Recalibrate - Heather Dyer

It’s just after dawn and I’m sitting in my easy chair in front of the patio doors. My dog is on my lap, and I’m cradling a cup of coffee. Outside, the sparrows are going about their business.  At this time of day, living out here, it's easy to believe that nothing has changed.

But of course, everything has changed. Offices are empty. Hospitals are chaotic. Flights have been grounded, and the pandas in Hong Kong are mating. And the projects I was so invested in two weeks ago feel irrelevant. But I still feel an urgency to write, to produce, to make something out of all of this….

Then, scrolling through my emails, I discover an article called, ‘Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure’.

Professor Aisha Ahmad has lived through several crises, and her reflections are wise, calm and kind. First, she says, establish your physical security and get your team in place. Then, she says, we must, ‘abandon the performative and embrace the authentic.’ She says we must focus on real internal change.

Yes! This is the creative process. We mustn’t try to keep treading along the previous tracks. We must stop and recognize new directions, new patterns. The world has shifted, so our thinking needs to shift.

On the other side of this shift, says Ahmad, ‘your wonderful, creative, resilient brain will be waiting for you. […] New ideas will emerge that would not have come to mind had you stayed in denial. Continue to embrace your mental shift. Have faith in the process. Support your team.’

Aisha Ahmad has written another article on Productivity and Happiness Under Sustained Disaster Conditions, which follows on from the first.

Heather also blogs at https://thecreativestateofmind.wordpress.com/blog/  

Heather Dyer is a consultant in writing for children. She provides writing and publishing advice through The Literary Consultancy, The Writers' Advice Centre for Children's Books, and privately. If you’re ready for feedback on your work-in-progress contact Heather at heatherdyerbooks@gmail.com. 

Heather’s children’s novel The Girl with the Broken Wing was one of Richard and Judy’s book club picks, and The Boy in the Biscuit Tin was nominated for a Galaxy Best British Children’s Book award. Heather also teaches creative writing for the University of the Creative Arts, and facilitates workshops in creative thinking techniques for creatives and academics.

Presenteeism - Clémentine Beauvais

Dear Awfully Big Blog Coworkers, I've been Awfully Bigly Absent the past two times I was supposed to write a blog post - I'm so sorry. I have no other excuse than "I simply didn't manage to make time for it" (not the same as 'I didn't have time to do it', which is very, very rarely true, of course.)

And now the deadline is upon me again, and I find myself, again, pressed against it. Yet this time I should have no excuse, because it's my 13th day of lockdown - I'm in France, where it started one week earlier than in the UK.
 
13 days of being stuck at home, with nothing but a computer and some books. I should have found the time, made the time for this blog post, shouldn't I ? I should also have found and made time for working on personal projects, getting on top of email, reading tons of books, finishing my next translation ahead of time, doing yoga, trying out new things. Resting.


I haven't, and it's only the guilt of a third missed month that pushes me to write this. The ardent desire to be able to say:

Here I am! Present.

I'm thinking a lot about presenteeism these days. In strict lockdown times, even though few people are still physically present for work, the imperative of online presence has rocketed. Absence was once frowned upon; but now, it seems to be, it has become absolutely intolerable. 

By the way, I know it's worse for people who have to keep doing their face-to-face work, and are at risk of contamination, or for those with kids. But even the working-from-home childfree crowd, of which I'm part, is being squeezed dry. I'm just astonished by the amount of work we're suddenly having to do for the university. I was supposed to be taking 3 weeks off entirely, to do school visits around Europe; of course, it all got cancelled. But since those 3 weeks were supposed to be non-working weeks, surely I should be taking things slowly, working only one or two hours a day, firing off a few emails? Impossible. There's simply too much to do. Students to reassure, hierarchy to listen to, colleagues to check on and, most importantly, everything to change. All the teaching we'd prepared for face-to-face interaction has to be put online. The Open Days we'd planned have to go online now. The meetings, the vivas, the administrative stuff, the research projects, everything that was once a ticked-off task is becoming a task again.

Hardly any out-of-office replies these days. No one is taking a break. It's not just presence that's being asked of us all, it's omnipresence. And to show that you are omnipresent, you need to be omnipresenteeist.

