The Arvon Blog

by Sally Crawford

3.  Seek out the right advice

How’s this for a wake-up call? If you wait for the perfect conditions in which to write, you’ll die first. It’s not an original idea: it comes from Ecclesiastes 11:4–5; I Googled it. In other words, seek not the perfect, make do with what you have now.

I have also found excellent advice on the Arvon site. Orlando Murrin’s ‘Spark Tip for Writing Fiction’, came at just the right moment for me, stuck in the middle of 2 (two) novels and able only to get some poems to the finished, that is, the sending out, stage. Why, I wondered, when I can write a journalistic piece in the time it takes to put on the kettle and get out the teabags, can I get into such a state of immobility when it’s my own work? Something about what Orlando said about keeping the flow going and being ‘carried along by the story’ stayed with me. Describing this way of writing, Orlando says: ‘it’s almost as if the book is writing itself’. Wow, are you all paying attention at the back!? It’s absolutely true – what star advice.

All journalists know about the helpfulness of set parameters: title (what the story’s about); length (and, of course, with ‘length’, comes the requirement that there will be no waffle); deadline (your story’s got to be delivered, competently written, by deadline); the importance of grabbing the reader’s attention from the outset.

Top tip 1: set up your own parameters.

Top tip 2: Let the words take the lead: write spontaneously without conscious effort to edit before you get them down.

I also have a piece of personal advice: keep faith with your muse. (He or she was introduced in part 2, and I make no apology for bringing them into the picture again.) For the muse’s sake, allow yourself an ‘Arvon moment’ in the day. During an Arvon course, such a moment occurs, usually, in the afternoon. You have said hello to everyone; you have had lunch; and you have retreated to your room. You sit down at your desk and – ‘pop’ – the bliss of it all comes through. You sit there and daydream mildly. You have books, notebooks, pens; your work is by your hand. Out of the window (your window for the week) you see stretches of sky and, for urbanites anyway, that green stuff you’ve almost forgotten the name of. There will be quietness; at most, the soft phutt-phutt of a lawnmower wafting in the smell of cut grass. Do you want to be anywhere else at that moment? You are ‘in’ the moment. This is muse territory. And the advice? Reproduce it. Reproduce it at home, in the office, or in your favourite café. All you need is a window (a reflective surface, after all), for some green and growing thing to be there, and to remember that, if you’re prepared to put in the practice, you are first and foremost a writer.