Tag: creativity

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How do you support yourself as a writer? How does poetry pay the bills, or fiction keep the wolf from the door? Every year, I write a blog post about exactly that – detailing where my income has come from during the previous year.

Here’s this year’s version:

The end of the UK financial year may have been a couple of months ago already, but it’s been a heck of a couple of months! With residencies in Scotland and Spitsbergen, not to mention a new book out. But now, last year’s finances are in order, I’m getting ready to sort my tax return (I know, I know – I’m a swat, but I hate leaving it to the last minute), so I thought it was time to make some coloured graphs and share the data.

This time last year, I was talking about the end of Covid-19 support grants, and the difficulties presented by the move towards hybrid working. Covid-19 is obviously still having an impact on freelance earnings (both systemically, and on an individual basis, with so many people finding themselves working at reduced capacity due to long covid and/or burnout) – but the other big words I keep hearing this year are Cost of Living Crisis.

Back in March, I was asked to give a talk for Cumbria Arts & Culture Network, about working as a freelance writer during the Cost of Living Crisis. The main points I made were:

  • in the institutional ladder, freelancers are often at the bottom, which means that any money that does come in often takes longer to trickle down to the freelancers, but also that, when there are cuts, freelance work often suffers first – and when the work does keep coming, our rates are expected to stay the same as they always have been (and so not reflective of inflation, meaning that, in real terms, we’re working for less).
  • for freelancers with dependents, this is all exacerbated
  • many of us are already struggling financially, following the past few years of disruptions
  • in publishing, there’s been a backlog caused by Covid, and publishers (like freelancers) are exhausted and burnt out
  • many freelance writers are ourselves suffering from long covid, in one form or another, which affects our capacity to work & earn
  • risk of reinfection is still an issue, and for many writers, this is still a barrier to accepting in-person work

In times like these, freelancers & artists particularly are often called on to be dynamic – to find innovative ways of working that will set us apart from our so-called competitors, and help us not only to survive in a financial crisis, but to thrive. But of course, when so many of us are already burnt out, trying to cope with new levels of post-covid fatigue, and already financially struggling, the capacity for dynamism is limited.

That said, it is possible to make a living as a writer. After all, that’s the point of these posts.

Where did my income come from last year?

In 2021, I listed 5 categories:

  1. Funding: money from grants.
  2. Facilitation: both workshop facilitation and facilitation of creative projects. (These go into one category, because project money will often include funding for both the delivery and administration side, lumped together.)
  3. Writing: commissions, royalties, ALCS money, PLR money, prize money – anything that comes from the actual writing of the actual words
  4. Events: panel events, chairing and readings (in person and online and even over the phone).
  5. Residencies: stipends & payment from attending writing residencies, or fulfilling Writer in Residence roles.
  6. This year, I’ve also reinstated a 6th category: Admin. Arts administration is something I used to do a lot, earlier in my career, and something I’ve gradually moved away from (although of course, it’s always necessary as a component within all my other work) – but last year, I worked as Festival Co-ordinator for Kendal Poetry Festival, so I’ve included that work here.

As a reminder, here’s where my income came from in 2021:

As we can see, largely that income came from grant funding and project / workshop facilitation – along with 20% coming from writing itself.

So how does that compare to this year?

(I’ve slightly changed how I measure my income this year: switching from looking at the calendar year, to looking at the financial year. This was something that just made sense to me, to tie my calculations in with the data I need to gather anyway for my tax return each year. But, since I’m still analysing a full 12 months of data in each case, the results are still comparable.)

The proportions earned from funding are actually pretty similar across both years: 44% in 2021, and 42% in 2022-23. This year, that’s taken the form of a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction (which includes funding to work on my second novel), and a Developing Your Creative Practice Grant from Arts Council England. In some ways, the DYCP grant skews the results slightly, because while I did receive the bulk of the funding in 2022-23, much of it was to pay for work which I’m only coming to now, in the 2023-24 financial year. But then, that tends to be symptomatic of the freelance life: not only up and down between months, but also across years. But more of that later.

My other two biggest earners this year were facilitation and money from my actual writing.

So, in many ways, 2022-23 was similar to the year before, and a clear indicator that those are the three main areas of income I need to focus on: writing, funding & facilitation.

But it isn’t the only story – because this year, those other smaller earners (residencies, admin & events) constituted a full 20% of my annual income, as opposed to just 8% the year before. What does that tell me? In the first instance, it tells me not to ignore them as income streams. It also harks back to what I was saying at the start of this post: that, during a cost of living crisis, it can quite literally pay to be dynamic, and to diversify work & forms of income. It’s a balance though – spread yourself too thin, and you end up burning yourself out more than ever. What was great about these income streams, was that they were all things I’d done before (or variations on previous work); I wasn’t having to carve out an entirely new niche for myself, but instead, was leaning into things I already knew, and making the most of old connections.

What has my income looked like on a month-by-month basis?

Well, like every year, it’s been a bit up and down:

As you can see, I had a few big months last year:

  • January (when my Arts Council grant came through) was easily the biggest earner – but then, as I’ve already mentioned, a lot of that money was earmarked to pay for work that would happen in the following financial year.
  • June, when I got paid for all of my Kendal Poetry Festival work (which was work which had been done over several previous months).
  • July, when I received the Northern Writers’ Award.

Slightly smaller were December, February & March: winning the Aesthetica Prize in December, my first payment for working with the Writing Squad in February, and just working as many hours as there are in the day during March (like I said, I had a book out).

As for the other months, these were mostly times when I either didn’t make enough to pay the bills that month, or did manage to, but barely. But that’s ok. Partly because they’re offest by those much bigger months, and partly because, every time I get paid, I put a little bit away in savings for a rainy day. The trick, or luck, or however you want to phrase it, is getting the right balance.

How is this year shaping up so far?

Only 3 months into the current financial year, and already things are looking… adequate.

As in, I’m not buying a superyacht (or even a very basic yacht) any time soon, but based on work I’m already contracted for (or can reasonably expect to be contracted / re-contracted for), I’m earning an acceptable income – a mixture of smaller one-off pieces of work, and a couple of larger payments. But hush hush for now – more on what they might be another time!

Want to keep reading? How about:

How To Make a Living as a Writer: 2021 Edition

How To Make a Living as a Writer: 2020 Edition

How To Make a Living as a Writer: 2019 Edition

How To Make a Living as a Writer: 2018 Edition

How To Make Money From Your Novel

How To Make a Living as a Poet (advice from people much better at it than me)

or check out my Resources for Writers for more tips, posts & opportunities!

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Another year gone by, which means another load of writing rejections stacked up in all our inboxes. So, in the interest of transparency (and of cheering everyone up with the reminder that rejections are just a natural part of the writing life), I wanted to share mine – and of course to give you my annual analysis of them, complete with the graphs & pie charts that long-term followers have come to know and love. (And if you don’t love them, I’m sorry for you, because there’s something so joyfully satisfying about a colour-coded graph, so at least just humour me, ok?)

Whenever you read or listen to writers giving advice about submitting work – whether to competitions or journals or any other form of opportunity – they’ll usually talk about having a system. A way of keeping track of what you’ve sent out, and where to.

I started keeping track of my submissions properly (in a way that wasn’t just on post-it notes and the backs of old drafts of poems) in 2017, when I read an article by Kim Liao, suggesting writers aim for 100 rejections over the course of the year. The point of this goal was never really about reaching it, but about pushing myself to submit to things I wouldn’t ordinarily go for, because I had to get as close as possible to my target of 100 rejections. (It also meant I was less disappointed when the inevitable rejections did come in, because at least it was another to tick off my list.)

Flash forward several years, and I no longer aim for 100 rejections. This is partly because I think that initial exercise has done its work, and I’m already in the habit of being less precious and/or nervous about sending my work out. But also because I’m further on in my career, and (as with the work I take on) I can afford to be more choosy about what I submit to.

So how did I do?

Over the course of 2022, I submitted to 72 opportunities.

This is significantly down on my 2021 total of 128, but part of that is because of this choosiness.

For example, when we break down my submissions by category, it looks a little bit more like this:

  • 38 competitions
  • 1 funding opportunity
  • 5 job applications
  • 7 residencies
  • 21 submissions

But hey – I promised colour-coded graphs, so here’s a nice handy visualisation of that breakdown:

As you can see, submissions (within which I include submissions to journals, magazines, anthologies etc.) and competitions make up the bulk of my applications, with a combined total of 82%. This is usually the case, as they generally don’t require anything beyond the work being submitted, and maybe a brief cover letter. So once the work is finished & edited & I’m happy with it, it’s fairly easy to then just send it out. And as soon as I get a rejection from one place, then I can just send the poem / story straight back out somewhere else.

(In last year’s round-up post, I talked a bit about simultaneous submissions – which are another reason the competition & submission categories are pushing higher than the others.)

So what about residencies? In 2021, I applied to 10 residencies. In 2020, I applied to 8 (though that was with lockdowns in force and international travel bans and most residencies closed for business). In 2019, I applied to 10.

This past year, I’ve started to limit the residencies I apply for. There are a few reasons for this:

  • I’ve still been a little bit cautious with my travel (especially in the early parts of 2022). After all, we are still in a pandemic.
  • I’ve had a couple of residencies hanging over from previous years, so I haven’t needed to apply for residencies as much, because my time has been filled up with these. For instance, in May I went to the Writers’ House of Georgia in Tbilisi (carried over from 2021), and in November, I took up residence at KSP Writers’ Centre in Australia (carried over from 2022).
  • More and more, I get work that I don’t need to actually apply for – and this includes residencies & retreats. For instance, in April, I spent a retreat week at Moniack Mhor, courtesy of an invitation which arose from an unsuccessful application to the Jessie Kesson Fellowship the year before.
  • I’m increasingly choosy about where I go. Previously, I tended to apply for residencies whatever they offered, and wherever they were, simply for the opportunity to travel. Lately, I’ve been more selective – partly because of the pandemic, and partly because, fortunately, I can now afford to travel off my own bat if it’s a place I really want to go to. So I’ve limited my residency applications to places I really want to vist, and/or residencies that I desperately want to do.
  • Plus, residency applications tend to take a long time. Much longer than, say, submitting a story to a magazine, or entering a poem into a competition.

As for job applications and funding opportunities, these are always pretty low numbers, because jobs are big things to apply for, and because funding opportunities are relatively scarce.

With all that in mind, how did I get on?

Of the 72 opportunities I’ve submitted to, I withdrew one (because the same piece had been successful elsewhere), and I’m still waiting on answers from 23. Of the 48 submissions for which I have received responses:

  • 5 were an outright success (e.g. a competition win, or a publication, or a funding grant)
  • 37 were an outright no
  • 3 were longlists (e.g. a no, but with some kind of mention – a kind of close but no cigar)
  • 3 were partial successes (a kind of close and yes some sort of cigar, but not quite the Cubans)

That big orange ‘no’ segment might look like a lot – and yes, 77% is a high percentage of rejections when looked at objectively – but actually I’m pretty happy with that. It’s only slightly up on last year’s rejections (72%), and it’s all part and parcel of being a writer.

Plus, my successes are all things I’m incredibly proud of, and are really big achievements. I’d probably rather have one incredibly successful funding bid than a rejected funding bid but two poems appearing in a magazine. Call me mercenary, but it’s the way of the job.

What were my five successes?

  • The Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction: following several years of applying for the Northern Writers’ Awards with no luck, I couldn’t believe it when I was successful for the second year in a row. The Award is a package of funding and other support, and has been a huge reason why I’ve been able to be a bit more relaxed about money over the past year (though more on that when I do my annual financial round-up at the end of the tax year).
  • Getting a job as a Core Team member of the Writing Squad: Again, I’ve been following the work of the Writing Squad for almost a decade, and have wanted to work with them for just about as long.
  • Fly on the Wall: This year, I found a home for a long-ish folk-ish short story set in Carlisle, called ‘You Can Let Yourself Be Swept Away or Else Become the Flood’. The anthology, The Ones Who Flew the Nest, comes out from Fly on the Wall in May 2023.
  • Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for Short Fiction: Another competition I’ve been entering for a while, so it was wonderful to win this towards the end of 2022. (Plus a lovely sized prize, so that’s not to be sniffed at, either!)
  • DYCP: And, right at the end of 2022, I learned I’d been successful in my application to Arts Council England for a Developing Your Creative Practice grant. So, in 2023, I’m combining a residency in Mull, with exploring ways of taking poetry off the page.

[I’ve also had a 6th big success this year, but it wasn’t something I had to apply for exactly, and I’m not allowed to talk about it just yet – so you’ll have to watch this space!]

What are my submission & application plans for 2023?

Mostly, I’m planning to just carry on as I have been doing. My poetry collection, White Ghosts, is coming out from Nine Arches in March, so I probably won’t be submitting as many poems to competitions, journals & magazines, as I’ll need to take time out to write some more first. I doubt I’ll be applying to many jobs this year, either – if any – because of time already taken up by the Writing Squad work, and by my ongoing regular workshops with Dove Cottage Young Poets and the Wordsworth Trust. Not to mention the extra financial freedom provided by the DYCP grant and the Northern Writers’ Award!

Other than that, I’m just planning to wait and see where the year takes me, and to keep on writing in the meantime.

Happy New Year, and as always, happy writing! x

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I write this not quite sitting in the kitchen sink, but at least close enough to it to see the huge pile of dishes I ought to be doing. And the vase of wilting flowers I really ought to have taken out to the compost heap by now. And the cobweb on the underside of the cabinets which I’m certain wasn’t there yesterday but which has erupted into a vast glittering net, seemingly overnight. I can see all these things, but instead of dealing with them, I’m sitting at the table, watching the cursor flicker on the screen.

It’s been like this quite a lot over the past few months: trying to work, while feeling like I’m balancing on a mountain of incomplete household chores and unsent emails and unanswered texts, knowing that at any second there could be an avalanche. This might sound overly dramatic, but I haven’t really stopped since April. Not even when I had Covid (round 3) in June.

And when I say I haven’t stopped, I mean I haven’t stopped.

I’ve already written about my incredibly full-on April and May (with a commission, two residencies and deadlines for both my poetry collection and my second novel). Well, straight off the back of that, I went into Kendal Poetry Festival, for which I was Festival Coordinator – as well as fulfilling my usual role of Guerilla Poetry Officer: creating displays around town, and curating the Festival Survival Kits to send out to ticket-holders. This was followed by another deadline for the poetry collection and another deadline for the novel (seriously, whoever it was who said that ‘writing is rewriting’ was not wrong), as well as a return to all the regular admin which I’d naturally let slide in preparing for the festival.

Cut to the end of August, and I feel ready to collapse on the sofa and do nothing but cuddle the cat for days on end.

Which is sort of what I’ve been doing for the past few days – but with less relaxation and more ‘ticking items off my to-do list’. Because after four months of pretty much non-stop high-level stressful work, there are two things I know:

  1. I desperately need a rest, and
  2. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to do that.

Ever since I was a teenager studying for exams (and possibly even before that), I’ve only had two responses to intense periods of work: either collapse completely and come down with a terrible post-stress flu, or just carry right on working, but for slightly lower stakes. Since in this instance I’d already done the collapse-and-be-ill part (although admittedly without being able to actually collapse, because we had a festival coming up), then I’ve had to go for option b.

Luckily, the work I’ve had to do over the past week or so (and most of the work I have lined up for the rest of September) is of a very different sort. For one thing, there are fewer deadlines – and those deadlines there are are much less pressing. For another, most of my work this month is pretty solitary, which always takes the pressure off, because it means not having to fit around anyone’s schedule but my own, which of course reduces those pressing deadlines even more. And lastly because roughly half of this month’s work is reading.

That’s right. For multiple hours over the next month, I actually do get to lounge around on the sofa, cuddling the cat and reading a book. (Side note: for years, one of my closest friends thought this actually was what I did all day for my job – something she didn’t admit to me until much later – so she was delighted this week to finally have been proven correct.) This is because I’m one of the judges for this year’s Gladstone’s Library Writers in Residence programme, and so have a shortlist of fourteen books to read before our judges’ meeting at the start of October.

To some people, I know, reading fourteen books in a month wouldn’t feel like much. (I know plenty of people have been doing the Sealey Challenge during August: reading a poetry collection or pamphlet every day throughout the month.) But for the bulk of 2022, I haven’t really been reading much. Put it down to all those high-pressure deadlines I was telling you about.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not one of these people who never reads because it somehow ‘tampers with their own individual creativity’, because as far as I’m concerned, if you don’t read or listen to books or consume them in some way, then why on earth would you want to write them? And how do you know you want to write them, because you never experience the thing you’re trying to create? But my reading habits do tend to peak and trough – largely because I still tend to think of reading as a delicious luxury, rather than as an integral part of my creative practice, and as such, it tends to get pushed to the bottom (and then off the bottom) of my list. So when things get super busy in the way they have done over the past few months, my reading rate tends to drop, and my TBR pile tends to grow.

This attitude of mine is something I’m trying to fix – and part of the reason I said yes to judging for Gladstone’s Library. (Another reason being because I absolutely love the library, and had the most amazing residency there last year.) And as it turns out, I was right to say yes. I’ve already read some great books (four out of the total fourteen), some of which I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise – and it’s definitely helped me to find that balance between continuing to work hard and also not working myself into the ground. I think (I hope) it’s also helping me to develop a better reading habit. More consistent, and less all-or-nothing. But I guess time will tell on that one.

One thing that has surprised me, though, is that I think I’ve been more productive as a result.

What, I hear you cry – even though you’re spending multiple hours a day doing nothing but reading? (Or maybe you don’t cry this. Maybe you stopped reading ages ago.)

Why yes. Even though I’m spending multiple hours a day reading.