Omnipresenteeism is sneakier than just 'having more work to do'. Email traffic is unprecedented but it's far from necessary all around. Everyone is in front of their computer, everyone is frantic, everyone is working hard to adjust to the situation - and there's a sense that everyone is trying to show everyone how very present they are, how very working-from-home-ready they are. Emails get sent about things that could absolutely wait, energies get deployed into projects that are not priority. Suddenly terrified that we might be found expendable, disposable, in that time when we're not showing our faces. 

Writers and illustrators are no exception. We are expected to be all the more present as the physical world vanishes around us.

What, you haven't gone live on instagram daily, to provide now home-schooled children with readings, analyses, creative writing exercises? What have you been doing with your time? If you're an illustrator, you'd better be creating new colouring-in templates every day. Have you taken advantage of the lockdown to write more, to edit more, to move on with that project you've had in mind for years? How many words today?

You mean you've been stuck at home for 5 days, 13 days, 27 days, and you still haven't done any of that?

At the beginning of lockdown I was full of good intentions: I'd go through all my to-do list, I'd evaluated, within the first two days - bliss! - and then I'd work on university stuff in the morning, and then my translation (one hour a day), and then personal projects, and then skype calls with friends and family. 

Nope. The to-do-list grew threefold in the first 24 hours, and now it's basically the barrel of the Danaids. Not a minute without a message on each platform - friends, colleagues, bosses, editors, readers, family. Another thing to do. Everyone in thrall to an anxiety of presence, of omnipresence, of overpresence.

This lockdown, I'm thinking today, is dystopian in more than one way. We're finding out what life would be like if the majority was working from home constantly. And it's not liberating - it's horrible. It's like having to remind the world of one's existence has become an additional item on the to-do-list; even better if it's creating more items for others on their to-do lists.

Can't wait to be able to be a little bit more absent. Good luck everyone...

When 'I Need to Write Something' becomes 'I Need to Write This' by Claire Fayers

In my conversations with other writers recently, one topic keeps coming up: remembering why we started to write. This seems to be equally true for published and yet-to-be-published writers.

"I've realised I've started to focus so much on getting a book finished recently that I forgot why I started," one friend said. "Because I enjoy writing!"

Another friend, sharing the familiar frustration of friends and family seeing her writing as a hobby commented, "But in the end it should be like a hobby. We do it because we love it."

I need to remind myself of this often. Because writing can often feel like this:

And in those time when writing feels like pushing a boulder up a never-ending hill, we wonder why we ever started this. We find ourselves writing just for the sake of reaching the top of the hill and everything until that point becomes drudgery.

I admit, I've been struggling to write this year. Still, I sat down dutifully at the computer every day with the aim of just writing something, anything. Because that's what writers, do isn't it - they write. Then last week two minor villains wandered into my draft and made me fall off my chair laughing. I raced through an entire chapter, eager to see what they'd get up to. In a matter of seconds, 'I need to write something' became 'I need to write this story.'

So I have my plan for the winter months, and I even have a few productivity tools to keep myself going. I don't use many because I find that productivity tools can become distractions in themselves, but these are the ones I've stuck with. I'm sure these are all familiar already, but I thought I'd share them in case they're helpful.

Word processor shortcuts

I've tried every writing method from notebooks and pens (too slow) to Scrivener (too organised.) I like to claw my raw material into one messy heap and then chip away at it until it looks like a story. I keep one document for the draft and one for background notes - useful for quickly checking everything from the colour of someone's hair to the customs of an alien planet.

I used to use bookmarks and comments to find my way around my draft, but now I add in scene headers and use the navigation bar, which is much more efficient. Write a brief description of your scene, go to the home tab and change the style to Heading 1. Then go to the view tab and tick the Navigation Pane box. You'll get a handy side-bar with a list of all your headings, and clicking on any of them will take you straight to it.

I've recently discovered Word's 'focus' button on the bottom right of the screen and I wish I'd known about this before. Click this and everything surrounding your words disappears. It is amazingly useful for cutting out on-screen distractions. 

Go away Internet

There are many apps which will block your access to the Internet. I use Leechblock which is very easy to use - simply list the sites you want to block and when you want to block them. You can allow yourself limited access to sites, too. I am allowed 5 minutes per hour on Twitter after which I'm thrown out.

