A Thousand Words About a Thousand Words by Paul May

There’s a bit of a theme going on here on ABBA at the moment. Last week there was Tamsin Cooke’s post about words flowing best when time is limited, and a couple of days ago Ciaran Murtagh was talking about writing routines. I heard Philip Pullman say recently that he aimed to write a thousand words a day. It was good to know that we had something in common, even though fame, fortune, movie and TV rights etc . . . etc . . . seem to have passed me by.

The view from my garden in the 1980s, when I started writing.
Occasionally our neighbour's bullocks would break through
 his dodgy fencing and we'd have to ramble across the
 fields, trying to herd them back to their field. It helped to break up the routine. 

I’m not very keen on advising budding writers, and when asked for advice (it does happen) I usually say something like: ‘Start writing. Keep going until you get to the end.’ Both of these things, as anyone knows who has done it, are surprisingly difficult, especially the second one. Then I probably say: ‘Rewrite it until it’s as good as you can make it.’ And, finally: ‘Send it off.’ I’m also happy to advise writers to learn to touch type because learning is so easy and the rewards so great. 

Transworld publishers used to produce some guidelines about writing for children which contained all kinds of useful information and even a few ‘rules’. I especially remember the No Talking Household Objects rule. Talking fridges were definitely out. But of course, rules are made to be broken, and I always thought it must depend on the fridge and on what it had to say. Sadly, I lent the info to an aspiring children’s author and never got it back.

Philip Pullman wasn’t offering advice in that TV programme, but it’s certainly true, for me, that having a daily word target used to help me to get things done. My writing routines evolved around my life at the time I started writing, and so I began writing each day once I had dropped the children at the school bus and tidied the kitchen. Then I’d go out to my converted larder/cupboard and start work. At 11.00 I’d have coffee break (15 mins).  Lunch was from 1.00 to 2.00. Then at 3.00 I’d stop work and get ready to collect the children.

Back in the nineties. Look at that box of floppy disks!

I’d reckon to produce about 400 words in the first session and the same after coffee, then finish off after lunch. The big bonus from the 1000 words target was that on a good day I could probably do this quite easily before lunch and then the afternoon was my own to do with as I liked. On rare occasions I could even knock off most of it before coffee. But on other days I could struggle all day and barely reach the 1000 words at all. However, the point is that, for me at least, even on a very bad day I could usually fight my way to that 1000 words, even if I was sure that they must be rubbish. And I have learnt over the years that the real rubbish is just as likely to be churned out on the ‘good’ days, as it is to be laboured over on the ‘bad’ ones.

Having reached my thousand words I would save my work and then leave it without a second look. I only wrote on Mondays and Fridays because I was teaching three days a week, which meant it was always two or three days before I sat down and read what I’d written aloud to myself. And that is probably the only advice that I unhesitatingly give to everyone who writes anything. Read it aloud. It will reveal all kinds of mistakes, infelicities, typos, clumsy phrasing, repetition and just plain dullness.

Oh, and if you think I'm contradicting myself here, saying I don't like advice and then scattering it all around, I'll just mention Malcolm Bradbury, co-founder with Angus Wilson of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. He famously didn't believe creative writing could be taught.

Where was I? Oh, yes. There was another benefit of the word target—and I know that these are all just games we play with ourselves to find a way to get the thing finished—and that was that, once I had achieved the target, I could tell myself that no matter how terrible the day had been, I at least had 1000 words more than I’d had that morning. I was 1000 words nearer to the end.

And now I’ve retired from teaching and the children are grown up. I have all the time in the world. I don’t have to go out to work and I don’t have to get up for the school bus, and I find it harder and harder to persuade myself to write a thousand words a day. I think it’s interesting that things that might have been considered constraints upon my opportunities to write may actually turn out in some strange way to have been incentives, a bit like Tamsin Cooke being short of time. 

I’d be very interested to hear from other writers who have retired from their long-time day jobs and found that the experience has removed some of the urgency from their need to write. It’s not that I’m planning to retire from writing—far from it—but I am spending a lot more time on projects with no obvious commercial potential and on what some might call unfocussed research, on Italian organ-grinders for example, or farming in Suffolk.

But now I feel I’ve done the things the newly-retired have to do— the rites of passage. I’ve got the allotment in order and researched and written the family history. I went for a long bike ride around the North Sea and, unlike most retired teachers, I didn’t need to buy a camper van as my partner already has one. So I guess I’m about ready to start turning out a thousand words a day again. What is it I have to do?

Oh yes.

Start.

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