You see, almost every day, I reach a point where my brain stops working, but my to-do list tells me I need to keep going. Often this point arrives in the middle of the afternoon, but not always. Usually, I make myself a tea or coffee, grab a snack, and force myself to keep working at the laptop. Usually spending about an hour answering a single email. It’s frustrating, and not efficient. But what I’ve been doing whenever this has happened over the past week, is retreating to the sofa (and the cat), and picking up a book. It isn’t that the books don’t require me to use my brain (some of them really do) but it’s a different type of thinking. It’s something I can do even when the email-answering and grant-writing and workshop-planning fails me. I sit and read for an hour or two, and then go back to whatever task I was supposed to be completing in the first place. And you know what? It works. The jobs get ticked off the list, and I feel a million times better for it.

What’s more, I even feel more like writing – which is why today, full of that back-to-school feeling on September 1st, I started a new project. What was that project? Well, you’ll just have to wait to find out.

A few extra bullet points from the past 3 months:

  • I won a Northern Writers’ Award! In fact, I won the Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction, since it was the only one the judges awarded this year. This means a year of support from New Writing North, plus a whole host of goodies including an Arvon online masterclass and membership of the Society of Authors, plus financial support to continue working on my second novel.
  • Kendal Poetry Festival: as I’ve already mentioned, I had two jobs for the festival this year – Guerrilla Poet and Festival Coordinator – although naturally each of those jobs broke down into about a hundred others. And as much as I supported the train strikes, I really wish they hadn’t chosen the weekend of the festival. Still, the festival was a huge success, with much bigger audiences than we’d hoped for, both in-person and online, and such a joyous atmosphere that it felt a privilege to be a part of.
  • Kirkby Lonsdale Poetry Festival: luckily I didn’t have to do any of the admin for this one, as I was there as a performer rather than in any kind of coordination role. It was a huge success in its debut year, and definitely a festival to watch as it grows in the years to come.

The month in pictures:

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The plane lands in the calm between two storms. Where the flash rainfall has left a standing layer of water, the expanse of airport tarmac is a mirror. It glints in the yellow storm-light. When the driver from Writers’ House of Georgia leads me out to the waiting car, the air is warm and heavy with the promise of more rain to come.

In May 2022, I spent 10 days in Tbilisi, working on my poetry collection at the Writers’ House of Georgia. I was awarded the residency after being shortlisted for the 2021 Desperate Literature Prize, and my flights were paid for by the de Groot Foundation – but (due to Covid) it took a while to get the dates in the diary. So by the time I made it out to Tbilisi, I was staring down the barrel of a poetry deadline. In the end, I think this was probably a good thing. Although it left less time for meandering through the narrow streets of the city’s beautiful old town, or for freewriting about whatever came to mind, it did mean that I had focus throughout the residency, and a project to work towards – both of which are things that I’ve found work well for me, when I’m writing away from home. They give me a sense of purpose, and stop me feeling lonely or homesick.

On that first night, the rain finally falls as I’m unpacking my bag, in the art deco opulence of the Steinbeck Room on the top floor of the Writers’ House. It falls with abandon, with thunder across tiled rooftops and lightning forking the sky above Mount Mtatsminda. It leaves me with a strange mixture of intense drama, and a feeling of being able to just sit back and soaking up the moment – a combination which would come to define my stay in Tbilisi.

While I was in Tbilisi, I slept badly. This was nothing to do with the residency, and everything to do with the impending deadline and imminent poetry festival battling for attention in my constantly churning head. But the result was going to bed early, then lying awake for hours, either reading or thinking about what I’d been reading – and then rising late to shower just in time for breakfast.

Luckily, from what I gathered, Tbilisi tends to be a city that rises late as well. Breakfast at the Writers’ House was served 9am-11am, and was usually a leisurely affair, chatting with one or two of the other writers who were staying there.

(Side note: breakfast is the only meal provided at the Writers’ House of Georgia, but it’s incredible!)

Then I would wander downstairs, to write in the dappled shade of the courtyard for a couple of hours.

I think the courtyard was probably my favourite thing about this residency – such a tranquil space, away from the bustle of the city streets, moving in and out of the shade whenever I got too hot or too cold. I had a few Zoom meetings while I was in Georgia, and I made sure to take them in the courtyard, because it was just so beautiful and idyllic.

When hunger finally drove me back upstairs (to my supply of snacks and mini pancakes taken from breakfast), I would get ready to go out for the afternoon. One of the main dilemmas of a residency like this one is how to strike a balance between working and exploring – and it can be particularly difficult when you’re working towards a deadline. I was adamant that I wouldn’t waste the chance of exploring the city, so I determined to do one bit of exploration a day. (The only day I didn’t stick to this was the day we had torrential rain and thunderstorms morning till night, and I decided to play it safe, catch up on writing & admin, and stay dry.)

So how did I spend my afternoons? I walked along Rustaveli Avenue. I wandered through the flea market by the river and read my book in the park. I took the cable car up to the fortress on the hill. I rode the funicular railway for views across the city to the Atlas Mountains. I explored the old town and sat listening to chanting in the city’s oldest church. I went to the museum. I found a courtyard bookshop and people-watched with a coffee. I tried traditional Georgian foods. On Georgian National Independence Day, I walked the length of Rustaveli Avenue stopping to watch the bands and dancers, and shopping at the independent craft stalls. At the end of each day, I collapsed back in my beautiful room at the Writers’ House with a cup of tea and a book.

This is what I mean about the combination between intensity and enjoying the moment. In some ways, the residency sped by – I felt like I’d barely arrived, and already I was on the flight home (and getting stuck at Schiphol Airport for multiple hours, but that’s another story). But in other ways, every day felt like an opportunity to soak up the atmosphere of the city – not always doing anything constructive, but often just wandering the streets and drinking coffee and letting myself be.

Which is important, too, as a writer. It’s good to strike that balance between work, and letting your brain do the work while you stare into space.

Which is maybe something I need to keep reminding myself when I’m at home.

(And yes, I met my deadline. Thank you, Writers’ House of Georgia!)

Writers’ House of Georgia Residency in Pictures:

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Hey there. It’s been a while. After a sleepy start to the year, things have really picked up over the past three months, and now I’m not sure I’ve ever been busier. In a good way, though. Mostly.

Multiple deadlines have come at once. A couple of different bits of funding came through for different projects. And some pandemic-cancelled things have finally been able to happen.

So what’s been going on over the past few months?

Residencies:

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been on two writing residencies – both of which should have been last year, but were postponed because of the pandemic.

The first was at Moniack Mhor, in the Highlands of Scotland.

At the start of 2021, I was shortlisted for Moniack Mhor’s Jessie Kesson Fellowship. I didn’t get it – but instead, they very kindly offered me a place on one of their retreat weeks, which I was finally able to take them up on in April. I spent the week sitting in the traditional straw bale house (affectionately known as the Hobbit House), drinking coffee, basking in the heat of the log fire, and finishing the next draft of my second novel.

What made this experience even better, was being able to tag it onto the end of a two week holiday – driving Scotland’s North Coast 500, wandering along beautiful white-sand beaches, and wending between snow-capped peaks.

The second residency took me even further afield – to the Writers’ House in Tbilisi, Georgia!

In 2021, one of my short stories was shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Prize. Desperate Literature have a partnership with the Writers’ House – which means that one of the shortlist wins the Georgia Writers’ House Prize, and is awarded a ten-day residency in Tbilisi!

The residency space was stunning – but even more beautiful was the courtyard at the back, which was filled with trees and greenery, and dozens of little tables where I could sit and write. Which was perfect, because…

Deadlines:

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had two major deadlines: at the end of April, I sent my second novel to my agent; at the end of May, I finished my first poetry collection.

In some ways, having two such massive deadlines back-to-back was stressful (especially with all the other work that’s been going on). In some ways, though, it’s been useful. I actually love editing. I think it’s much more straightforward to take something you already have and, like clay, to mould it into something better. I think it’s much more stressful starting with a blank page – and I also think it takes a different kind of thought process. It’s been useful being able to be in ‘editing mode’ for a while, even if it is for two different projects.

That said, the freelance life is all about juggling projects, right? And it isn’t like I haven’t also been in all those other modes over the past couple of months as well…

Other Projects:

Ragged Edge Audio Adventure:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with Ragged Edge Productions, on an audio adventure project. The project involved conversations with people from Ewanrigg estate in Maryport, facilitated and recorded by Stefan Escreet – which I then used as inspiration to write the commissioned poem. The poem, sections of audio, and music sung by the community choir were then combined with a walking route around the estate, and community performance along the route.

It was such a lovely project to be a part of – and I can’t wait to share the online version once it’s up and ready.

Kendal Poetry Festival:

This is probably the big one, which I’ve been working on a lot over the past couple of months. As well as being commissioned to create the annual Guerrilla Poetry strand, this year I’m also working as Festival Coordinator, supporting festival directors Kim Moore & Clare Shaw to deliver the festival (which runs 23-26 June, so if you haven’t already got your tickets, get them quick)!

The Month in Pictures:

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It only feels like a few days ago that I was sitting down to write my update for January, and yet somehow, here we are again. February might be a couple of days shorter than the other months, but it feels even shorter than that. So how has so much managed to happen in the past four weeks?

Some of that, of course, I mean globally. But some of it I mean personally as well.

A Few Good Things:

Perhaps the most exciting development this month has been getting my agent’s feedback on the manuscript for my second novel.

I like to think I’m fairly hardy in terms of feedback – I’ve been part of enough workshops and writing groups over the years to be well adjusted to hearing people talk about my work. But it can still be incredibly nerve-wracking, waiting to hear whether a piece of writing is working for someone. With something as long as a novel, the time investment is so much more than, say, a poem, that nerve-wracking can quickly become terrifying. What if it falls flat? What if the idea is hopeless, and the conclusion is you have no choice but to scrap it and start over? However much confidence I have in a piece of writing, these thoughts will often flash through my head.

Luckily, the feedback was far more positive than that. In fact, I think it was my favourite kind of feedback: lots of positives, with some good solid editing suggestions to work on in the next draft. So that’s how I’m going to be spending my March: with my head buried in my manuscript, working gradually through my list of edits.

‘Marie first became obsessed with digging things up the week they buried her dad…’

But it isn’t all about work-in-progress. After the slew of successes in January, February has felt much lighter on the publishing front – although I still had a short story published in Joyland.

The story was written (and is largely set) in 2020, during the first lockdown, and features a mystery grey cat who appears as if from nowhere.

Read it here

And speaking of published work, I’ve also been out and about signing copies of My Name is Monster over the past few weeks. The Abbey Kitchen cafe in Shap has a stack of them, as does Sam Read Bookseller in Grasmere (also available online here).

The Month in Books:

Not as many books as last month, thanks to a number of things which have cropped up over the past few weeks – not least having to sit down and re-read my own manuscript, to remind myself what happens in it before I approach the edits. But that saying about quality not quantity definitely rings true, because this month’s reading was excellent. A couple of proofs for books due out later this year, plus the second novel about medieval nuns I’ve read recently.

  • there are more things, by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
  • Matrix, by Lauren Groff
  • The Seawomen, by Chloe Timms

I keep waiting to read a bad book, but so far this year has been superb! Now looking forward to diving back into my TBR pile for March.

The Month in Pictures:

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January is always a strange month. Named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, gates and doorways: a god with two heads, for looking forwards and looking back. It always feels to me like an in-between month, still emerging from the hibernation of Christmas, not quite in the full swing of the year.

This year, January has felt particularly transient, as I’ve spent a good portion of it self-isolating with Covid. In some ways, this isn’t too different to how I usually spend my January – I rarely have much work at the start of the year, and the weather tends to keep me coccooned on the sofa for most of the month, making it the ideal month to catch up on admin tasks and the ever-higher totter of the to-be-read pile. But Covid is a srange beast, and even on the days I haven’t felt particularly ill with it, it’s left me wiped out, unable to complete more than one or two simple tasks per day.

Luckily (or perhaps unluckily), I’ve been here before. Back in March 2020, after my first close encounter with Covid, I built myself a recovery plan: I split each day into three parts (morning, afternoon, evening), and aimed to accomplish one task in one of those parts, with the other two set aside for relaxing. Gradually, I progressed to two tasks over two parts of the day, and then moved from there back to something more like a normal schedule – although it took a good few months to achieve this.

What that means is that this time around, I know what I’m doing – which is to not overdo it, and to take it slowly. And to hope things get better before too long.

So, other than baking and crocheting and falling asleep on the sofa, what have I been up to this month?

A Few Good Things:

Despite the Covid situation, there have been some definite positives to this month. For starters, I won the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Gulliver Travel Grant! The grant is awarded annually, to assist writers of speculative literature in their research. I’ve been applying for the past few years, so it’s lovely to finally be successful! The grant will fund a trip to Cambridge, to the Scott Polar Research Institute, and the Polar Museum.

I also had a short story longlisted for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize! The story, ‘The Architect‘, was selected as one of 10 to make the longlist, out of almost 1400 entered for the prize. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the announcement of the shortlist next month – but in the meantime, you can read the story here.

And speaking of short stories – another one was accepted by Under the Radar this month – the excellent journal run by Nine Arches Press. The story, ‘In the Soft Grey Tide of the War’, will appear in issue 28, which should already be winging its way out to subscribers’ letterboxes, and which is available from the Nine Arches website.

And last but not least, I also had a poem longlisted for the Bedford Poetry Competition. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the shortlist, but recognition is always something to be proud of, so thank you to the judges!

The Month in Books:

I haven’t read as much as I’d have liked to this month. Blame it on the Covid, which has sapped my concentration like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. That said, I have read some really great books over the past few weeks, and I’m excited to keep working through my TBR pile in the weeks to come.

  • Strangers at Snowfell, by Malcolm Saville
  • The Art of Voice, by Tony Hoagland
  • All the Men I Never Married, by Kim Moore
  • Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
  • The BBC National Short Story Award 2021 anthology
  • Much With Body, by Polly Atkin

The Month in Pictures:

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Every year, I write a blog post about how I’ve managed to make a living as a writer that year. Following on from 2020’s support grant-heavy income, this year has been a bit more of a mix: the support grants came to an end, and many of us are still trying to figure out what work looks like in this new half-open world.

At the end of 2020, I had a strategy: focus on my existing work channels to buy myself time to write. In practice, this meant not applying for opportunities (such as commissions or project work) which took days of application-writing. It meant waiting – largely – for work to come to me.

So how did that work out?

2021: A Rejection Round-Up

I said this last year, and I’ll say it again here: I’m lucky. I’ve been working freelance as a writer and facilitator for almost a decade, eight years of that in the same county. So I’ve built up enough contacts and relationships with other artists and organisations, which means that work does, now, just drop into my inbox from time to time. Even this year, when everything’s been a bit topsy-turvy, I’ve had work just arrive. So much, in fact, that I’ve even had to turn some of it down.

Wait, what? I’ve turned down work? Paid work?

Yep, that’s right. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be in this position, I’m not sure I’d have believed you. Even to me now, writing this in the annual financial slump otherwise known as January, it sounds almost unbelievable. But I still think it was the right thing to do – partly because I was so busy, and therefore had to prioritise existing commitments, but also because, this year, I’ve been lucky enough to receive two grants (a Northern Writers’ Award and a Society of Authors Authors Foundation Grant), which buy me time to work on specific projects.

But more about this later on. For now:

What has 2021 looked like for me?

As you can see from the graph, income has been very up and down this year. This isn’t much of a surprise – it generally is.

I had a few decent-sized pieces of online work in the first few months, boosted by the 4th installment of the SEISS Covid grant in April. In May and June, the income took a big dip. Normally, this would be because this is exam time, and so I’m not going into any schools to run workshops – but of course, that hasn’t been happening for the past couple of years anyway.

What I have noticed over the past couple of years, is that when we’ve been in deepest darkest lockdown, there’s been a slow but relatively steady stream of work. It’s when we’re coming out of lockdown, and when there’s uncertainty, that the work all but disappears. It’s still very thin on the ground now, 6 months after the final SEISS grant installment.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – you’ll have till next year’s blog post if you want to hear about this year’s problems.

So. May and June were a bit of a wash-out, but then July and August were successful (thanks partly to SEISS Grant 5 in August), as were October and November. In September, I was Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library, and so the stipend from this was my only income for that month. December is almost always a wash-out.

What does all this mean? Well, it means that I need to think ahead when I’m thinking about my finances. I can’t live month to month, because the next month might be a no-income month, and then I’d be stuffed. It means I can’t always rely on more work coming into the inbox – and it’s this which makes that decision to turn work down so scary.

Kendal Poetry Festival: Festival Survival Kits

So where has my income come from this year?

Last year, I listed four categories:

  1. Funding: money from grants.
  2. Facilitation: both workshop facilitation and facilitation of creative projects. (These go into one category, because project money will often include funding for both the delivery and administration side, lumped together.)
  3. Writing: commissions, royalties, ALCS money, PLR money, prize money – anything that comes from the actual writing of the actual words
  4. Events: panel events, chairing and readings (in person and online and even over the phone).
  5. This year I’ve also reinstated a fifth category: residencies. (This was missing last year, because most residencies were closed for so much of 2020.)

As a reminder, here’s where my income came from in 2020:

As we can see, most of it came from grant-funding – unsurprising, given that we were in the thick of the pandemic, and pretty much all other income dropped away for the bulk of the year.

A small amount came from writing. Plus some from facilitation – mostly from a single project, which involved a combination of administration and remote workshop leading.

Let’s compare that to this year:

In 2021, the biggest block is still funding, but it’s a significantly smaller proportion – 44% rather than 72%. This is partly because the Covid support has now stopped, and partly because of the return of (some) other work. Most of the funding support I did receive came from the Northern Writers’ Awards, and from the Society of Authors, who gave me an Authors’ Foundation grant to work on my novel, to stand in place of the income that still hasn’t returned following the pandemic.

Facilitation is another significant chunk (28%) – largely because I started leading online workshops in 2021, which has gone some way towards returning the balance.

