writing it.

Another class of author for whom LLMs are attractive are those who are trying to publish books at a tempo that would crush most of us. There are self-published authors on Kindle who are writing and publishing full-length novels within 49 days, from conception to publication. That is a ludicrous schedule, and yes I know Barbara Cartland wrote a book a week, but she had amanuenses to take dictation and someone to edit her (short) manuscripts before they even went off to the publisher. If you’re under the kind of pressure that these high volume writers are under, LLMs are going to look attractive, to assist at the very least.

I suppose I’ve been wondering if my stubbornness to hand craft everything I write is just idiocy. It’s true that, if given an easy way to do something and a hard way, I will always choose the hard way. Is this resistance to, even rejection of, LLMs on my part merely me taking the hard way? Or is there something more?

I don’t write to have written, I write to be read. Sure, it’s a nice feeling when you can wrap up a book or short story, but that comes from knowing that you produced the best work you could, that you expressed an idea that was uniquely yours in a way that only you can. But, for me at least, the majority of my motivation comes from the hope that my readers will enjoy it. Being read is a fundamental part of my writing process. Otherwise, what’s the point?

I feel that there’s a social contract between writer and reader, or storyteller and listener, that goes back eons. I promise to write the best story I can, and you promise to give it a fair chance. And I feel that using an LLM breaks that contract because it would not me writing anymore, it would be an algorithm. It has no heart or soul to put into its writing; it’s just a giant autocomplete.

When I read about LLMs and think about how they put writers’ livelihoods at risk, it does make me wonder why I bother. Why do I put so much time and effort into what I’m writing? Is there going to be anyone, anyone at all, who will care?

I have felt quite disheartened the last couple of weeks. But then last night I did some work on my current script and reminded myself that I do, indeed, love writing. And if I love what I do, perhaps that love will come through in my words and, somehow, reach my reader. That would be worth it, wouldn’t it?

Ultimately, I think it’s important to know why you write. What is it that really motivates you? What gets you excited when you sit down to write? Because when you hit a slough of despond, knowing why you write can help you pull yourself out of it.

Understanding your foundational why? gives you a way back to yourself, to your purpose, to your writing. And there’s no writer alive who doesn’t occasionally get lost and need to find their way home.

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Your brain craves novelty, so changing even tiny things can help creativity.

There were times during the writing of my pandemic novel where I got really, really bored. Not bored of the story nor of the telling of it, but bored of the act of sitting at my computer and typing out what was in my head. I wished I could just get the words out faster, without all the tedious typing and deleting and typing again.

Then I read an article about research by Daniel Oppenheimer, Connor Diemand-Yauman and Erikka Vaughan that showed that we remember more of what we read when it is presented in a more challenging font.

The authors theorized that by making the font harder to read the information would seem more difficult to learn. Based on the concept of disfluency, the students would concentrate more carefully on learning the material. Disfluency, which occurs when something feels hard to do, has been shown to lead people to process information more deeply.

At about the same time, I also learnt that the human brain is a real sucker for novelty. Anything new or unusual is catnip to our attention. Novel stimuli prompt the brain to release dopamine, which encourages you to continue doing whatever you’re doing because your brain is now expecting a reward.

A study by Dr Emrah Düzel found that:

A region in the midbrain (substantia nigra/ventral tegmental), which is responsible for regulating our motivation and reward-processing, responds better to novelty than to the familiar. This system also regulates levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, and could aid learning. This link between memory, novelty, motivation and reward could help patients with memory problems.

That made me wonder what would happen if I added a bit of disfluency and novelty into my writing practice by using unusual and slightly hard to read fonts. Could I fool my brain into being more interested in writing than it currently was?

I set my document to Alex Brush, which is a nice swirly font, and sat down to write. Sure enough, that particular writing session went far more quickly and successfully than the previous. Soon, I was combing Google Fonts for the most flamboyant, exuberant and ornate fonts I could find. After all, it’s the novelty that’s important, not the font, so if I used Alex Brush all the time, the novelty would wear off and I’d be back to square one.

Some of the fonts that I used were Allura, Dancing Script, Great Vibes, Italianno, Parisienne, Pinyon Script, Rochester, Tangerine, and Zapfino. I picked these for two reason: Firstly, I like script fonts with ligatures and other embellishments and, secondly, they aren’t quite as easy to read as Palatino, which is Scrivener’s default font.