Spreadsheeting your progress

These can either be extremely useful for setting deadlines and motivating yourself to write, or ghastly things that only serve to highlight how far behind you are. I like them because they let you see how much progress you've made already.

You can find loads of templates online but I've written my own and kept them simple.

The wordcount spreadsheet lets me set a target wordcount for each day, add in my actual wordcount, then it tells me how I'm doing, many days I have left to go and my projected end date, allowing for weekends off. 

Then I have an editing spreadsheet, which serves a practical purpose as it will help me with the structure of my novel once I've finished the first draft. I always include POV as I use multiple third person. The structural analysis column is to mark major points in the story. Once I've finished the draft, I'll spend a couple of days with this spreadsheet, seeing where material needs to be cut or moved about - which will be easy to do as all my scenes in Word are already labelled.

If you'd like the spreadsheet templates, let me know! And happy writing.

Claire Fayers is the author of the Accidental Pirates series, Mirror Magic and Storm Hound. Website www.clairefayers.com Twitter @clairefayers

To NanoWriMo or Not? Building a Writing Habit - Lynn Huggins-Cooper

I have lost count of the amount of times people have told me that they have always wanted to write a book - if only they had the time. I have considered making up occupations at parties - firefighter, baker or toilet attendant - just to avoid that awkward moment where 'inner me' shrieks ''Well, write one then!'' and 'outer me' tries the sympathetic-smile-turned-rictus that is supposed to convey my understanding of their predicament. Writing, it seems, is the thing that us languid writers do, sipping our cocktails on a silken bench and occasionally penning a line. Yeah, right.

It is interesting how many times I have been described as 'prolific' in my 20 year writing career. As though I am a veritable wellspring of ideas who effortlessly knocks out a book before lunch. The secret to the quantity of books I have written is the dullest secret in the world. I get up; I make tea - and then it's bum-on-seat writing time. Then I have lunch. A little Facebook-footling and yep; the bum goes firmly back into the groove it has worn in the chair by the desk.

Many of the folks who come on my writing courses struggle to find the time to write. On my writing retreats at Gibside, a lovely National Trust property close to home, we talk about this regularly. The truth is, if you want to write enough - if you need to write, you will find time. It sounds harsh, but it's the truth. When I was first published, back in 1997, I was teaching full time in a management position. I had two young children to look after. Yet I spent hours specially carved out of the day writing. Eventually, I earned enough from writing to give up the day job.

Many of the writers I work with also have families and day jobs - but they write. They write because ideas bubble up and boil out of them onto the page. That drive; that need to write pushes them on. Many of them are weighing up whether to leap into the madness of NanoWriMo this November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month - that's 1667 every day. It seems like a big commitment to many people, but it is the act of writing every day that builds writing muscle, and turns writing into part of your daily routine. It's the daily placing of the bum-on-seat in front of the laptop or notebook that makes you a writer. I shall be Nano-ing this November, as I often do, to get a jump start on a new book project. I love knowing that in coffee shops, kitchens and studies around the world, other writers are beavering away, building their word count and more importantly, building their writing habit. Will you be joining us? Look me up. We can be writing buddies and push each other on. I am, rather unimaginatively, listed as lynnhc. Hope to see you there!

Pride and Productivity - Cecilia Busby

There is, apparently, a productivity problem in the UK. It's something that's been exercising the Chancellor, George Osborne, in recent months. Here he is, looking unhappy about it...

Of course, there are many reasons for this low productivity and a good few of them are issues that we would probably all agree need dealing with: housing is too expensive so people are forced to live too far away from their work, transport links are poor, wages are low, there is a lack of skills training...

But these are all things that could be equally said to be a cause of low levels of well-being in our society. They need to be dealt with because they cause misery rather than low productivity. Productivity itself is something that I feel ambivalent about, and that's because for me, it can often run counter to another important aspect of working life: pride.

Whatever you do, you can increase your productivity by just doing it faster or doing more of it in a day. In many parts of the economy, this seems to be exactly what has been asked of workers as a result of a relentless focus on profit and 'efficiency', two other things that increase when productivity increases. Councils contract out services to the private sector because it's more 'efficient'. The NHS is reorganised in order to make it more 'efficient'. Universities and schools are told to cut costs and deliver more 'education' while also being monitored for quality.