I also earned a significant chunk from writing last year – unusual in a year where I didn’t sell a manuscript, and so didn’t get an advance. (You can read more about how books earn money here.) The bulk of this came from just one source: winning the Palette Poetry Prize. This is why big prizes like this are so competitive – alongside being a massive confidence boost, they can also make such a huge difference to a writer’s income, and buy you a good couple of months of writing time if you’re lucky enough to win.

While I did do a couple of residencies and online events in 2021, these are still predictably low, thanks partly to Covid, and partly to my own circumstances, as it’s now two years since the novel came out. I’m keeping things crossed these aspects of my income have a chance to buck up a bit more in 2022!

So what’s next for 2022?

We’re already a good few weeks into 2022, and I’m starting to try to get a sense for how it’s all going to shape up. At this point, it’s always difficult to tell – even in a year where we’re not battling a global pandemic.

I’ll be honest, mostly, things look pretty lousy. A lot of organisations seem (understandably) unwilling to plan things at the moment. In-person-only events remain inaccessible to so many people, hybrid events require extra planning (all of which could be undone at any time by new restrictions), and there seems to be a reluctance by a lot of people to plan online-only events – led, I think, by the belief that people are fed up with them. (Personally, I don’t get this. I love not having to travel for events, and getting to sit on the sofa with the cat and a bowl of ice cream while I’m watching them. But that’s another story.)

In terms of income, this means 2022 looks pretty thin on the ground.

But all is not lost! I have a couple of sizeable things in the pipeline, which I’m keeping my fingers crossed for – but which I’m not mentioning as I’m trying not to jinx. And as always, you never know what might land in the inbox…

Fancy reading some more? How about:

How To Make a Living as a Writer: 2020 Edition

How To Make a Living as a Writer: 2019 Edition

How To Make a Living as a Writer: 2018 Edition

How To Make Money From Your Novel

How To Make a Living as a Poet (advice from people much better at it than me)

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Let’s imagine you’ve written your novel. You’ve got an agent and/or publisher. The world is your oyster and you’ve got dollar signs lighting up your eyes. You know that a book is a commodity, that sales mean (at least some) money – but where does the money come from? And how else could your book make you money, beyond just flogging copies of it out of the boot of your car?

photo: Gladstone’s Library

The first thing to say is that most authors are not millionaires. So before you start shopping for your luxury yacht, a touch of realism:

Writing doesn’t pay well. Sorry. (If you don’t believe me, check out this info from the Society of Authors.)

Fiction pays slightly better than, say, poetry, but there’s still a lot of disparity within the form, and how much your novel makes will depend on a number of factors, including but not limited to: the genre, whether it’s standalone or part of a series, your publisher, their vision for the book, who reads it and happens to promote it online, whether bookshops get behind it, whether it wins or is shortlisted for any prizes, whether it gets picked up for film or TV (more on that later), your own part in promoting it, and of course, absolute luck.

That said, with fiction, it is technically possible to make a living solely from the books you write. It just isn’t easy.

I’m not saying this to put you off trying (please please don’t let me put you off trying), but just to be honest. (I write an annual blog post about all the various ways I’ve made a living in the previous year, of which the actual writing is only a part.)

But, if you were to make a living solely or even partly from the books, where might that money come from?

Grants & Prizes

Believe it or not, it is actually possible to get money for a book before it’s published, or even before you’ve finished writing it. Highly competitive, yes, but possible.

Generally, this comes in two forms: prizes (a kind of ‘well done, you’re amazing’ for part of the book you’ve already written) and grants (a kind of ‘well done, you’re amazing, here’s some money to write / finish the book’). Different prizes and grants have different stipulations for entry. Some require you to be unpublished. Others require you to have written & published at least two full-length books. Some want you to have finished the book, but not have a publisher (often with these, the prize includes publication and/or agent representation). Some only need to see the first few thousand words.

So where do you find out about them?

A couple of years ago, I put together a twitter thread of resources for writers, which includes places you can look for things like prizes & grants – as well as for residencies.

Residencies are another way to fund the writing of your novel. They don’t all pay, but if you can get one that does, it can be a way to make your book pay even while you’re writing it.

A kitchen table, with a cactus, a lit candle, a notebook and pen, and a mug of coffee

Advance & Royalties

This is the main way most authors get paid for their work, and is the money which comes from books actually being sold in bookshops / online, and is split into two (related) sections: advances and royalties.

Royalties are perhaps easier to understand, so let’s start there.

For every book that’s sold, the author gets a cut. It isn’t usually a big cut, though the percentage you get as a writer will depend on your contract, and whether you have an agent, and whether you’re self-published or published through a traditional publisher. For a traditionally published writer, this tends to be around 10-15%, depending on the edition / number of copies sold.

Self-published writers tend to take a bigger cut, but you also have to do more of the work, and you have to become an expert in multiple areas of the publishing industry. You also don’t get to see any of the money until after copies of the book have been sold. In other words, if you’re self-published, you won’t get an advance.

An advance is one of the big differences between self-publishing and traditional publishing. It’s basically a down-payment on royalties, made to you by the publisher and agreed when you sign the contract. Advances can range from £100 into the hundreds of thousands (though that’s rare), and depend on how much the publisher thinks they can make from your book. What’s its market potential? How many copies will it sell? Will it sell abroad (more on this later)?

Usually, an advance is paid in 3 or 4 chunks: on signing the contract; on delivery of the finished manuscript; on publication (sometimes split into hardback and paperback publication). Then, any royalties the book makes go towards paying off that advance.

Let’s say you get a £5000 advance. Your book costs £10 and you earn 10% royalties – so £1 per book. For the first 5000 copies, you won’t get any extra money, because you’ve already had it in your advance. Once that advance is ‘paid off’, you’ll start seeing royalty cheques. So if your book sells 6000 copies, you’ll be due £1000 in royalties. NB: If your book only sells 4000 copies, you won’t have to pay that extra £1000 back to the publisher. The advance is yours.

Foreign Rights

Books don’t just sell in the UK. If your book is translated into another language (or if it’s picked up by an American publisher as well), then you’ll get money for that, too. How you get this money depends on your contract, and what your advance is for.

When you sign with a publisher, there are two main types of contract: UKCW (UK & Commonwealth, excluding Canada), and World.

If you have a UKCW contract, the publisher can publish & distribute your book in the UK, and in places like Australia & New Zealand, as well as certain English Language bookshops abroad. But they can’t sell the rights for it to be translated. Those rights remain with you – which is where a good agency comes in handy, as the agent (usually a dedicated foreign rights team within the agency that your own agent is part of) will try to sell those rights off individually to foreign publishers. Each time your rights are sold, you get a new advance. For example, you might get a US advance, a German advance, and a Japanese advance, which means you get a new publisher in each of those countries, and a new advance / royalty agreement.

If you have a World contract with your publisher, then the publisher handles all of this instead of the agent. There’s still a new advance each time, but it doesn’t come to you directly. Instead, it goes towards paying off that initial advance the publisher paid you. Think of it like this: the publisher has already paid you a load of money, so they need to make that back before they can pay you any more.

The plus side to this, is that you (or your agent) can demand a bigger advance from the publisher for World rights. The down side is that you only get that payment once – until, as with royalties, you ‘earn out’ (i.e. you earn enough to cover that initial publisher’s advance).

new year writing resolutions: Katie Hale

PLR / ALCS

Royalties aren’t the only way to make money from people reading your book. After all, not every book is bought. Some are borrowed.

Ever wondered about the difference between pirating a copy of a book online, or borrowing it from the library? Well, when you borrow from the library, you’re not only supporting an excellent community-focused service. You’re also paying the author – and at no cost to you. Let’s just stop and think for a moment about how great that is. You get to read a book without paying a penny for it, and the person who wrote it is still getting paid. Wow.

This money comes to the author via PLR (Public Lending Rights). PLR is administered by the British Library, with funding from the Deparment of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. Once your book is published, you can register with them as an author, and then individually register your books. Then, once a year, you should receive a small payment, based on how many times your book has been borrowed from the library.

Another annual payment comes from ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society).

I’ll be honest, I understand where this money comes from a lot less. The payment is for ‘secondary rights’ – so, when a school photocopies a textbook, or when libraries outside the UK (and not covered by PLR) lend copies of your book. The important thing for this post, though, is that it’s a source of income for your book. Like with PLR, you have to register your books, and then you get a nice little payment once or twice a year, depending on how much you’re owed.

You have to pay for membership of ALCS – but lifetime membership costs just £36 at the time of writing, and you can easily make that back. Or, if you’re a member of the Society of Authors (which I recommend for all writers), then you get your ALCS membership included.

My writing life - Katie Hale

Prizes (again)

Prizes don’t just happen before the book is published. They also happen afterwards. Think of things like the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Costa Awards. These are a few of the big ones, but there will also be a host of other prizes your book might be eligible for – prizes that are specific to your genre or location.

Prizes usually come with an actual prize, as the name suggests: money, which the winner (and sometimes shortlisted writers) are awarded as a congratulations on their excellent novel.

But this isn’t the only way a prize can earn you money – because prizes also affect sales.

If your book wins the Costa, it’s likely to get pushed closer to the front of the shop. It’ll be on the table near the door in Waterstones, so people see it as soon as they come in. It might be in the window, calling to people in the street. It’ll be on this bookshop e-news, or that recommended reading list. Online booksellers might push it to their front page, or further up their algorithms. If enough people buy it, it might make it onto a bestseller list, which pushes it up these algorithms even more.

More sales = more royalties, which either goes further to paying off your advance, or, once that’s done, means more money in your bank account.

If you’re a traditionally published writer, your publisher will usually submit your book to these on your behalf – though if there are regional / local / particular prizes you happen to know about, you can always mention them to your publisher and request to be submitted.

Self-published books tend not to be eligible for a lot of these prizes – though there are also prizes which are solely for self-published books. The best way to find out about these tends to be sitting down one evening with a glass of wine and google, and making a list for yourself.

A desk covered in bits of manuscript, with shelves of notebooks above

Adaptations

So many writers have that dream: our book is picked up by a big Hollywood producer, it becomes a box office hit, and we make our millions. Extra money, for a book we’ve already written and shelved.

Easy, right?

Not exactly.

For every book you see adapted into a film, hundreds more haven’t made the cut. Firstly, the right person has to read your book and think it might make a good film. (This is where things like sales and prizes come in handy – the more people read your book, the bigger chance there is that one of them will be someone who makes those kinds of commissioning decisions.)

So, let’s say a producer reads and loves your book. Great! Fanastic! Well done you! Usually what happens is they’ll put in an offer for option rights, usually for a period of 18 months to 2 years. This doen’t mean they’re allowed to make the film. What it means is that, for that length of time, you’re not allowed to sell the film rights to anyone else. This then gives the production company 18-24 months to decide whether they want to make the film or not.

Films are phenomenally expensive to make. Seriously – the amount of money involved in making even a small indie film is mind-boggling. That kind of money takes time to find.

At the end of the option contract period, the production company has a choice. They can:

  • buy the actual film rights, which will be a deal with more money attached to it, often a percentage of the film budget (usually with a floor and ceiling amount), or sometimes a percentage of box office take
  • take out another option contract, giving them another 18-24 months to find the funds (with another payment for you as the author)
  • say thank you but no thank you, and walk away (which means you get the film rights back, and, if someone else is interested, begin the whole process again with somebody else)

It’s worth noting that even a film adaptation doesn’t guarantee the big bucks. Joanne Harris is quoted as saying she only received £5000 for the film version of Chocolat. Though it’s also worth nothing that film isn’t the only adaptation. Your book could also be adapted for TV, theatre, radio, game, comic… The options are as many as there are art forms.

As with prizes, an adaptation can also push up sales of your book, as the title becomes something people recognise. Your publisher might release a film-cover version of your book, for example, and this will push a book which has been out a few years back into bookshops.

I bought some fancy coloured gel pens for editing

Extracts

Sometimes, a magazine will print an extract of a book. Or a radio programme might broadcast a first chapter, or an abridged version. Or a section of your book might appear in somebody else’s book (especially if you’re a poet, for example, who might be featured in an anthology, or if you write non-fiction and your work might be quoted).

Because of UK copyight law, all these things mean you would be owed money. Usually, these come in as requests to your agent and / or publisher, but it’s worth keeping an eye out yourself for opportunities as well.

Talks & Book Tours

This one is cheating slightly, because it isn’t just resting on your laurels and making money from the book you’ve already written. You actually have to do something extra for this. I promise you, though, it’s worth it.

How do readers find out about your book? Unless you’re a household name (if you are, then well done, you – and why are you reading this post?) or have a phenomenal social media following, then you need to find ways of persuading people that they want to buy your book. Some of this is out of your hands (reviews in national papers, marketing by your publisher etc), but some of it is much more small-scale, but can have a much higher impact. I’m talking, of course, about book events.

Speaking & reading at festivals and event series can be a great way of getting the message to readers that they really ought to be reading your book – which can translate to sales & royalties, or PLR payments if people borrow it from the library. But you should also be paid for the event itself, too.

The Society of Authors publishes a list of observed rates for things like talks, readings, panel discussions.

Archive

I’ll be honest – I don’t know masses about this. I don’t know how it works, or at what point it becomes an option. All I know is that, during a tutorial at university once, we were told about the phenomenal possibility of a university wanting to purchase your archive.

I’m assuming you need to have more than just one or two books for this to be a possibility – I think you might need to be the sort of writer who has their works studied and read over and over.

All I know is that we had it drilled into us: DO NOT THROW AWAY YOUR DRAFTS.

I’m assuming, the more comprehensive your archive, the more a university might offer you for it. As I say, this one isn’t really my area of expertise. But that doesn’t stop me having an attic full of manuscripts in plastic boxes, just in case!

Other Related Work

This last one is vague, but I wanted to acknowledge that you never know where a book is going to take you, or what other work might arise from it. You never know who might have read it, what projects they might have which mesh with yours, what opportunities might emerge. If you have a way that people can contact you (even if it’s just a page on your website, directing them to contact your agent), then the possibilities are there.

It pays (often literally) to keep an open mind.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and found it useful! If you did, then, in the spirit of authors earning money, please do support me by buying a copy of my novel, My Name is Monster. It won’t give you any extra income advice, but it will (I hope) be a good read!

Available from all good retailers, but I have a particular fondness for my lovely local indie, who will ship your order anywhere in the world.

Buy My Name is Monster & support a writer!

by on

I sit at the old wooden desk in front of the picture window. In front of me, the bogland dips down to where a stream runs down along the side of the lane. At the bottom of it, visible as a bright triangle of blue, is the sea.

This is where I sit and write for two weeks in October, as the world russets and yellows towards autumn.

On the edge of the village of Dugort, on Achill Island, on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way, is Heinrich Böll Cottage. Once belonging to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll, the cottage offers fortnightly residencies to writers and artists, providing time and space for you to work.

I arrived at the cottage straight off the back of a month’s residency at Gladstone’s Library in Wales in October 2021. This wasn’t the original plan – originally I was supposed to be staying at the cottage in October 2020, but, for obvious reasons, it had to be postponed. I was a bit nervous about whether it would be too intense, attending two residencies one after another like this. After all, a residency is a wonderful opportunity to focus on the work, but that can lead to it feeling a bit like a creative workout; it needs a bit of normality around it to make the intensity work.

I needn’t have worried. The residencies had such different feels to them, that the contrast worked.

(Though, after 18 months at home, six weeks away did still feel like a lot – less in terms of creative intensity, and more in terms of missing friends. And the cat.)

So what is Heinrich Böll Cottage like?

This is a self-catered residency, but luckily, the kitchen is lovely (and has a dishwasher, which is my favourite time-saver). There’s a supermarket about 15-20 minutes’ drive away, in Achill Sound, or, in the other direction, a convenience store about 10 minutes’ drive. There are also a couple of pubs just a short drive away, which is ideal when you’ve spent the whole day writing and don’t want to cook.

The cottage has two bedrooms (a double and a twin), two studies (with desks and views down towards the sea), as well as a painting studio with plenty of natural light. There’s also an outside utility with washing machine and tumble drier – very useful when you’re on the road for six weeks.

There’s a bus that goes right past the front door, which goes into Achill Sound. But the island is so beautiful to explore that I wouldn’t want to do this residency without a car.

So how did I spend my residency?

Achill Island is stunning. I’d never visited the west of Ireland before, and now that I have, I’m already desperate to go back. Purpling peat bogs, towering mountains, golden sand, azure waters, dramatic sea cliffs, and about a million sheep. All of this meant I was determined to do plenty of exploring while I was there.

Over the course of my two weeks on the island, I developed a kind of routine: writing in the morning, then off exploring in the afternoon. Sometimes (often) I then carried on writing in the evening, or else read, or even just had a super early night. (Turns out, all that work and travel can be kind of draining.)

I say writing, but more specifically, I mean editing.

While I was at Gladstone’s Library, I wrote a second draft of the novel. During the weeks on Achill, I did the bulk of the work on the third draft. A lot of this process involved reading aloud (cue that day when I thought I had Covid because I had such a sore throat) – which was a refreshingly weird experience after spending a month working silently in a library.

I tend to edit by hand, on a big printout of the manuscript, which was perfect for avoiding distractions – especially as the cottage doesn’t have wifi (although there is limited 3G at the cottage). I didn’t quite finish the process of typing up all those edits, but once that’s done, I’m planning to take a couple of weeks’ break from the novel. After all, writing two drafts back-to-back like that (especially on back-to-back residencies) is intensive, and distance is always a good way to get perspective on a book.

What do you get / what’s expected of you in return?

Firstly, it’s worth noting that, while I was there as a writer, the residency is also open to other artists. The studio room, for example, has recently been refurbished and additional windows put in, giving it oodles of natural light and making it a perfect space for painting.

So what do you get on the residency?

The main thing is, of course, two weeks in the beautiful Heinrich Böll Cottage. Unlike other residencies I’ve done, you don’t get meals or transport paid for – which means you’re responsible for making your own way to the cottage.