You could just as easily use various serif, sans serif, or display fonts, as long as you pick a font that’s both harder to read and different to the one you usually write in.

Every time I sat down to write, I picked a new font. Sometimes, when a new font wasn’t quite enough, I changed the colour too. I personally like deep, jewel colours which work well for writing because they have a lot of contrast. So when a fancy font in black didn’t tickle my midbrain, a fancy font in dark purple did the trick.

And it worked. That simple act of regularly changing font, and sometimes font colour, got me through that mid-novel marathon.

Of course, any novelty will work. A different word processing program. A different writing environment. Listening to different music. Smelling different smells. Anything that makes our midbrain perk its little ears up and say, “Oh! This is new! This is exciting!” will do.

So the next time you feel a bit bored of the act of typing, ask what you can change.

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It turns out that typing and handwriting aren’t the same. Are you choosing the right one for the job?

One of my favourite insights into the writing process is this short talk from tech journalist Clive Thompson about the cognitive difference between handwriting and typing. If you have ten minutes, take a look.

If you don’t, the tl;dr is that the brain works differently when you’re writing something by hand compared to when you’re typing, and you need to be mindful of what you’re trying to achieve when you choose whether to type or handwrite.

Handwriting is good for taking notes, for example, when you’re listening to a talk. People who take handwritten notes understand and remember more than those who type, possibly because you have to synthesise the information as you go along. People who type (this used to be me!) merely transcribe.

Handwriting “also seems to work very well for big picture thinking” says Thompson. “Whenever I’m writing a big article or a chapter in a book or even designing this presentation, I need to work on paper to sort of organise the flow of ideas and architecture.”

Typing, and particularly fast typing, is the best way to get out ideas that have already formed in your head.

“Fast typing is significant because it’s something that psychologists who study composition call ‘transcription fluency’,” says Thompson. The faster you type, the easier it is to capture the flow of your thoughts as your brain has them. Indeed, studies have shown that the faster you can type, the higher the quality of your writing.

I can type at 85 words per minute (WPM) with an accuracy of 97 percent, but if you can mange more than 24 WPM you’re probably typing fast enough. Faster is better, though, so it’s always worth learning to touch type.

One of my most common experiences of writer’s block has been down to using the wrong tools at the wrong time: Sitting with a blank document and trying to type when I ought to be sitting with a blank sheet of paper and scribbling ideas and notes on it. And it still is my most common block, but I’m faster at recognising and correcting it.

But what I’ve also learnt over the years is that there are two other positions on the scale of handwriting to typing. The first is slower than handwriting and that’s diagramming. Thompson touches on this in his talk, but I want to delve into it more deeply.

Before I can get to handwriting, in the sense of making notes or plans, I sometimes need a more abstract handwritten step. As I mentioned last week, I do not do well when linearity is imposed upon my thought processes, whether that’s by traditional notebooks, lists, bullet points or anything else that expects a rational progression from A to Z.

This means I frequently fall back on mind maps or even just jotting random notes down on a large piece of paper until some of it starts to make sense. This phase is one of expansive or divergent thinking. It’s getting down every idea that comes to mind, regardless of whether it’s any good or not, regardless of whether it fits with the others. There’s no judgement, there’s just jotting down your thoughts and letting them just be whatever they are.

Once I’ve emptied my brain out in this way, sometimes over several sessions, then I can start to write in a more structured way, which is a phase of convergent thinking. This is when I bring some level of logic and reason to bear, sifting through the ideas, discarding whatever won’t work, working out how the bits that might work are connected, and then putting them together in a sensible and useful manner.

Now, sometimes I can go from my convergent thinking phase straight to typing. That might mean that I’m sitting looking at my mind map and typing whilst my brain does all the heavy lifting. But sometimes, I have to go through a second handwritten stage, where I convert the mind maps into a more structured list or outline. And sometimes, I have to do something somewhere in between.

When I got stuck on my novel, I went through a somewhat sludgy phase where the ideas were coming too fast for handwriting, but not fast enough for typing. I had just bought myself a Remington Streamliner typewriter and it turned out that it was perfect for this mid-speed typing. Slow enough that my brain didn’t run away with itself and end up painting me into a corner, but fast enough that I didn’t get frustrated with the speed I was working.

My method was to type out a scene, scan it, upload a PDF to Google, let Google OCR it, then copy the result into Scrivener where I corrected the many, many errors. It was quite tedious, but it was what my brain needed at that point in time.

