Burn Your Notebooks
Filed under Advice • 15-05-2010 •
In order to write well, you first have to write badly. You have to learn your craft. It’s like learning to drive a car – you can’t compete in the Monte Carlo grand prix the first time you sit behind a wheel; you have to make all the embarrassing mistakes, the awkward stalls and occasional prangs – and the same’s true for writing.
During the three years I spent at university, I kept a series of hardbacked, cloth-bound notebooks, which I filled with scraps of fiction, poetry and diary entries. The A4 pages had train tickets, flyers, articles and photographs stuck and stapled to them. I wrote in them every day (this was in the early Nineties, before blogs and social media), and I must have written upwards of 250 poems in them. For three years, those books were the most precious things I owned. They held all my thoughts and drafts. I even included photocopies of them as an appendix in my dissertation.
But after university, the books felt like a dead weight around my neck. They contained too much angst, and too many bad poems. Writing in them felt like a duty instead of a pleasure. If I wanted to move forward as I writer, I knew I’d have to unburden myself of them.
And so I burned them.
You have to write a lot of crap before you start to get good. You have to get a lot of rubbish out of your system.
And burn it.
Tags: Advice • Writing
This was certainly the case with my book, minus the burning. I found that by the time I finished, the style/tone of the opening third was very different from that of the rest of the novel. Heavy re-writes ensued.
Of course, when you become really well-known, an American university library will offer you ridiculous amounts of money for stuff like that.