What I did learn while I was there, was that I also got a small stipend to help cover costs (a total of €350 for the fortnight). This is funded by Mayo County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland. I don’t know whether this is something received by every artist in residence, or only in certain years, or certain art forms, or dependent on funding – it isn’t mentioned on the Heinrich Böll Cottage website, so I wouldn’t like to assure anyone of it, only for people to then be disappointed. For me, I planned the residency without it, and then it was a nice bonus while I was away.

What’s expected in return?

Apparently, during non-Covid times, the Association likes to link you up with a school or local arts group, to run some kind of event or workshop during your stay, as a way of giving back to the community. But while I was there, this part of the residency wasn’t happening.

The main expectation, though, is that you use the time and space to work on your artistic practice, whatever that may be. That’s it: just go to the cottage and create.

How do you apply?

The first thing to be aware of is that the Heinrich Böll residency has a long lead-in time. Admittedly, my experience of this was exacerbated by Covid, but even so, I submitted my application for the residency in July 2018. I also have it on good authority that the applications received in this current round are being considered for 2023, so any applications received in the coming year will be for 2024 consideration. As I said: long lead-in.

Personally, though, I like to plan ahead, so I’m a bit of a fan of a longer lead-in for a residency. (I find those residencies where you only find out if you’re successful a month or so before the start incredibly stressful.)

If this works for you as well, then you apply by snail mail, submitting your application (consisting of a recent sample of your work, a short CV and a letter of interest) to:

John McHugh
Achill Heinrich Böll Association
c/o Abha Teangai
Dooagh
Achill Island
Co Mayo
IRELAND

(Information correct at time of writing, but it’s worth checking the website for any change.)

NB: As with Hawthornden residency, the initial application for Henrich Böll Cottage is by post, but communication thereafter is done by email – or, when it comes to arrangements such as collecting the key to the cottage, by phone.

And that’s it! I hope you’ve found this informative – whether you’re thinking of applying yourself, or just here to nosy at what I was up to for a couple of weeks. And if you do decide to apply: best of luck, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you!

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The hush of books. The dusty tingle of being surrounded by other people’s thoughts, other people’s ideas. Ornate wooden beams soaring overhead, as the occasional turned page rustles from across the gallery. In the sacred quiet of the library, I sit at my desk and start to write.

Gladstone’s Library is the UK’s only residential library, meaning that you can book to stay in one of the bedrooms, and eat in the restaurant, Food for Thought, and work in the library while you’re here. (Clergy & members of the Society of Authors gete 20% off!) The library also offers bursaries and scholarships, and runs a writer-in-residence programme – which is how I came to spend a month here, working on the second draft of my novel.

I arrived at Gladstone’s Library on 1 September 2021, sixteen months later than originally planned. The reason, of course, being Covid and the mutiple lockdowns and restrictions. For almost eighteen months, the library was closed, and we kept having to renegotiate the dates of my residency – so that by the time I actually made it here, the library had taken on this strange mythical quality, like a mirage, always two steps further on.

And there is something magical about Gladstone’s Library. Something transformative about the Reading Rooms, about the process of climbing the narrow wooden stairs each day, to sit at my desk in the little alcove above the porch, and immerse myself in the world of my second novel.

My first residency after (more or less) 18 months of being at home:

Compared to a lot of people, I haven’t had it bad the past 18 months. I haven’t had to shield, so I have been able to leave the house for things like food shopping and, more recently, outdoor social gathering. I have a garden and my back door pretty much opens onto the fell, so there’s been plenty of opportunity to get out of the house safely. I’ve even been on a couple of holidays around the UK.

But, like most people, I’ve spent the majority of the past 18 months in my own home, in my own (sometimes failing) routine.

The past few weeks have shocked me out of that. The change of scene, the change of company, the knowledge that I only had a specific amount of time – all of this helped me be far more focused and creative than I would have been at home. Not to mention the fact that having set (or loosely set) mealtimes imposed a useful amount of routine on my days at the library.

It reminded me how much I love residencies, and how much a new environment can – for me – help and encourage the creative process.

So what did I achieve?

I started the residency with a first draft of a second novel.

Everyone approaches the drafting process differently, and for me, first drafts are a mess. I don’t write chronologically. I write scenes which I know have to happen, but with only a vague concept of how they might all fit together. I also have a tendancy to change the characters’ histories and motivations halfway through the writing process, or to decide the ending isn’t going in the direction I originally thought, or – as in this case – to totally change the narrative voice from third person past to first person present.

This means that, when I have a ‘finished first draft’, what I actually have is a jumble of scenes and linkages which may be vaguely novel-shaped, but which also may look a bit more like a rubbish heap. The second draft, then, is where the shape and feel of the book really start to emerge. Where I have to try to make it all make sense.

(This is why, often, I dread the second draft. Suddenly, unlike before, the pressure is on for the words to actually make sense.)

While I was planning for the residency, I’d been thinking of my time away as a six-week block: four weeks at Gladstone’s Library, followed by two weeks on a residency in Ireland. In those six weeks, I thought, I should be able to get the bulk of the way through the second draft of my novel.

I also thought this was a pretty tall order. Bear in mind, the first draft took me eight months to write, and it was a total mess. Still, I would give it a go. Even if I didn’t finish the second draft, I reasoned, I would have enough of it done to carry me across the finish line when I got home.

Cut to three and a half weeks later. I’m in my final week of the Gladstone’s residency, and, after twenty-six days of writing in the library, I’ve finished a second draft.

85,000 words + a heck of a lot of coffees, and somehow, the whole second draft is complete.

I’m someone who tends to write a lot of drafts (I know writers who write more, and writers who write fewer – it really depends on the writer). For me, there’ll probably still be structural changes going on into draft three, and maybe even draft four – so there’s still quite a way to go in terms of finishing the actual book. And that’s before I even send it to my agent, and way before an editor gets to see it.

But it’s a solid start – and the residency has meant that I’m much further on than I ever expected to be at this stage.

The practicalities:

The residency consists of residential stay + meals + library use for a calendar month. The library also offers a £100 per week stipend, plus travel expenses from your UK address. In return, the Writer in Residence gives a talk (mine was part of the library’s annual festival, GladFest), leads a full day masterclass, and writes two blog posts during the course of their stay:

Blog post: Rewriting a Novel in the Theatre of Listening

Where do you sleep?

The library is a beautiful building, with one wing dedicated to the Reading Rooms (where the books & desks & archive collections are), a middle section of offices, and another wing dedicated to living: bedrooms, a lounge, the chapel, and the restaurant.

The Writer in Residence bedroom is a double ensuite room – mine was on the second floor, with a little window that I fell in love with at once, looking out on a tree which was filled with birds and, occasionally, squirrels.

There’s also a desk in case you prefer to work in your room – though beyond the occasional Zoom call, I didn’t use this much, preferring to work in the much more atmospheric Reading Rooms instead.

What about the food?

The Writer in Residence position is fully catered, meaning the library provides three meals a day, plus coffees in between if/when necessary.

Breakfast is continental (I maybe ate my body weight in croissants over the course of the month), with options for either lighter or more hearty meals at lunch and dinner (the steak pie is excellent). To begin with, I was worried the food might get a bit samey, eating from the same menu every night, but luckily they varied it up by adding specials, and having features such as Sunday lunctime roast dinner.

I had to limit myself on the desserts, though. Right at the start of the residency, I made a decision to only allow myself pudding on days where my total wordcount reached the next 10k word marker (so, at 10k words, 20k words, 30k words, etc) – which may have also contributed to my productivity during the month!

The best bits:

The best bit of any residency is the time to write. A chance to turn on the out-of-office and dedicate that brain space to the writing.

But there’s something extra special that happens at Gladstone’s. Whether it’s being surrounded by all the books, or the concentrated quiet of other people working, but there’s a magical focus that happens in the library, where the work just flows.

Apply to be Gladstone’s Library Writer in Residence

Also read: A Few Thoughts On: Writing Residencies

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Hey there. It’s been a while. Sorry about that – but then, in some ways, it feels as though it’s been no time at all.

Either way, it feels as though time has been doing some pretty strange things over the last year and a half. Always slowing down and then speeding up, trapped between a race and a limbo. And the truth is that for a large chunk of it, at least for me, it hasn’t felt as though very much has been happening. I get up. I make coffee. I play with the neighbour’s cat. I write. I answer emails. I collapse on the sofa. I watch something or other on Netflix. I nod off. I drag myself to bed.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been struggling a lot this year with a feeling of inertia, a fatigue in the bones. Whether that’s just a result of lockdown, or the uncertainty we’ve all been living through for the past year and a half, who knows. The upshot is that everything seems to take longer, which means less going on, which has not only meant less time to post on here, but also feeling like I have less to post about.

Basically, this is just one long big excuse for my absence.

Cue this summer, when evrything changed. Or rather, when everything happened. It’s as though the days got longer and suddenly everyone came out of hibernation. Suddenly, I have news.

A Few Good Things:

I FINISHED A FIRST DRAFT!

At the beginning of this year, I started working on my second novel.

It’s been slow going. The novel which I started to work on early in 2020 proved to be a false start – partly because of Covid. (When the world turns upside down, different stories can start to matter more, and the stories which you thought drove you before can suddenly feel vaccuous and unimportant.) Luckily, I’d had another idea for a novel last March, and was finally able to start work on it in January.

A few weeks ago, I finished a first draft.

Of course, there’s still a long way to go yet. I’ve let the manuscript sit in a drawer for the past couple of weeks, giving it time to rest before I start work on draft two.

I always think the second draft is the hardest. Draft one is just about writing down your ideas. In draft two, you somehow have to make this colossal bundle of words make sense as a story.

But I don’t want to demean the process of writing that initial draft! It’s still an awful lot of words (70,000 words, to be exact), and this year in particular, that process of pulling a story out of thin air has been hard. I think it’s important to celebrate those achievements at every stage of the writing process.

So: first draft accomplished. Draft two, here I come!

AWARDS & PRIZES

At the end of last year, I posted about the sheer volume of rejections that 2020 brought. And, for the first few months of this year, it looked as though 2021 would follow suit. But then summer happened, and turned things around.

The biggest win (and one I’ve been applying for for years) has been a Northern Writers’ Award.

Northern Writers’ Awards are an annual set of awards, grants and prizes, run by New Writing North. This year, I was lucky enough to win a Debut Poetry Award, to work on my first full-length collection. The award comes in the form of a financial grant, alongside mentoring, which I can’t wait to get started on.

And, speaking of poetry, my poem, ‘Snapshot of My Great Great Great Grandmother, Missouri, 1863’ won the Prole Laureate Competition, judged by Carrie Etter, who said this about the poem:

The winning poem, “Snapshot of My Great Great Great Grandmother, Missouri, 1863,” transfixed me every time I read it. I was entranced by the poem’s deft interweaving of American history, motherhood, and the country’s relationship with guns. The speaker’s consciousness is well conceived, the references to God crucial for our sense of the speaker’s consciousness in that time and place. With expertly interwoven narrative threads, a thoughtful use of line and pacing, and poignant observation, this poem deserves more applause than I alone can give. It’s a remarkable, moving poem.

Carrie Etter, Prole

You can read ‘Snapshot of My Great Great Great Grandmother, Missouri, 1863’ here.

But it hasn’t all been about poetry this summer.

At the end of June, I had a short story shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Prize. And not only that – it went on to win the Georgia Writers’ House Prize, which comes with a week at the Writers’ House in Tbilisi! Still not sure when I’ll be able to take that one up (thanks, Covid), but I was thrilled to be chosen, and am already very excited for whenever it does happen.

The story, ‘Raise, or How to Break Free of the Ground, or The Lakeland Dialect for Slippery is Slape and to Form it in the Mouth Requires an Act of Falling’, will be published in an anthology later this year.

So that’s my very successful summer! Don’t get me wrong – there are still plenty of ‘thanks but no thanks’ responses. But it’s amazing how much difference it makes when you get a couple of ‘yes pleases’.

ROBIN HOOD

For me, one of the markers of summer is seeing The Three Inch Fools perform. An outdoor theatre company, The Three Inch Fools tour the country every summer, with five actors performing two Shakespeare plays (this year, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Romeo and Juliet).

This year, they toured a second play: Robin Hood. This was a more meta, folky, musical take on the well-known story, and I had great fun writing the lyrics for one of the songs (music by Stephen Hyde), sung by Marion (aka Emily Newsome):

So what else have I been up to?

Alongside all this, there’s been a mix of work & play. I’ve run a number of online writing workshops (which will start up again in October), and been one of the tutors on Northern Writers’ Studio’s inaugural Summer School.

Despite saying I was going to put less energy into submissions & applications this year, I’ve also been submitting work and writing applications. Which, yes, is time consuming. The difference this year is that I’m only applying for things that I actively want to do / would benefit my practcice, rather than just because the money’s good. If I’m going to spend hours and hours on an application with limited chance of success, I at least want it to feel somehow worthy.

As for the ‘play’ side of the summer, after very little over the past year, I’ve actually been away from my own house a few times lately. This started with a trip to the Highlands in June, and continued with a self-made writing retreat (where I wrote around 12,000 words in 5 days), then finished up with 3 days walking the Pendle Witches Walk with my friend Loren (in some very witchy weather). After the year of monotony, it’s been good to remind myself that taking a break, and changing the routine, can be so hugely beneficial for creativiy.

So what’s next?

Well, in many ways, that depends on the outcomes of some of these applications. But in the shorter term, there are a few things I know are in the pipeline:

  • Firstly, I have a couple of residencies in the pipeline, which were postponed from last year: Gladstone’s Library in Wales, and Heinrich Boell Cottage in Ireland. I’m going to be using the time at these to work on redrafting the novel, and hopefully to be able to totally immerse myself in it.
  • I’m also very excited to be going back to the poetry collection, with mentoring courtesy of the Northern Writers’ Award.
  • And, in the autumn, I’ll be back to running the online writing workshops, starting with Writing Weather on Saturday 23 October.

The Summer in Pictures:

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I’m still not sure how we got here. The leaves are turning, and all the summer plants in my garden have started dying back. There’s a chill in the air when I walk up onto the fell, which itself is paling, losing some of its green summer lustre. The nights are drawing close up against the living room window.

And yet, somehow, I catch myself thinking it’s still March. Possibly because of the occasion sunny days that squeeze in through the rain. More likely because I feel as though I’ve been in stasis for the past six months.

But September, at least, has felt a bit different. Things have started moving again.

I won’t say things are back to normal, because they’re not, and there isn’t the same level of work as there was before lockdown. But there have been a few projects which have started to come together.

Cairngorms

September: A Few Good Things

Contains Strong Language:

Contains Strong Language is the BBC’s poetry festival – this year taking place in Cumbria. Obviously, it was an unusual approach to a festival, made necessary by Covid restrictions. But there was still plenty broadcast over the festival itself, and available online afterwards.

I took part in two events during the festival: one was a panel discussion on Ruskin’s View in Kirkby Lonsdale, and on the commissioned poems that four of us had written about it; and the other was an event called ‘Passing Words’, where a whole range of poets each performed six-minute sets. Both of these were broadcast live online (a strange experience, performing to an auditorium almost entirely devoid of anyone other than the production team), and I think there are plans for the events to be made available again on the website in the coming weeks.

(On top of Contains Strong Languague, there’ve also been a couple of other media bits, too – but more on those in the future! After all, I’ve got to keep some secrets…)

Winter Droving film

A top secret project:

And speaking of things that are under wraps… This month, I’ve been taking a little bit of a break from my own writing projects, and working on something a little more collaborative. Which has included a fair few Zoom chats, and even a couple of socially-distanced-masked-up-in-person meetings, which has felt very weird after so many months of very little work with organisations, and certainly none in person.

I can’t say too much about it just yet (oh how I love a good secret!) but I can say that it involves myth and mystery and vlogging and celebrating local places and not-at-all-made-up historical facts. And I’m hoping to be able to reveal what it is over the next few weeks!

beach

Getting away from it all:

Honestly, I think what gave me the energy to work on this new project was a change of scene. Like a lot of people, I’ve spend the past six months not going anywhere. I don’t just mean the usual been-working-too-hard-and-need-a-holiday. It’s been stranger than that. More intense. For months, I hadn’t been anywhere other than my own house and garden, the Co-op and post office (each only a mile away), and walks on the fell within a few miles of my own front door. I hadn’t even been into town to do a ‘big shop’, or into the other town to go to the dentist or get the car serviced. None of the little changes of scene that are so normal in most of our lives that we don’t even notice them.

It was partly this feeling of micro-institutionalisation that inspired my Ruskin’s View poem for Contains Strong Language. And it was also what made my trip to Scotland a few weeks ago both unnerving, and also one of the most refreshing things I could possible have done. A change of company, scenery (and stunning scenery at that), and long walks almost every day were exactly what I needed. I barely thought about writing once – though I did manage to find a few moments in the peaceful heather-filled garden to sit and read. In many ways, the trip was a creative cleanse. It left me physically shattered, but full of mental energy and ready to get back to writing.

Thin Places

The Month in Books:

Ever since the start of lockdown, I’ve been struggling to focus on reading. That’s continued this month, but with a strange sort of imbalance. At the start of September, I found reading incredibly difficult. I was reading the proof of Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s Thin Places, which is a phenomenally beautiful and heart-breaking and also hopeful book, but I was aware that I was reading slowly. Part of this was the desire to soak up every gorgeously crafted word on the page, but part of it was also due to something else. A worry, perhaps. That Covid-related anxiety that’s been bubbling under the surface for so many of us for the past six months or more.

Then, suddenly, I came back from my trip to Scotland, and it was as though something clicked. I started to read again – first finishing Thin Places, and then roaring through four subsequent books as though my life depended on it. Not only was I reading, but I had a hunger for other books as well. I’d stopped looking listlessly at my to-read pile, seeing it as a chore to be accomplished; suddenly, it was back to being a shelf of mysteries, each one silently begging to be uncovered.