How do they achieve this miraculous increase in productivity? By processing more patients, washing, dressing and feeding more elderly people, emptying more dustbins and passing more young people through their degree courses in less time and with fewer workers.

Hurrah! More productivity!

But what's this? Workers feel less satisfied. They have to offer the elderly people they care for a brisk ten minutes instead of being able to relax with a cup of tea and a chat. They are tired and stressed by their work routines and expectations. They publish research that they haven't had enough time to get right, they can't support their students or patients as they'd like to, they are forced to cut corners or drive themselves into the ground trying to do their job properly.

More productivity allows companies to pay their workers higher wages. That should make them happier. But there's the thing.  There are growing numbers of self-employed people in the UK at the moment, and while in general they earn less than their employed counterparts and work longer hours, they are also happier and more satisfied with their work.

Their productivity - wages against hours - is clearly a lot lower. But I would hazard a guess that their happiness and satisfaction levels are higher because they are able to maintain the other important 'p' word - pride.

It's something the Arts and Crafts movement argued way back in the 19th century. Work that is done with pride, that's done with care and attention to detail, that makes us feel we have done something well, is extremely important to a sense of identity and well-being. We've all had to do rush jobs, get something done for a deadline, make compromises - but when that sort of pressure becomes the new normal, it's hard to maintain a sense of pride in your work or a sense of self-worth.

I was visited recently by a colleague from my old university department. She'd got to the stage I reached ten years ago - no longer able to maintain a sense of pride in educating young people or in carrying out research, because pressures from managers in the department and wider university meant too many students left to sink or swim without proper support (despite the huge financial debts they were being burdened with), and weak research being pushed out to satisfy quotas. She wanted to know what it was like on the other side of the fence - without the financial security of a permanent job contract. It made me think quite hard about whether I regretted jumping ship for the uncertain hand-to-mouth existence of the self-employed writer and copyeditor.

Readers, I regretted it not one jot. I may be less well paid. I may work harder. I may have extremely low levels of productivity. But I have pride. When I get slightly anxious about where the next cheque is coming from and if we can afford to replace the washing-machine, I remind myself of that. It's a tonic for the soul.


Cecilia Busby writes fantasy adventures for children aged 7-12 as C.J. Busby.

Her first series was the Spell series, an Arthurian knockabout fantasy aimed at 7-9. Her latest book, The Amber Crown, was published in March by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)

In-Between Times - Heather Dyer

University lecturers in creative writing are required to produce creative work as part of their job description – but they often complain that their jobs are so time consuming that they can hardly find time to write.

Anyone who has a busy day job will recognize the same complaint. But universities, unlike many jobs, tend to slow down a bit this time of year. This is the time of year when creative writing lecturers can carve out a little more time for their own creative writing.

But ‘creative’ is not a switch that can be flicked, and often the transition from ‘busy’ to ‘creative’ is not instantaneous. The trouble is that creativity happens in the pauses between thoughts. Pauses are longer and more frequent when we are moving slowly.

When deadlines are taken away we can’t come to a dead stop immediately; we keep running for a while, like the road-runner whose legs carry him beyond the edge of the cliff. There is a tendency to pace, to fret, to make lists, and to worry that we are wasting time. Why aren’t we being creative yet?

The problem is that we are still in our efficient, busy mode. On the wonderful Slow Muse blog recently, Deborah Barlow quotes Rebecca Solnit in Finding Time:

The Four Horsemen of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out.

Ideas tend to arrive in the moments of down time, those in-between moments. To be creative we need to increase the frequency of those in-between moments - moments in which we are not doing anything at all. 

These days, we’re running so fast and being so efficient that we tend to fill these in-between times with little jobs. We make lists, surf the net, answer emails, eat. It’s important to allow these dead times to just ‘be’, or at least to fill them with nurturing activities like walking, meditating, listening to music, or reading something inspiring. Or just watching the rain.

Keep a notebook with you to capture the ideas that arise in these quiet times. Ideas tend to proliferate when they are noticed and appreciated. Bit by bit, in the in-between moments, your creativity will surface. And before you know it, you’ll be galloping along on your next creative adventure.

Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/