So now I have a variety of tactics for dealing with my brain when it’s running at different speeds and doing slightly different tasks:

1. Diagrams and mind maps for slow, divergent thinking.
2. Handwriting for slow, organised thinking.
3. Typewriting for moderate transcription when I’m not quite sure of myself.
4. Typing for fast transcription when my brain is fired up and ready to go.

They say a bad worker blames their tools, but a good worker knows which tools to use and when.

This is a very timely reminder for me because, just before I wrote this, I sat down with the script for Episode 5 of my TV series, read through my far-too-sparse notes, thought “Oh, fuck” and put it away again. I had thought I was ready to do Step 2 with a rapid skip forward to Step 4, but in actual fact, I need to sit down with a large sheet of blank paper and start just tossing out ideas until I properly understand how to fix this script.

And that means breaking out my lovely Blackwing Palomino Ada Lovelace pencil and a load of A3 paper. Oooh, lucky me!

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Understanding how your mind prefers to work helps you find the right tools so that you can nurture your creativity.

Writing last week’s newsletter reminded me of a transformative moment in my writing life when, in April 2017, I discovered the existence of the disc-bound notebook. My husband and I were walking around Office Depot in Sheboygan when I first saw the T?l ‘customer note-taking system’ wherein a disc with a T-shaped lip holds paper that’s been punched with a similar T-shaped slot. I bought a book and refills there and then, and eventually bought more books, discs and even a T?l hole punch.

It was genuinely revolutionary.

Now, this is going to sound utterly ridiculous, but for many years my writing was hampered by the horribly linear nature of notebooks. No, really.

As I wrote back then:

Disorganised notes make me profoundly uncomfortable, to the point of causing creative paralysis, but there’s no functional way I can experience ideas in an organised manner. This means that traditional bound notebooks will always suffer not just from a lack of organisation but also negative emotional weight that’s hard to ignore. It’s just not possible to know how many pages to leave for a particular section: leave too many and it will feel like wasted space; leave too few and thematically related passages become separated and one has to search for and flip between pages when reading back over notes.

My mind is a disorganised creature that craves order. Traditional notebooks emphasise disorder and that caused a creative block that I found difficult to get around.

This became painfully evident last year when I discovered a trove of notebooks, each one containing the beginning of a novel or short story, or notes for same. In some cases, I’d left blank pages between sections of notes, trying to anticipate how much room I’d need for each topic. But each had been abandoned unfinished, the strictures of linear writing having strangled most of my ideas shortly after birth.

But when I discovered T?l, I no longer had to think about how many blank pages to leave because I could insert a page at will. I could take the entire notebook apart and re-bind it in a totally different order, if I wanted to. And that was immensely liberating.

(I am aware that I could have achieved the same thing with a ring-binder, but for some reason my subconscious doesn’t like ring-binders, possibly because I associate them with study.)

My use of my T?l notebooks has ebbed away over the last few years as Notability on the iPad has taken its place. But it’s exactly the same experience. I can create as many new documents in Notability as I like, and I can shuffle them about however I see fit. Because Notability allows for handwritten notes, I can scribble and draw diagrams and do whatever I would normally do on paper, and it’s available not just on my iPad but on every one of my devices that is capable of running Notability.

The bottom line here is not that T?l notebooks or Notability are some kinda of global panacea for all your note taking needs, it’s that you have to understand how your brain works and then find the tools to support it. You can’t fight the currents of your brain’s own flow, you have to find a way to swim with the rip tide.

As much as I love stationery – and I really do love stationery – the most beautiful notebooks in the world can’t help me if my brain is scared of ruining them by not writing linearly in them. About a decade ago, I did a bookbinding workshop where I made a gorgeous red leather notebook. It is exquisite. I will never, ever use it, because nothing I can write will ever live up to its physical beauty. So instead, I simply admire it for the work of art it is and I take my notes and write my stories elsewhere.

The lesson here is to experiment. If beautiful notebooks are too gorgeous to use, buy a cheap, scruffy one. If linear notebooks alarm your subconscious, use a disc-bound system. If writing notes on paper doesn’t work, try jotting them down on your phone. If writing doesn’t work, try using a voice memo app.

Your brain is in charge here. Learn how it works, what it likes, what it dislikes, and tailor your tools and processes to please it, because when your brain is happy, creativity becomes so much easier.

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