The following list might not be the longest ‘books I’ve read over the course of an entire month’ list (and, with the possible exception of a novel in verse, there are no poetry collections on there at all), but it represents somthing else: a kind of re-birth; or, more accurately, a re-falling-in-love, and for that reason I’m proud of it.

  • Thin Places, by Kerri ni Dochartaigh
  • Run, Rebel, by Manjeet Mann
  • The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz
  • The Glass Hotel, by Emily St John Mandel
  • English Pastoral, by James Rebanks

And I can’t wait for what the next month of reading is going to bring.

The Month in Pictures:

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2020. The year it all went pear-shaped, and the writing world was largely split between those who were struggling to find the headspace to engage with a single word, and those who were churning out chapters like the world was about to end. Which, let’s face it, it still might.

Notebook, pen, laptop and coffee mug on a kitchen table

I’ve already talked a bit about productivity during lockdown, and about the difference between solitude and isolation. But I want to come back to it: this idea of the writer in a lonely garret, probably wearing fingerless gloves and gnawing on a hunk of stale bread.

What does it mean to write in isolation?

At the end of 2019, I spent a month in Brussels. This was part of a residency organised between Belgian organisation Passa Porta and the National Centre for Writing, based in Norwich. I got to stay in a gorgeous apartment in the city centre, just up the road from the famous Grand-Place, and within spitting distance of Place Sainte-Catherine.

It was a gorgeous place to spend a month, and I had one of the nicest writing rooms I’ve ever experienced (vying for first place only with my little cabin in the woods at MacDowell).

Katie sitting at a desk in a light airy room in a Brussels apartment, with shelves of books behind her

And yet I felt lonely.

At first, I didn’t really notice. I was too wrapped up in reading, writing and editing poetry to pay much attention to the warning signs my body was giving me: insomnia, restlessness, overly vivid dreams that left me feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, shallow breathing, and a craving for salt-rich meals I didn’t have to cook but could just pick at, constantly.

This wasn’t the first time I’d experienced some sort of anxiety, so I knew what these symptoms meant. The trouble was that I just didn’t think I felt anxious. It took me until the end of the third week to work out that was what this was: an anxiety born of loneliness.

By that time, I’d already started going for long walks in Brussels’ many parks. At first, I felt guilty for bunking off from poetry, but the more I did it, the more I made myself acknowledge that this was actually a vital part of my writing process in that city: a way of reconnecting with nature and getting out of my own head – something as important for writing as it is for my own mental health.

It was November, and the trees were a flourish of reds and golds. There were a lot of those cold crisp days covered by endless blue skies, which always feel as though they’re pulled straight out of an autumnal picture book. I started taking a book with me to read on benches. I took poems to edit outside.

An avenue of autumnal trees in a Brussels park

I won’t say that these walks were a cure-all, because they weren’t. I was still lonely. I didn’t realise how lonely till I got back to London and met up with a friend for coffee a couple of hours after getting off the Eurostar; when I saw him in the coffee shop and gave him a hello hug, I realised I was shaking and on the edge of tears at realising I was back with familiar faces. I think it was a precursor to knowing I’d get to see my family the following day.

Since coming home, I’ve learned that I’m not the only person to have experienced this while on that particular residency. US writer Lauren Russel wrote her post-residency open letter about that feeling of aloneness in a foreign place. Olivia Sudjic published Exposure: a long personal essay that begins with her recounting her loneliness while staying in that very apartment in Brussels.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing – it’s just something I wasn’t prepared for. All the previous residencies I’d done had involved a group of people being in residence somewhere together, and suddenly finding yourself on your own in a foreign city – especially one you’re only in temporarily – is a big thing.

(I should mention here that all the staff at Passa Porta were utterly lovely, and very welcoming; they just all had their own jobs to be getting on with. I also met up with a couple of friends while I was in Brussels, and these few occasions were probably the saving grace of my sanity!)

I learned a lot about myself during this residency, and some of the things I learned have helped me over the past six months, as so many of us have had to negotiate a whole new type of isolation.

Isolated writing in the time of coronavirus:

Back near the start of lockdown, I wrote a blog post about how I was struggling to write. There were a number of things going on there (including jet lag and some sort of illness that may or may not have been Covid) – but there was also enforced isolation. At one point, I realised it had been over two months since I’d touched another human being.

And yes, I felt anxious. Of course I did – there was a deadly pandemic sweeping across the globe and everything was turning upside down. Vivid dreams seemed to be affecting people across the country, and there were days when I couldn’t remember whether something had really happened or if I had only dreamed it. I had insomnia. I felt restless. Everything about my body felt arhythmic and reactive. With the anxiety came some of the worst period pains I’d ever experienced.

But unlike in Brussels, it didn’t grind me down. Perhaps it was because what was affecting me was so definitely external, and something everyone was facing across the country, but this time, my anxiety felt distant. As though a separate part of my mind were looking down on my body, subjecting it to scientific observations. It was as though the whole country were sitting an exam, and I was one of the few people who had revised for it.

Laptop on a round blue metal table in a garden shed, looking out over a sunny garden

Two of the first things I did during lockdown, after I’d got over the worst of my maybe-Covid illness, were to clear my writing desk and reorganise my garden shed. (My neighbour calls it a summerhouse, but personally I’m not sure I spent enough money on it for it to have such a fancy name.)

Previously, I’d always worked at my kitchen table, but my kitchen chairs aren’t that comfy for sustained seating, and I’d learned from Brussels that it was important for me to vary up my writing space. Denied the possibility of writing in cafes (my usual go-to when I get fed up of being in one space) or going on any of the residencies I had planned for the rest of 2020, I created four separate writing zones: my kitchen table; my desk; my garden shed / summerhouse; and my sofa.

Like a lot of the rest of the country using their government-allotted exercise time, I went for walks. As in Brussels, I paid attention to the world around me. Gradually, I started to find myself writing.

Brussels also taught me about the need to spend time with friends, and the need to spend time think about things other than writing. Among other things, I’m now part of a regular Zoom quiz group, which I think would have been an amazing thing to have had during my Brussels residency.

As the months have progressed, the lockdown anxiety hasn’t really gone away, but I’ve been able to watch it as though from a distance. I can keep one eye on it, while focusing the rest of my attention on writing.

straight road leading away over the horizon - long grass on either side and a blue sky overhead

A bit like my walks around the park in Brussels, this isn’t to say that any of this is a cure-all. I don’t believe that all you have to do is reorganise your space, take part in a Zoom quiz and go for walks, and then suddenly you’ll have no issues with anxiety, and / or be able to write an entire novel during lockdown. We all have our own challenges, and I can’t even begin to address the work-life balance that has come into play for families working from home.

But for me, building on what I learned through my residency in Brussels, this has worked. At least so far. As for whether it will keep working as the seasons change and we’re threatened by more local lockdowns? Well, I’ll just have to wait and see.

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A 17th Century Guide to Beauty in Virginia

Come,
in the owl-time, in the shy fox-hour, coyotes

still courting the moon, the silver creek
of the Milky Way glinting

above the Rappahannock River
in a fist of flung shillings –

come, dip your face
to the dew, each drop its own

loose change, waiting
to be slipped into the charity box of dawn.

Spend them liberally, soaking your cheeks
in the tears of your not-yet-country –

till, with a great stirring of snuff-dark breath
the sightless eyes of the household

blink awake, and the sun begins again
its daily scouring of the soil beneath tobacco leaves.

All day the plants will stake their hard
aromas to your brow, your unwashed palms.

All day you will catch your tongue
lamenting, reimbursing their murmuring aubade.

*

‘A 17th Century Guide to Beauty in Virginia’ was a finalist in the 2019 PBS/Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition.

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Novels are long. Really long. So long, that even if you’re full of ideas & enthusiasm when you start writing one, there’s almost definitely going to come a point when you’re not going to be quite as certain.

Sometimes, this is just a case of motivating yourself. After all, 70,000 words plus of writing, rewriting and rewriting again is a lot of time to keep yourself engaged. You’re bound to get frustrated with it from time to time, and it can be so easy to find a million things you’d rather be doing than writing your novel: baking; cleaning the windows; answering emails; scrubbing the toilet with a toothbrush… It’s a case of reminding yourself what you love about the novel you’re writing, and then making yourself get back to it.

But sometimes, it isn’t just about making yourself a big pot of coffee and chaining yourself to the desk. Sometimes, you can be hugely motivated to write, and yet still find yourself stuck in a particular scene. There are hundreds of reasons you might find your story isn’t really going anywhere. But there are also ways to help yourself over the hurdle of that difficult scene.

1. Go back to basics.

If I’m stuck on what’s going to happen in a scene, I often find it’s because I haven’t done enough preparatory work. Often, this boils down to me not knowing my characters well enough. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – every writer works differently. Some writers plan everything in meticulous detail, constructing a ‘beat-by-beat’ of each scene, so that they know exactly what has to happen when, and then they just have to write it. Some writers go in knowing absolutely nothing. They start with a phrase or a first line or a vague idea, and build the whole thing up through the drafting process.

Personally, I’m somewhere in the middle. I like to plan just enough so that I have a vague idea of what’s going on, but not so much that there’s nothing left to discover in the writing process. I think of it a bit like walking through a tunnel under a mountain. I don’t need to see the whole route, but nor do I want to be blundering about in the dark. As long as I can see the next few feet in front of me, and have a vague idea of where the tunnel might bring me out, then that’s fine.

The good thing about this way of working is that I’m always getting to know more about my characters, the whole time I’m writing them. The less good thing is that I don’t know everything about my characters when I start writing – which means that sometimes, I have to go back and do some of that ‘preparatory work’ part way through the drafting process.

Often if I’m stuck, it’s because I’ve lost sight of what my character wants.

Everybody has something that drives them. Most of us are driven by multiple desires at once – some short-term (I’m cold and want to get warm) and some long-term (I want to be the first woman on the moon). The chances are, you’ll already have figured out what your character’s long-term desire is, during the planning process. But in the individual scene that you’re stuck on, maybe that long-term desire isn’t what’s driving them, and they’re being driven by something much more short-term. Maybe they have two or more conflicting desires – after all, most of us do. But in almost every moment, there’s going to be a desire that comes out on top.

One of the best books I’ve ever read, for understanding character-building, is Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling. I’d recommend it for anyone wanting to understand character and build up a character-driven narrative.

Once you know what a character wants, you can put problems in their way, and see how they go about solving those problems, in order to achieve their desire. Goal + obstacles = story.

If you want a perfect example of how desire + obstacle can create narrative, watch The Martian. Without giving too much away: Matt Damon’s character is stuck on Mars, and his goal is to survive long enough for somebody from earth to send a rescue mission. It’s a hostile environment, where the obstacles are stacked against him. Each time he crosses an obstacle, another one rears its head. Not only does this create narrative drive, it also gives the narrative a sense of tension and release, as we follow the character’s desire to live.

‘At some point, everything’s going to south on you… and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem – and you solve the next one – and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.’ – The Martian

2. Make characters interact.

It can be so easy to write long extensive scenes in which a character sits in a room, possibly looking out of a rain-blurred window, contemplating life. I get it. Let’s face it – that’s quite possibly what you, the writer, are doing a lot of during the writing process, and they do say to write about what you know…

I wrote a whole novel where (for a significant chunk of it) the protagonist believes she’s the last person left alive on earth. The temptation to have her sit down and just think highly philosophical thoughts for long swathes of text was huge. But at the end of the day, that rarely makes good narrative. And if you’re stuck, maybe it’s because nothing is actually happening in your book. I recently spoke to a friend who was having trouble with a scene she was writing for precisely this reason. Her character was simply standing by the window, raising the tension and giving the writer a chance to describe the carpet tiles in great lyrical depth.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with lyrical description. Some of my favourite writers have this lyrical gift in spades. But when you do describe something in great detail, it has to be a choice, and not just as a way of stalling because you’re not sure what’s going to happen next.

My advice to my friend? Bring another character into the scene. Force them to interact.

Of course, how they interact will depend on who the other character is, and on their relationship to character number one. And I mean that in narrative terms, not just in terms of whether they’re the character’s sister or boyfriend or a distant stranger.

Let’s say that Character A (the one previously sitting and pondering the rain) is the protagonist. What is Character B’s purpose in the story? Are they there to assist the protagonist? Or are they the antagonist? If they’re the antagonist, then maybe they’re the one providing those obstacles we talked about in the previous section. (Think of the way a villain tries to foil the hero in a superhero film.) If they’re there to assist the protagonist, maybe the two of them are overcoming an obstacle together (think Thelma & Louise).

Still stuck on how to make your characters interact? Give them a task to accomplish together. It can be as simple as cooking a meal, but the way they interact during it will reveal a lot about their characters, and about their relationship with one another.

3. Start a fire.

If that interaction still isn’t getting you anywhere, then try something more dramatic. Give your character or characters a catastrophic event to react to. The beauty of rewriting is that you can always cut this event later, if you decide it really doesn’t fit your plot. But it can be a useful tool to get you past a difficult stage in the writing process.

In her book A Novel in a Year (based on the newspaper column of the same name), Louise Doughty advises crashing an aeroplane into a hospital, then seeing how the characters respond. Obviously that’s a hugely dramatic event, involving a whole community. But if you wanted to make it smaller and more contained, then why not start a fire? (In your novel, of course – not on your desk.) It could be a big house-burning-down sort of fire, or it could be a small more easily containable fire. Either way, it’s the sort of emergency that brings character traits to the fore, and heightens relationships between them.

I always think that writing fiction is somewhere between finely tuned craft and childlike play. So don’t be afraid to play around with your characters. Put them in unusual situations. Write fan fiction of your own novel, if it helps, to see how your characters would respond in different circumstances. You can always pick and choose the bits you want to include later on.

writing in cafes - notebooks and coffee

4. Skip back a bit.

It’s a well-known truism that, if you run into problems on page 200 of your manuscript, the likelihood is that the original problem started on page 100.

I forget who originally said this, but it’s certainly proven true for me – not just in fiction, but sometimes in poetry as well, albeit on a smaller scale. Often, the bit you’re struggling on isn’t the problem. The problem is buried somewhere much earlier.

I suppose it’s a bit like catching a cold. The first time you cough or sneeze isn’t the first instant you’ve caught the cold. The illness has probably been there for a few days or hours, incubating as your immune system begins its attempts to combat it, before the symptoms show themselves. It’s the same with fiction. Something happens early on in the novel, or your character makes a wrong choice, and suddenly 100 pages later, you find you’ve reached the dead end.

The trick is working out what that choice was. Try working out what events led to the scene that you’re stuck on. Can you change one of them slightly?

Over-simplified example: a girl is walking through a forest, on the way to her grandmother’s house. She sees a wolf, and wisely avoids talking to him, because she’s always been told to avoid wolves. There’s a moment of dramatic tension where you think she’s going to break her promise to her mother, but because she’s the hero, she never does – so she continues through the wood till she arrives at the cottage. When she gets there, she has tea with her grandmother. Suddenly, you’re stuck in a scene where Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are making smalltalk about the weather and nothing is really happening very much.

You have two options.

Option 1 is to introduce a big dramatic event, such as a fire. Maybe a spark from the grate ignites the rug, and before you know it the whole cottage is in flames, forcing them out into the forest, and perhaps straight into the arms of the prowling wolf, who has followed Red Riding Hood to the cottage. Suddenly, you have a crisis, and a problem they have to solve. You have a story again.

Option 2 is to go back to a point earlier in the story, where Red Riding Hood meets the wolf. Instead of ignoring him as she’s been told to do, she tells the wolf all about where she’s headed, giving him time to reach Grandmother’s cottage ahead of her, to eat Grandmother, and assume his disguise. We change the protagonist’s actions, and by doing so also introduce a character flaw: her reckless disobedience (the flaw which, in the Roald Dahl version of the story, becomes her saving grace). Once again, we now have a story.

Writing poetry in a cafe in Grasmere

5. Skip forward.

If you’ve tried looking backwards in the story, and got nowhere, then you’re always free to go the other way, and to skip forwards. After all, there’s no rule saying you have to write your novel chronologically. It’s perfectly acceptable to write the bits where you know what’s going to happen, and then fill in the blanks later.

(Programmes like Scrivener are particularly useful for this, as they allow you to segment your writing project into scenes and chapters, then move them around if necessary.)

You might not even know what order the scenes go in just yet. That’s also fine. When I was drafting My Name is Monster, while I did have a vague notion of the direction of the story, there were definitely bits that I moved from one part of the novel to another during the writing process. At one point I had the whole manuscript printed out and arranged by scene on my living room floor, with all my furniture pushed back to the walls, so I could rearrange the order by moving the pages around from one place to another.

So if you’re stuck? Move on and write something else. You may get to a scene later on, where you realise X needs to have happened already in order for Y to happen later. Suddenly, you realise X is the missing ingredient to the scene you were stuck with all along.

Whatever happens, the important thing is to not let it get the better of you. Don’t give up – and keep writing!

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There’s a lot of mystery around how a writer makes money. A couple of months ago, I had a great question from a teenager, who heard I was a writer, and wanted to know how many books I’d written. Or, to be clearer – how many books had I earned lots of money from?

Adjusting for inflation (between what counts as ‘lots of money’ to a writer versus what counts as ‘lots of money’ for most other people, and therefore not including my poetry pamphlets), I said, ‘One.’

His response? ‘How can you be a writer if you’ve only written one book?’

It’s a fair question. How can you make a living as a writer if you’ve only written one (full-length) book?

2019: How I Earned a Living (with Pie Charts):

At the beginning of 2019, I wrote a blog post about how to make a living as a writer, compartmentalising the different ways writers (including myself) can earn a living. It wasn’t an exhaustive list, as I don’t think these sorts of lists ever can be – after all, every writer is different, and we all work in different ways to find our own niches.

But it did attempt to break down the various ways that I, personally, earn my income.

I broke my income for 2018 down into sections. I made pie charts and line graphs to illustrate the proportions of these income sections, and to emphasise the inconsistency of earnings month by month. I made the whole thing as clear as I could possibly make it – but with one final caveat: just as a writer’s income is inconsistent month by month, so it’s also often inconsistent year by year.

2018 was an exceptional year for me. I sold the rights to my debut novel, and delivered on my final manuscript, which meant that not only did I receive an advance, but that two thirds of it were paid to me over 2 consecutive months. Cue a big income spike, and a large proportion in the ‘advance’ section of the income pie chart. But the flip side of that was that, as I didn’t publish a book in 2018, it was quite a slim year for readings, talks & festival appearances.

The upshot? The 2018 graphs & pie charts were only part of the picture.

So I’ve decided to break down my 2019 income in the same way – to look at the ways my income was earned in a very different year: one where I didn’t sell the rights to any new books, but my debut novel was released and I had all the attendant income that comes from talks & readings etc alongside that release.

As with 2018, I’ve broken my income down into sections. In 2018, these were:

  • earnings from commissions
  • earnings from running workshops (for young people and for adults)
  • income from competition wins
  • earnings from readings / talks etc
  • money from my advance on my novel
  • income from other arts-related work (mostly, but not limited to, arts administration roles)

One mark of how my income pattern has changed since last year has been the need to add more categories. As my career has grown, I’ve started to get different types of work – which makes sense, when you think about it. So for 2019, I’ve added the following income categories:

  • residencies
  • radio work
  • grant funding

I’ve also had to widen ‘money from advance on my novel’ to include other book sales income, as well as ALCS payments and payments for writing included in magazines & journals.

As becomes very quickly apparent, my biggest income in 2019 came from the 3rd & final part of my novel advance, and from grant funding. This makes sense: a lot of the year was taken up with working on a poetry project, which I was lucky enough to receive an Arts Council DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) grant to help fund.

The rest of my income, as in 2018, is made up of a combination of other bits and bobs. The ‘portfolio career’ as it’s so attractively called. One interesting factor (at least to me) is that while I did earn some income in the ‘other arts-related work’ category, it was so little as to be rounded down to 0%. For me, this is a good thing, as I deliberately tried to cut down on the paid admin work in 2019, in order to be able to focus more on the actual writing.

But what does the pie chart look like without those two anomalies: the novel advance & the Arts Council grant?

With the anomalies removed, the big changes immediately become more apparent. Let me pop the two graphs (2018 & 2019) side by side here for comparison:

The main changes from 2018-2019:

  • More categories. I’ve already mentioned this, but I’ll mention it again: with the novel coming out, other avenues of work have opened up to me. The two main ones are writing residencies and radio work (both writing & present a programme of my own, and appearing as a guest on others).
  • Increase in readings & talks. From only 2% in 2018, I earned 15% of my (adjusted) 2019 income from giving readings & talks. Again, this makes sense, with the novel coming out. You’re more likely to get readings when you’ve got a recently publish book to promote.
  • Decrease in workshops. This might seem surprising, given that you could expect publication to lead to an increase in workshop bookings. But in 2018, most of my workshops were in schools. The increase in residencies, and being away from home a lot in 2019, meant that I wasn’t around to do as many school workshops as I had done the previous year. An increase in one corner leads, quite naturally, to a descrease in another.

Income by Month:

But what about how my income was distributed across the year? I’ve already talked about how a writer’s income is rarely evenly distributed. As always, this was the case in 2019:

It’s instantly clear that April was a low month – as it was the previous year. In 2018, this was largely because of Easter. In 2019, it was because I spent a chunk of March, and all of April, away in the States, on a research trip (funded by the Arts Council Grant) and on a residency (unpaid). So, while there may not have been any income, there was also basically nothing in the way of outgoings – other than what was already paid for by the grant.

The big spike in June is because of my novel advance. The second-highest point, in January, is because this was when I received the bulk of the Arts Council Grant.

These two anomalies aside, the graph looks more like this:

As you can see, once those anomalies are removed, the first half of the year suddenly starts to look quiet erratic. February and March were pretty good months (thanks largely to a well-paid residency & commission in February, and a good-sized competition win in March), but January & April’s income was non-existent.

But in the second half of the year, after the publication of the novel in June, things settle down a bit. Sure, there’s still a bit of a summer slump, and the standard December dip – but that’s to be expected when you’re working freelance in an industry not directly connected with school holidays or Christmas.

Will things continue in a nicely predictable, secure & even way into 2020? Doubtful. From what I’ve got in the calendar so far, the first half of the year is all over the place – and it’s a bit too far away to make any predictions about the second half just yet. But as long as there’s something coming in (and hopefully a bit of a buffer in the bank account), fingers crossed the electricity will stay on, and there’ll still be food in the fridge.

Ok – so what am I saying with all of this?

I know, I know. This is just a bunch of graphs. Apart from the fact that I quite enjoy making pie charts, what’s the point of all of this?

When I made last year’s graphs, I wanted to point out how unstable a writer’s income can be, and how difficult it is to predict where the bulk of that income is going to come from. This year, my goal is something slightly different.

It can be so easy to assume, once a writer is published, and their book is on the shelves in Waterstones & in your local indie, that they’ve got everything made. A lot of people assume that a cheque comes through every month, with book royalties, and that the writer cashes this in order to cover their bills & food & coffees. I want to show that while, yes, publication has absolutely increased my income, earning a living as a writer still isn’t straightforward. There’s still a need to diversify. There are still months when you can earn almost (if not completely) nothing at all.

Does that sound a bit too doom & gloom? It isn’t meant to. But if you want some consolation, then here it is: sure, making a living as a writer can be difficult, and sure, you can have to turn your hand to lots of different things at once; but the advantage of that variety is that, once something starts to take off, you get to pick and choose, and you get to tailor your work to drop the bits you’re not so keen on, and amplify the bits you love. In other words, you get to create your own ideal job.

*

Read last year’s post:
How To Make a Living as a Writer

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Ever fancied penning your novel in a medieval castle? Or pouring over poems in a cabin in the woods? Working on your script in a little apartment by the sea? Maybe what you’re looking for is a writing residency. But what exactly is a writing residency? And how do they work?

What is a writing residency?

First things first: not all residencies are created equal. Some offer more than others. Some last as much as a year, some only last a week or so. Some offer individual accommodation, some offer shared. Some pay, some don’t. Some even expect the writer to pay to attend, but that’s not the sort of residency I’m going to be focusing on in this post (more on those further down).

So what is a residency? Generally speaking, it’s a combination of accommodation & time to write. You get somewhere to sleep and somewhere to work. Sometimes, you also get meals, and / or a stipend, and / or travel expenses.

Sometimes, the residencies ask you to run a writing workshop, or to give a talk or something, in return. Sometimes you have absolutely no commitments other than working on your own writing.

I went on 3 residencies in 2019, and I’ve got another 4 lined up for this year. Here’s a quick run-down of what they offer(ed):

  • The Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence, Cumbria, England: a month; a private study-bedroom in a shared house opposite Dove Cottage; payment; required to give a reading & run 4 workshops.
  • MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, USA: 3 weeks; private bedroom in a shared house; a separate studio cabin in the woods; meals; travel expenses; no requirements other than writing.
  • Passa Porta, Brussels, Belgium: 4 weeks; private apartment in the centre of the city; travel expenses; stipend; participated in 2 translation workshops & wrote a blog post.
  • Hawthornden Castle, Scotland: 4 weeks; private room in shared medieval castle; meals; no requirements other than writing.
  • KSP Writers’ Centre, Perth, Australia: 3 weeks; private cabin; stipend; required to run a workshop, attend a literary dinner & give a library talk.
  • Gladstone’s Library, Wales: a month; private bedroom in residential library; travel expenses & stipend; meals; required to run a masterclass & give a talk.
  • Heinrich Boell Cottage, Achill Island, Ireland: 2 weeks; private cottage by the sea; no requirements other than own writing.

Residency Round-Up: The Wordsworth Trust

Residency Round-Up: MacDowell Colony

What’s so good about residencies?

Residencies give you time to write, away from the pressures of everyday life. Whenever I’m on a residency, I switch on my Out Of Office, (mostly) prepare and queue up my blog posts ready to go, and ignore my admin. (Ok, I’ll be honest – I do sometimes check my emails, just in case. But I restrict my email-checking to the occasional evening, and even then I only reply to the absolutely urgent ones. At some residencies, such as Hawthornden, there isn’t any wifi anyway.)

It’s amazing how much extra time there is in a day when you don’t have to fill half of it with answering emails and trudging through invoicing & expenses & admin. Particularly if someone else is making all your meals for you, as is the case with some residencies.

My 6 most productive weeks of 2019 were the 3 weeks of my MacDowell residency, and the first 3 weeks of my Passa Porta residency. I wrote way more than I’d normally have written during that time, and when I looked back on what I’d produced afterwards, some of it was quite different to what I think I’d have written at home. For me, these residencies pushed me qualitatively, as well as quantitively.

But residencies can also be time to read, and a chance to experiment with your craft. In contrast to MacDowell & Passa Porta, I wrote comparatively little during my Wordsworth Trust residency (though still probably more than I’d have written during the same period at home). What I did do, though, was oodles & oodles of reading – reading both poems, and books about writing poetry. I spent a lot of time thinking about the craft of poetry, and experimenting with my own style of writing – something which I’m sure contributed to my huge productivity at MacDowell a month later.

This is the sort of craft development that can easily get pushed to the side in everyday life, particularly when you’re having to write for commissions & deadlines etc, and so every poem has to be ‘good’; it can become difficult to make time to explore & experiment. Residencies can provide that time.

They can also be a way of meeting other writers – though this depends on the residency. For those residencies where there are a number of writers all there together (such as Hawthornden), it can be an excellent bonding experience, where everyone is working so intensively on their own manuscripts during the day, then coming together to eat and talk during the evenings.

For those residencies that are multi-disciplinary (such as MacDowell), it can also be a good way of meeting artists working in other forms, and of finding inspiration in conversations with non-writers.

I’ll be honest, a large part of my initial motivation to apply for residencies was the opportunity to travel. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love to travel, and residencies can provide a cheap way of doing that. If you can get a residency that provides travel expenses & accommodation, then you’ve essentially got a free trip to wherever it is that the residency is based.

Of course, residencies aren’t meant for sightseeing; they’re meant for working. But if you’re there for a reasonable length of time, then you’re going to need the odd day off anyway (trust me: residencies can be intense, and it’s good to break the cabin fever once in a while).

Another good way of exploring an area where you’re in residence can be to extend your trip. If your residency pays travel expenses, then there’s no reason you can find your own accommodation for a few days before or after your residency, and stick around to see the sights then.

Of course, beyond the tourism, travel & change of environment can be excellent for the work as well. Stuck on a manuscript, or just getting too easily distracted at home? A change of workspace could be exactly what the doctor ordered. And honestly, it doesn’t even have to be a beautiful cabin in the woods, or a medieval castle. I’ve had some of my most productive poetic breakthroughs in Travelodges.

But let’s look at the financial side of things for a moment, too.

Some residencies pay a stipend – which is sometimes a token amount to help you buy pasta & notebooks, and is sometimes akin to an actual wage. This means that you can actually earn money by staying somewhere gorgeous and working on your manuscript. Depending on what you have in the way of expenses back home, it’s even possible to save some of this stipend money to fund even more writing time back at home. In 2019, residencies formed a not insignificant part of my income.

Even for those residences that don’t pay anything, they can still make financial sense. For example: I live alone, in an old house that’s kind of pricey to heat, which means that my bills can be huge. By planning residencies during the winter, I can go whole months without having to heat my house. I might not be being paid to attend the residency (though fingers crossed I’d eventually get an advance on the manuscript I was working on during it), but I’m also minimising my outgoings enormously.

5 Things About: Writing on the Move

What’s not so good about residencies?

Maybe by now you’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true. Obviously, nothing is perfect. For me, the positives of residencies have always outweighed any negatives. But I like to be honest on this blog, so here are some of the downsides to residencies:

When you’re in a place for a concentrated period of time, there can be a huge pressure to produce work. After all, you have this precious gift of time, and if you don’t use it to create something incredible, then doesn’t that mean that you’ve wasted it?

This negative aspect is largely self-inflicted. After all, it’s extremely rare that a residency will ask you for a quantative breakdown of what you’ve produced during your stay. Which means that the strategy for dealing with this pressure has to come from you as well. After all, you know your ways of working better than anyone. But just remember that you don’t have to write 17 novels and 53 essays during your residency. It’s just as vital to work on your practice in other ways, by thinking, by reading, and by exploring the way that you work.

Although, speaking of productivity, it is also possible for a residency to go the other way: that you’re so overwhelmed by the residency’s other requirements of you (running workshops / giving talks etc) that you end up with very little time or headspace left for actual writing.

This is largely down to the residency, to make sure that they don’t overload you. But you should also make the effort to be aware of what’s required of you before you start, and to raise any concerns you have about workload with the residency coordinator ahead of time. This obviously doesn’t mean you can be a diva about it – the occasional commitment is fine, particularly if the residency is paying you a fee or stipend on top of the accommodation. But if the commitments outweigh the writing time, or if they keep being piled on beyond what you originally agreed to, then maybe it’s time to say something.

The other issue I want to talk about is loneliness.

Writing residencies can be intense, and they can also be lonely. Even when there are multiple writers / artists on the same residency, you can end up spending a lot of time inside your own head. And when it’s just you in an apartment, writing all day and reading every evening, then that loneliness can be hugely amplified.

Think of it like this: you’ve gone to a new town or city, where you don’t know anybody. You’re willingly spending hours (if not days) at a time shut up in your room or house or apartment. You don’t speak to anyone, much, except maybe the person on the checkout in the supermarket. You may not even speak the local language.

Now imagine this for four weeks. It probably isn’t long enough to make solid friends, the way you would if you were moving to a new city for good. But it is a long time to spend away from your normal social groups.

Of course, everyone reacts to isolation differently. There’ll be some people reading this, for whom even the thought of a few days without talking to anyone sounds horrific. There’ll be some of you who think a few weeks’ isolation sounds idyllic. At the end of the day, we all know our own limits – or at least we suspect them.

Take me, for example. I think I’m a fairly independent person. I’m an only child, so we never really had a houseful growing up. I live alone. I also live rurally. I work freelance, so I don’t have colleagues who I interact with on a daily basis. I’m generally faily happy in my own company, and I like knowing that I have my own space if I need to get away from it all.

But, during part of my residency in Brussels last year, I felt very, very lonely.

I was fine for the first two weeks, after negotiating the first couple of days of settling in – difficult whenever you go anywhere new. By week 3, I was starting to miss friends & family, but was still managing to put that aside to focus on work. I’d also starting going for days and afternoons out to explore a bit more, and to force myself out of the apartment. But by week 4, I was honestly a bit of a mess. I missed conversations with people. I missed the sort of interaction that comes from knowing someone really well – or from getting to know someone through shared intense experience.

Don’t get me wrong: the residency was amazing, the staff at Passa Porta were utterly lovely, and Brussels is a stunning city. I just realised that 3 weeks is pretty much my limit for that kind of isolated residency.

Which is fine. I learned something about myself during the course of the residency. I now know that I can discount any residencies longer than 3 weeks, if there aren’t other artists or writers in residence at the same time. I discovered the limits of my loneliness.

How to survive a writing residency:

That all said: what’s my advice for anyone going on a residency?

Do your research before you go. Because residencies can be so varied in terms of what they offer, and who they cater to, it’s worth knowing exactly what you’re getting yourself in for beforehand. This means there shouldn’t be any nasty surprises when you get there, and also that you can prepare for any talks & workshops before you go, so they don’t cut too much into your precious writing time.

Go with a project in mind. Remember that pressure to produce that we were talking about earlier? This can be exacerbated if you’re the sort of writer who works on more than one project at once. If you’ve only got the one residency, what do you start with? Your novel? Your poetry collection? Your short stories? Your epic fantasy saga spanning seven volumes? Do you try to dedicate a little bit of time to each? Knowing what you want to achieve from the outset can help you avoid wasting time on indecisiveness, and allow you to hit the ground running when you arrive at the residency.

Speak to people. A good way to combat the possibility of loneliness is to actually speak to people. This is obviously easier if it’s the kind of residency where there are multiple people there at once. But even if you’re on your own, make an effort to find people to talk to. Fellow writers. That person in the cafe. Even just a brief exchange with the person behind the counter in the shop can help with the feelings of isolation.

Take breaks. Yes, you’re there to work, and it can feel a bit like every day needs to be a 12-hour writing marathon, stopping only for toilet breaks and coffee. But that isn’t a sustainable way of working, and slowly concentration will begin to wane. Take breaks to read a book, to go for a walk, to sit in a cafe and drink coffee you haven’t reheated 3 times in the microwave. It’s a way of rejuvenating your energy – and it’s amazing how many Eureka moments can come when you actually step away from the writing desk.

Get out and about. By which I mean: don’t just take breaks in the immediate vicinity of your residency, but get even further away from the writing desk from time to time. During my MacDowell residency, a group of us took a whole day off to drive to a nearby town and try our hands at an Escape Room. It was completely unrelated to anything any of us were working on, but was also the best thing we could have done, to break that feeling of cabin fever we hadn’t even realised was beginning to set in.

Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not hitting your word counts. Yes, you’ve come with a specific project in mind, and you probably have goals you want to achieve while you’re in residence. But, while I absolutely believe that half the battle is just showing up to write, I also know that it isn’t a certain thing either. Sometimes, however hard you smack your head against your notebook or stare down that blank Word document, the words just won’t come. And that’s fine, too. You can have blank spells during a residency just as much as you can at any other time. The beauty of the residency is that you still have all that free time for creativity – so you can use it to read, or to freewrite, or to go for a walk and just think through your creative project. You can still be working, even when you’re not actually writing out words.

Pack snacks – and maybe a bottle of wine or two. This is a personal one, but I’m a big one for snacking, and I find it really hard to work if I’m hungry. So if I know I’m going somewhere that might not have easy access to a grocery shop, I always find it’s a good idea to stick a bag of biscuits in my bag – just in case. Even if I don’t end up eating them, I just like to know they’re there on the offchance I might need them. Plus, they’re a great way of breaking the ice. And the wine? Again: wine is nearly always a good way of making friends!

What to watch out for:

I said at the start of this post that not all residencies are created equal. The truth is that some offer much, much more than others. It isn’t always the case that the most respected residencies offer the most – but it is often the case that the less respected (and often less conducive to creativity) can actually take the most from the writer. The best way to avoid any upleasant surprises is to always read all the information available before you apply – just so you know what’s what.

A few things I’ve come across, which aren’t always bad, but which need to be noted, are:

Shared accommodation:

It’s quite common for residencies to offer writers a private bedroom / study-bedroom in a communal house, which may have shared bathrooms and communal workspaces – though you’re generally free to work in your room if you prefer privacy.

But I have also seen some residencies that only offer shared bedrooms (shared with another resident / residents, who you won’t meet till you arrive). I’ve even heard report of a residency that expected the writers to share a bed! Personally, I don’t think asking strangers to share a bed is ever appropriate, but I suppose the shared bedrooms thing is a matter of individual preference. If it’s something you’d be fine with, then go for it. Personally, I need my own space to work in.

Application fees:

A number of residencies charge a fee for you to apply. Usually, this is to offset the cost of processing the applications. After all, an individual residency might receive hundreds of applications, and somebody needs to process all of those, to check eligibility and ultimately to make a decision. That person probably needs paying, hence the application fee. Sometimes it can also go towards funding the residencies slightly, in the same way that the prize pot for a writing competition might be funded by the entry fees. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – some highly respected residencies charge a fee to apply. It’s just something to be aware of before you decide whether apply, so that you can budget it into your decision.

Fee-paying residencies:

I mentioned this at the start of the post, and I want to talk about it here, because some residencies not only charge a fee to apply, but also charge a fee to attend. Sometimes this is nominal – just enough to cover a cleaner’s fee, or maybe put something towards electricity bills. But sometimes the cost can be as much as (or even more than) the cost of a hotel.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with paying for a room / apartment / cottage to go and write in, but I would argue that this is something different from a writing residency. I would argue that this is more like a self-guided retreat – like the kind offered by Arvon & by Gladstone’s Library. You pay your money, and in return you get to stay in a peaceful & supportive environment, and work on your manuscript.

But the thing about retreats like these is that they’re not selective. By which I mean: anyone can book and go on one, in the same way that anyone can book a room in a hotel. Again, that’s absolutely fine. There are hundreds of great reasons why these models work, and why you might want to pay to isolate yourself and focus on your manuscript – many of them th same as the ones above in this blog post.

However, if there’s a selective application process involved, and then you have to pay the full cost of the residency in order to attend, then I always wonder: why not just book into a hotel instead? Why bother with the whole hassle of writing & submitting an application, then waiting to see if you’ve been successful, when you can just book a retreat at Arvon or Gladstone’s in minutes – and know what you’re getting as well?

I’ve even seen so-called residencies that charge writers a fee to apply, and then also charge an astronomical amount for the writer to actually attend the residency. That’s like paying £20 to be in with the chance of booking an apartment on Airbnb, then having to wait 6 months to find out if you got it or not. Why would you do that?

Fortunately, there are plenty of residency opportunities that don’t try to make lots of extra money from the writer, and that aren’t commercial retreats masquerading as exclusive residency opportunities. So as long as you do your research, there should always be a residency that will suit the needs of each individual.

Ok, so where can I go?

There are residencies all over the world, and far too many to list here, even if I did know them all. I’ll start with the ones already mentioned in this post:

But of course, there are hundreds of other places to look for residencies. Good places to start your search might be:

  • ResArtis is an online database of residencies. It allows you to search for residencies with current application opportunities, as well as to filter by artform, accommodation type, and geographical location. Be aware that this website also features residencies where the writer has to pay to attend, so be sure to read all the details before you decide whether to apply.
  • Simliar to ResArtis, the other one to check is TransArtists. This online resource also allows filtered searches, and also features fee-paying residencies alongside ones where the writer doesn’t pay.
  • Arts Council England runs two mailing lists: ArtsJobs and ArtsNews. These sometimes advertise residencies, so it’s worth signing up to them. It’s also worth signing up to the relevant equivalent mailing lists if you’re based in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, too.
  • Sign up to the mailing list of your regional writing organisation. For me, this is New Writing North, who are based in Newcastle. They also share residency opportunities, as well as lots of other useful info.
  • If you want to travel, then periodic checks of the opportunities page on the British Council website aren’t a bad idea, either, as sometimes these include residencies & travel opportunities for individual writers.
  • Another option? Sit down one evening with a couple of hours to spare, and a big glass of wine, and google variations on ‘writing residencies’ or ‘writer in residence opportunities’. Keep a list of anything that comes up, whcih you think might interest you.

If you’re applying for a residency, or you’re off to participate in one, then the best of luck! And in the meantime, here’s my favourite list of ‘residencies’ for you, from the New Yorker:

The New Yorker: Little-Known Writing Residencies

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Some years just rattle over from one to the next, with very little sense of change or progression between them. Then again, some years are like fireworks, bursting into a glorious array of sound and light, leaving you dazed and slightly dizzy in their wake. 2019 has been one of those years – summarised as best as I possibly can here, in a mix of words and pictures.

Publications:

Let’s start with the big one, which I’m sure everyone reading this is already well aware of, as I’ve barely shut up about it for the past 12 months: my debut novel, My Name is Monster, which was published by Canongate in June.

From the moment I first saw the proposed cover design for the book, I fell in love with it. Since then, it’s been a rollercoaster of proofreading, launches, and two (yes, two!) dedicated bookshop windows! I did a series of events in some of the amazing bookshops and libraries around Cumbria, and appeared at a bunch of festivals, including Cheltenham, Edinburgh Book Fest, Port Eliot & Borderlines.

Seeing the book in print, and even more seeing it on the shelves in bookshops, has been a phenomenal experience. It still feels strange to know that something that started off as a vague idea somewhere in the recesses of my brain, has been made into an actual physical object, that people can pick up and buy and read and take their own thoughts from. It’s like some strange form of alchemy.

My Name is Monster: available from all good bookshops!

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In the poetry department, 2019 also saw the publication of my second pamphlet, Assembly Instructions.

Assembly Instructions was published in March by Southword, after winning the Munster Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition. And, because Southword are based in Cork, I got to travel to Cork Poetry Festival to launch it, and to read from the book at Cork Library.

Read the opening poem from Assembly Instructions here.

Residencies:

This year, I’ve learned that residencies are like buses. You spend years applying for them, and then suddenly all the successful applications come through at once.

My first residency was for the month of February, with an organisation I know well, having run numerous schools workshops for them over the past 5 or 6 years: The Wordsworth Trust, in Grasmere.

While I did, of course, write poetry during the residency, what proved most valuable was the time to read, and the time to experiment with poetic practice. These are the things that so often get pushed to the side, in favour of admin and deadlines, so it was hugely important to have that time to focus on the poetic craft, without the pressure of having to ‘produce’ something.

Residency Round-Up: The Wordsworth Trust

I’m certain this time was instrumental in setting me up for the amount of work I produced during my second residency of the year: MacDowell.

MacDowell Colony is a multi-disciplinary residency, set across an area of woodland in New Hampshire, USA. Each resident gets their own studio, which takes the form of a little house or cabin in the woods, and gets their lunch delivered to them in a little picnic basket. Breakfast & dinner are communal meals in the big house.

Residency Round-Up: MacDowell Colony

The main thing I noticed at MacDowell was how much time there was in each day. Having someone else cooking my meals for me freed up way more time than I’d anticipated, and I had possibly the most productive 3 weeks I’ve had all year – rivalled only by my first 3 weeks at Passa Porta.

Passa Porta was my third residency of the year, in Brussels. It was a month-long stay in an apartment in the centre of Brussels, through a partnership between Passa Porta, the National Centre for Writing and the Flemish Literature Fund. It gave me the chance to finish a first (very rough) draft of my poetry collection – and, of course, to eat a lot of waffles!

Each of these 3 residencies had a very different feel, and I learned a lot about myself and about my ways of working by doing them. (I think I may write a blog post about it sometime in the new year. Watch this space!) But in the meantime, I’m just celebrating the opportunity to live and work in such beautiful places, and to meet so many interesting people.

And speaking of beautiful places…

Arts Council Funding:

At the end of 2018, I was lucky enough to be awarded a DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) Grant from Arts Council England.

As well as buying me time to write this year, the grant also paid for me to go to the US to research my collection. This was split between 10 days in New York, using the collections at New York Public Library, and around 10 days driving between Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky, following the historic route that my ancestors took towards Missouri, and eventually to Kansas.

The opportunity to research the collection in the actual places where so many of the poems are set was incredible. I met some hugely interesting people along the way (and had some conversations that still leave me reeling – some of which have made it into poems), and got to drive through some utterly stunning landscapes. Honestly, I think I’m still processing the trip, and working bits of it into the poems. I’ll probably still be processing it long after the collection is finished.

(Side note: if you’re considering applying for a DYCP grant, go for it! it’s a [relatively] straightforward application, and it’s proved to be invaluable for me.)

Radio:

This year, I’ve also slipped, almost accidentally, into the world of national radio. Specifically: Radio 4.

This started at the end of last year, when I was asked to write & present the Cumbria episode of Tongue & Talk: The Dialect Poets, for independent production company Made in Manchester. The programme was one in a series, exploring dialect poetry in regions across the country, and its continuing impact today. I was given the Cumbria episode, which I used to explore the intersection between dialect poetry, place and identity – particularly looking at what it means to be an ‘offcomer’ in Cumbria. The programme aired at the start of June, just before My Name is Monster was published.

Then, since My Name is Monster came out, I’ve also been on Radio 4 a couple of times to talk about that. The first was on Open Book, from the Edinburgh Book Festival in August, talking about the book in the context of millennial writers / readers. The second was just a couple of weeks ago, on Front Row, which was based around the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe, and why we’re still drawn to survival stories. An interesting one to talk about the day after the general election…

And the rest:

2019 has also been not a bad year for prizes – though mostly in the ‘almost, but not quite’ category. Still, given the calibre of some of the competitions, and the high quality & quantity of entries, I’m over the moon to be shortlisted, or even longlisted! This is something I’m a firm believer in: there’s so much poetry & fiction out there, that any positive recognition of a piece of work is something to be hugely proud of, whether it wins the big first prize or not.

This year, those successes have included: being shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Mslexia Poetry Prize, and the Bridport Poetry Prize; coming 3rd in both the Magma Editors’ Prize and the Plough Short Poem Prize; and being longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Competition. I’ve also had individual poems published in Magma magazine, Under the Radar, and in Mslexia – which I’ve been tryingt to get a poem into for the past decade!

To add to the other poetry, this year I was commissioned by Théâtre Volière to write a series of poems exploring the history of women in and around Gretna. The poems ranged from the more well-known stories of elopements, to the women who worked at the nearby ‘Devil’s Porridge’ munitions factory during the First World War, to those who worked the land and fished in the Solway. The poems were performed at Ye Olde Mitre pub in London in March, along with music from Scottish fiddle-player Lori Watson. They were then performed again in October, at the RADA studio in London, as part of an event launching the anthology of commissioned work.

I also wrote a couple more commissioned poems for the National Trust this year, as part of their Tables Turned project: a three year participation project, which is all about bringing together community groups, young people, historians, curators and artists in projects that deepen understanding, build new partnerships and inspire creativity.

Having written a poem in response to meeting the miners and listening to them recount their experiences of working in the mines on Cumbria’s West Coast, I was then commissioned to write two more poems, inspired by the work the National Trust had done with other groups: pupils from Keswick School, and members of Glenmore art group and Glenmore creative writing group. These poems were a mix of original work, and words collaged from the work and conversation of participants. The result? Three poems, each then filmed by John Hamlett, which were played as part of the Under Northern Skies exhibition alongside artwork from the groups, at Carlisle Old Fire Station.

So what next?

2020 is already shaping up to be as busy as 2019.

I’ve already got 4 residencies lined up for next year, to continue working on my poetry collection, and to (hopefully) make a start on drafting my second novel: a month at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland; 3 weeks at the Kathrine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Perth, Australia; another month at Gladstone’s Library just over the border into Wales; and 2 weeks at Heinrich Boell Cottage, on Achill Island in Ireland.

To tie in with the Australia residency, I’m also planning an epic trip in the first part of next year (think multiple countries & continents!), during which I’ll turn 30! It doesn’t seem like 5 minutes ago since I was making my ’32 things before 30′ list, so it’ll be good to look back and see which ones I’ve managed to achieve.

And when I get back? There’s always Kendal Poetry Festival to look forward to (I’ll be orchestrating a guerrilla poetry project for that again in 2020), and a bunch of workshops that are already booked into my diary.

Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough – next year will not only see the release of the paperback of My Name is Monster (with a new & equally beautiful cover that I can’t wait to share!), but will also see the book published in German, as Mein Name ist Monster! World domination here we come…

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just continue working on my poetry and my fiction, and sharing the occasional blog post.

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Hope you’ve had a wonderful 2019 – and all the best for the new year. Happy writing!

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One of my big poetry achievements this year has been to finally have a poem published in Mslexia – something I’ve been trying to do for around a decade. And, as it happened, I ended up with poems in two consecutive isues! Funny how these things work out.

Here’s my poem, ‘Feathers’, which was submitted for the open callout on the theme of ‘journeys’.

Feathers

I don’t know what I’m trying to say
exactly – only that today, commuting the hangdog
length of the river path, I spied
for the first time this season

a flight of silver breaking from the broad
shoulders of the water:

the metal undercarriage
of an office chair, unheeding
of predators, basking in the knowledge of itself,
its wheels uplifted to the weak sun,
a cursive uncurling towards the sky.

I swear I heard it calling reassurance to its young
on the brambled bank, a sudden circular song.
I swear I heard their ruffled hope reply.

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‘Feathers’ was first published in Mslexia, Issue 83: Sept/Oct/Nov 2019

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If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to write. Obvious, right? Right. I mean, if you wanted to be a concert pianist you’d expect to have to learn to play the piano first.

But there’s this weird thing that happens with writing, where some people think that, because they can write words down (a shopping list? An email? A letter to a friend?) they can write a story or a poem or a play, or whatever it may be. After all, they use words every day – surely it’s just a matter of choosing the right ones?

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably already well aware that it doesn’t work like this. You have to understand the craft of your writing – to learn about narrative arc, voice, dialogue, sentence structure, point of view, figurative language, rhythm and meter, pacing, imagery…

Sure, you can write without understanding any of this, and if you’re writing solely for the pleasure of it and it isn’t about writing well, then fine. Just because we enjoy something doesn’t mean we have to monetise it – whatever capitalism has to say about it. After all, I’m a far cry from selling out a solo gig at the Royal Albert Hall, but I take huge enjoyment from singing in the shower now and again.

But if you want your writing to be good, as judged by industry expectations, then you’re going to have to learn it, just like any other craft.

So how do you learn to write?

Books at Allan Bank, Grasmere (National Trust)
Allan Bank, Grasmere (National Trust)

Read.

Before you even pick up a pen, you need to read as widely and as deeply as you can. You don’t have to be a particularly fast reader, but you have to read well. By that, I mean you have to read with a critical eye. You’re not just reading for the story any more, to find out what happens. Instead, approach each book as a training exercise.

  • How is this author creating suspense?
  • How do they make you like their protagonist?
  • If the book feels a bit slow or you lose interest at some point, why is that?
  • How could you avoid making the same mistakes?

If you don’t like to read (and, believe it or not, I have actually met people who write, who say that they hate books), then you need to question whether you really do want to be a writer. If it’s just because you like the sound of your own voice, then record yourself reading the phone book or something instead. Writers need to read, the same way that painters need to look at other paintings.

I’ve also met people who say they don’t read because it’ll influence what they write.

Good.

Let yourself be influenced by others. That doesn’t mean you have to copy their ideas or steal their characters (in fact, there are laws against that sort of thing). But if a writer has a particularly engaging way of writing dialogue, so that you can actually hear the characters coming off the page, then absolutely study their technique and let it influence yours. If you’re an aviation engineer, you need to study the concept of how an aeroplane wing works or the plane will fall out of the sky. If you’re a writer, you need to study how to string a sentence together, or construct a plot, or develop a character, or your book will never get off the ground.

writing prompt - Katie Hale

Read widely.

Reading in your own genre is great. If you write crime fiction then sure, read crime fiction. Figure out what other crime writers are doing, what they have done in the past. Where do you fit within the genre? How can you do something different?

But read other stuff as well. Let yourself be influenced by writers of all kinds. Read thrillers and romance. Read literary fiction. Read poetry and play scripts. Read classics. Read YA. Read non-fiction. Heck, read a picture book. As long as you read critically, you’re growing your craft. And the variety of your influences may just give you your distinctive voice.

As well as reading other types of fiction, and poetry, and scripts, and creative non-fiction, try reading books about writing. Study what other writers do, and study what other writers are telling you to do.

There are literally hundreds of ‘how to’ books out there. (Ok, probably there are thousands, but obviously I haven’t counted. I’m too busy reading and writing.) So how do you choose which ones are worth your time?

Honestly, it’s probably going to be trial and error. Recommendations are great, but what works for your friend might leave you high and dry, whereas something another writer has found completely useless might be like gold dust for you. We’re all different writers and, crucially, we’re all at different stages of development in our writing. So we’re all going to be looking for something different. If you want to try a few without a big price tag, see what you can get from your local library. You can then dip into a number of options, and if you find one you like, potentially buy a copy afterwards.

In the meantime, here are a few books on writing that I would recommend:

  • Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way
  • Louise Doughty’s A Novel in a Year
  • Renni Browne & Dave King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
  • Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling
  • Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems
  • Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry

new year writing resolutions: Katie Hale

Write.

Reading is all very well, but of course you also need to write. Just as a concert pianist learns to play sonatas by practising scales, so you can learn to write by writing. You can write exercises, or you can write that epic novel that you’ve had in the back of your brain for ages. It doesn’t really matter, so long as you’re writing, and you’re working out at all times how you can improve.

Try different voices. Try different forms. Try using techniques you’ve observed in your reading – how do they work for you?

Practice makes perfect – and although I’m not entirely sure I believe in ‘the perfect novel’, at least practising can help to get you closer.

Social media addiction - Katie Hale, Cumbrian poet, writer and artist

Join a writing group.

Once you’re on the way with your writing, you’re going to realise what a solitary process it can be, if you haven’t already. I guess it’s a bit like parenting – sometimes you just need to talk to other people who are going through the same thing.

Writing groups can take any form. They can be workshopping groups, where you get together to comment on each others’ works in progress. They can be support groups, where you share opportunities and talk about the problems you may be facing. They can be physical groups (at someone’s house, in the pub, in a specially booked room somewhere), or they can be online groups. They can be mixed ability, or grouped so that everyone has similar levels of experience.

I’m in a number of writing groups, each with its own focus:

  • A poetry group that meets once a month, where we each bring in a poem to workshop as a group.
  • A group that focuses more on fiction (and scripts), which also meets once a month, and for a full day. In the mornings, we do a number of writing exercises, usually with a specific theme or focus, and in the afternoons we workshop bits of our works in progress, which we circulate about a month in advance.
  • A WhatsApp group of other debut writers, which we use as a support group for sharing experiences / successes / difficulties etc, rather than for sharing actual work.
  • I also have a number of friends who are writers, who I often share things with individually.

I’ve also been in a number of other groups over the years, as I’ve moved around geographically, and as my focuses have changed. For me, the groups that seem to work best are the ones where everyone is at a similar level – if not of experience or knowledge, then at least of commitment. As with many things, it helps if everyone is coming from a place of similar understanding.

If you’re looking for a writing group in your local area, and you’re not sure where to start, try by googling, or by asking at your local library, arts organisation or community centre. Talk to other writers in your area – particularly ones who write something similar to what you write. If you’re not sure who these might be, try asking at any local bookshops.

Still can’t find anything? Start one yourself!

script writing for theatre - Katie Hale

Look at writing courses.

This one isn’t essential. You can absolutely become a good writer without ever going on a writing course. After all, most of the hard work is done between you and the notebook, and it takes time. It isn’t something someone can teach you in a week, a month, or even a year.

That isn’t to say that writing can’t be taught. Writing is a craft, and any craft is teachable, as long as the student has the willingness, passion and skill to learn. But it takes time. You might learn to play the odd tune on the piano in a year, but you won’t yet be a concert pianist.

But, with that caveat made, there are still a number of really good reasons to explore courses as a means of improving your writing.

  • You can learn from experienced tutors.
  • They’re often a good way of meeting other writers, who’ll have similar writing interests to yourself – and whom you may also be able to learn from.
  • If you’re stuck in a rut with your writing, a course can help you to see things from a new perspective.
  • A course can give you confidence as a writer, and goodness knows we all need that from time to time.
  • Particularly with residential courses, or longer courses such as an MA, they can be a good way of forcing yourself to carve out writing time from your daily life.
  • They’re also incredibly fun!

As with writing groups, there are all kinds of different courses available, depending on the needs, experience level and budget of the writer.

  • Arvon and Ty Newydd are well-known as centres for tutored residential courses, usually over a weekend or a week.
  • Online courses such as the Poetry School.
  • One-day workshops, as well as longer evening / afternoon courses run by adult education providers.
  • One-off workshops through libraries, arts organisations, bookshops and book festivals.
  • I’ve also heard great things about Sophie Hannah’s Dream Author coaching programme for writers.

If you want to go down the university route, there are undergraduate courses (usually 3 years full-time or 6 years part-time), or Masters level courses (1-2 years full-time and 2-3 years part-time). Beyond that there are PhDs, if you’re more advanced.

These courses vary hugely in terms of cost, and of course we know that even well-established writers are rarely rolling in it, let alone writers who are just starting out. But many of them will offer bursary schemes for writers on low incomes, so they’re still worth exploring, even if your budget isn’t huge.

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And there are my thoughts on learning to write!

Next week: The Writer’s Apprenticeship 2: Learning the Ropes of the Industry

 

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There are a number of questions I get asked about being a writer. Inevitably, these include: Have you written anything I’ve heard of? Are you going to be the next J.K.Rowling?

And, sometimes, What do you do all day?

I can’t really answer the first two questions, but I can definitely have a crack at the last one. This question usually comes from people of a generation where working from home is still a largely recent possibility (though not always), and is often asked with a look of concern that I don’t have a ‘proper job’. It’s also quite frequently followed by: But how do you earn a living?

The other way I get asked about my daily routine is more along the lines of, How do you stay motivated? If you don’t have a boss telling you to be at your work station at a certain time, then how do you make yourself get out of bed and do the work?

These are both huge topics in their own right: what constitues the job of being a writer, and how writers can earn a living. I can’t tackle the here; they both deserve their own blog posts.

(I’ve talked a bit about motivation & celebrating success as a writer here, and about a writers’ income here.)

But for now, let’s focus on our initial question: what on earth do I do all day?

the writing desk

Morning:

I like to start the day with the most important bits of being a writer: the writing. (Actually, I like to start the day with coffee, but maybe that is the most important bit of being a writer? Then once the coffee’s made and is slowly waking up my brain, I can move onto the actual writerly bits.)

I’m sure many of us have seen that inspirational message that does the rounds on social media from time to time, about how we should fill our time with the important things first and foremost, rather than cluttering it up with the little things that don’t matter. Just in case you haven’t, I’ll paraphrase:

If you take a glass jar and fill it with ping pong balls, the jar will appear full. But then if you take a handful of beads you’ll find that you can still fit them in the jar, because they’ll filter down the gaps. Once the beads are added, the jar will appear full again. But you can still add sand to the jar, as this will trickle between the beads and fill up all the really tiny gaps. But if you’d started with the sand, and then added the beads, you’d find that you wouldn’t have enough room for all the ping pong balls. The message is this: that we should make room for the big things first – in life as well as in jars.

Ok, so I admit it’s fairly corny, but it’s also true. Make room for the important things, and all the little bits and bobs will fill up around them. But if you fill up your time with all the little things, you’ll soon find you run out of time for the important stuff.

Which is why I reserve the mornings for reading, writing and editing. Sometimes I’ll do some of each ot these in a morning, and sometimes I’ll stick to just one. It depends where I am in a project.

What’s really important is that I leave all the admin bits to the…

Afternoon:

The afternoon is sort of a free-for-all. Sometimes I’ll carry on with whatever I’ve been doing in the morning. Sometimes I’ll switch to all the other stuff that makes the one-woman writing business tick (and if you’re doing it professionally, then it is a business).

What does this include? Everything from emails (don’t we all have to do these?) to submissions to competitions and magazines, to residency or funding applications. Sometimes, I try to get outside to go for a walk or something during the afternoons, to get some fresh air and get my sedentary self moving – but I’ll be honest, this happens far less than I’d like it to.

(Residencies are another matter – when I’m lucky enough to be on a residency, I can step away from all the admin bits, which means the freedom to spend some time thinking / walking / exploring my new surroundings.)

And in the evenings?

My evenings are technically non-work time, where I can read or watch Netflix or whatever, but this rarely actually happens. Often the emails and/or the admin bits drag over, and I find myself switching off my laptop much later than I’d like. This is less than ideal for a number of reasons, but especially because it means that, when I go to bed, my brain is still whirring with everything on my to-do list, and so I don’t sleep as well. So, when I have to get up and write the next day, it isn’t from quite as good a place as I would necessarily like it to be.

One of my new year’s resolutions for 2019 was to keep my evenings work-free. Like most resolutions, I did pretty well in January. But of course, it started to slip. I guess it’s one I need to reinstate.

Caveat: like most day-in-the-life pieces, this is an idealised version of my writing day, and is often discarded in favour of an all-day workshop and / or a frantic rush to meet deadlines. But this is the template I try to fit my other days around, and sometimes – just sometimes – I manage to make it happen.

 

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Eleven years since I left school, and September still feels like back-to-school month. I feel as though I should be out buying new pens and novelty rubbers and things. I guess I did start a new notebook this month, so maybe that counts?

After festival-season in August, September has been a month of quiet work. I quite like months like this from time to time: a chance to get back on top of the admin, and quietly work away at the writing. Not too many events. The odd workshop. A chance to think.

That said, this month hasn’t been entirely without festivals. Last week I went to the Bronte Festival of Women’s Writing in Haworth, with three other Cumbrian writers. It was a lovely festival: big enough that there was a really interesting range of speakers, but small enough that it was possible to go to everything. It also felt incredibly honest, with writers, editors, agents and booksellers sharing their experiences in a way that felt generous and encouraging.

One thing I took away from the weekend (other than a horrid cold – I guess that’s what happens when you visit the 19th century?) was to remember all the things I used to know. When you’re starting out as a writer, people will often tell you that you need to practise self-care, that you need to spend time focusing on craft and not to rush, that you need to celebrate smaller milestones along the way. But I’d forgotten a lot of that. My next milestone was ‘finish writing the second novel’. (Side-note: I haven’t even started writing the second novel yet.) That’s too much. A novel’s big; if I don’t get to celebrate success until I’ve finished the thing, then that’s a long time to wait. A person can get pretty down in that time. My decision? To set myself some markers in the interim. When I get to 10k words, for example, I’ll take a moment to be proud of that achievement. It’s about motivation. I may write a blog post about this in the future.

And speaking of successes, I haven’t been taking enough time to celebrate them lately, so here are a few that have happened over the past couple of months:

KSP residency: The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre is in Perth. Perth Australia, that is. And I’ve been invited to be their Emerging Writer in Residency in April 2020. Going to pack my strappy tops and flip flops! (Sorry, singlets & thongs.)

Gladstone’s Library Writer in Residence: Next May, I’m heading over the border into Wales, to spend a month writing at Gladstone’s Library. This is something I’m particularly excited about – partly because I’ve looked at pictures of the library, and it looks like the dream place to sit and draft a novel. But also because I’ve heard glowing recommendations, both for the library itself, and for their scones! Expect me to be significantly larger by next summer…

University of Canberra Poetry Prize longlisting: Another one with an Australian theme – I recently learned that I’ve been longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize, which is announced at the end of October. Last year I managed to make the shortlist, so keeping my fingers crossed for this year. Either way, though, it’s a huge prize, so just to make the longlist is a fantastic affirmation.

Mslexia: And finally, this month I achieved a decade-long ambition, and got a poem into the most recent issue of Mslexia. It’s always lovely when a publication likes your work enough to print it, but there’s something particularly special about it when it’s a publication you’ve been aiming towards ever since you start to write poetry.

In the interest of balance, I should also say that I’ve received 17 rejections so far this year, out of 22 things I’ve heard back from. It isn’t all cause for celebration – which of course makes it doubly important to celebrate the good news when it does come along.

And, last but not least, the next couple of weeks are your last chance to vote for My Name is Monster in the Edinburgh First Book Award. It’s run on public vote, and voting only takes a moment, so please do click through and support!

The Month in Books:

It’s been a slightly slower reading month than last month. I sometimes find it works like that, at least for me: that reading, like writing, comes in waves. Perhaps that means that next month I’ll read absolutely loads? Still, if you’re only going to read four books in a month, these are a pretty good four to choose:

  • Walt Whitman Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets)
  • The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
  • The Island Child, by Molly Aitken
  • Black Car Burning, by Helen Mort

The Month in Pictures:

 

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I’m sitting in the back corner of Brew Brothers café in Kendal. It’s just after 5pm on a Friday night. Outside, the street is full of people gearing up for a big night out, or trudging home after a difficult week at work – but in here, it’s warm and bright. There’s a mellow buzz of conversation against the backdrop of music: a mix of people meeting up for post-work coffees, or a pre-dinner glass of wine. One or two other people also have laptops. For me, at this moment in time, there’s just the right level of background stimulus to provide a productive atmosphere.

Writing poetry in a cafe in Grasmere

I haven’t always written in cafes. When I was a student, I found it next to impossible – too easy to be distracted by what was going on around me. But since then, I’ve started to lean towards it more and more. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe something to do with how our brains change as we get older, or the fact I have exponentially more admin than I did as a student, trying to distract me from the creative stuff. I still do the bulk of my writing sitting at my kitchen table – but when your writing space is the same as your living space, sometimes it can be good to take a break.

The seat I’ve chosen in this cafe is significant. It’s in the corner, with a view of the rest of the café. Separate from everyone else, not overlooked, and yet with a view. The other people with laptops have taken up similar seats.

There’s an evolutionary theory that most humans would plump for these sorts of positions, away from the door but with a view of the rest of the room. Prehistorically, it means we were far enough into the cave to be safe and warm, yet able to see the entrance in case a predator should approach. Calm, yet alert.

Like a lot of evolutionary theory, this is probably largely guesswork, but it imitates the state I tend to occupy when I write, halfway between relaxed and on edge. Or, as X-Men: First Class would have it, ‘somewhere between anger and serenity’.

There’s something about being in a café that provides this carefully balanced feeling. But, as with all balances, it can quickly tip one way or the other. I have to be picky not only with the seat I select, but with the café that it’s in. Somewhere with ambient noise, but not too much of it. Somewhere bustling, but not too full. And above all, somewhere with good coffee and cake.

MY TOP 5 CUMBRIAN CAFES FOR WRITING IN

Of course, there are downsides to writing in cafes as well. One is that you’re always dependent on it not getting too busy. Another is that, really, there’s only so much time you can spend in a café, unless you want to spend your money on buying your lunch and a lot of coffees there. (I mean, it’s probably still cheaper than renting an office space if you’re someone who can’t write at home.)

And for some people, any noise while writing is something of an abhorrence. We all have our different practices. The important thing is finding what works for you, or for this particular project, or even for this particular scene or poem or whatever.

Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.

This is one of a number of pieces of advice that I sometimes hand out in creative writing workshops. It comes from the Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules, written by Sister Corita Kent (though often incorrectly attributed to John Cage). It’s a list of ten ‘rules’, which urge the writer/artist to develop a work ethic, and to engage with the world around them.

Finding a place you trust is rule number one.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a café, a pub, your attic, or a park bench. I think the important thing, for me, is that it’s a place that allows for that feeling of intense focus that comes from being both calm and alert simultaneously. And then, once you’ve found it, you have to trust it.

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A couple of years ago, I listened to Liz Lochhead being interviewed on Desert Island Discs. One of the songs she selected was Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Some Days There Just Ain’t No Fish’ – a 1947 song written by Bob Russell & Carl Sigman.

I’ve used a fishing metaphor on this blog before, when talking about submitting work to magazines & competitions, but it applies equally well to the actual creative process, too. The more often you sit down and try to write – the more often you cast your line – the more likely it is that inspiration will catch.

‘Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.’ – Picasso

Which is all very well and good, and a useful maxim for forcing yourself to write when you think you’re too tired / hungover / busy / distracted etc etc. But what about when there’s something deeper going on, that’s in some way blocking your creativity?

I’ve talked a little bit before about what I think are the different types of writers’ block: the ‘I don’t really fancy writing at the moment’ type, and the ‘there’s actually something major that I need to deal with in my mental health that is completely prohibiting me from writing’. (Clue: the first one is much easier to solve, and basically just requires discipline; the second one is much more tricky.)

So what do you do if you’re experiencing that second type of creative block? If you’re turning up to the writing desk / kitchen table / cafe / train commute every day with your notebook and pen, and it doesn’t help? If you’ve found a stack of writing exercises to work your way through, but nothing comes out right? If you’ve been keeping a writing routine for weeks, waiting for that inspiration to come and find you working, and yet you still feel blocked?

This is the sort of thing some writers have nightmares about. When I was younger, I used to be one of them – I saw writers’ block as some mythical disease, like a witch’s curse that could descend on me at any time and leave me unable to string a sentence together. But the truth is, as I’ve got older, I’ve learned a bit more about my own brain, and about how my mind works. And I’ve learned that writers’ block isn’t so much a disease as a symptom of something else.

About three years ago, I started to experience some pretty hefty anxiety. I say ‘started to’, but it had sort of been there all along. I just hadn’t been able to recognise it for what it was – partly because I just didn’t know enough about anxiety, or about my own brain, but also because up until then it had always been a kind of low level burn, like the sound of a waterfall, always there in the background and sometimes louder than others, but never enough to make me stop and pay attention for very long. Then, at the start of 2016, there came a flood, and suddenly I was drowning in it.

For six months, I barely wrote anything. I tried. I really, really tried. I’d just left one of my two part-time jobs to give myself more time for writing, but whenever I sat down and tried to write something, it felt like someone had put a cement mixer in my brain.

Eventually, I went to the doctors, and refused the offer of pills (I knew that wasn’t what I wanted, and while they are absolutely the right course for some people, I knew that I wanted talking therapy instead). I was referred for therapy – or rather, I was given a piece of paper with a phone number on it and told to refer myself. I never rang the number.

(This isn’t a blog post about how the NHS, for all its strengths and qualities, is hugely lacking when it comes to supporting mental health – though if it were, I might point out how I told the GP that the very reason it had taken me several months even to go to him was because my anxiety kept preventing me, and so this tactic of asking me to jump through that appointment-making help-seeking hoop again was highly flawed. But that’s another argument.)

After 7-and-a-bit months, I got over my period of anxiety. No, that’s a lie. I didn’t ‘get over it’ (hateful phrase) – but the flood-rush subsided and the waterfall went back to its normal level, and the words began to return. A number of things helped me with this, particularly friends and books. I read an awful lot during that time, and although I didn’t realise it then, this reading was feeding my creativity. I might not have been producing anything, but the creative process was still going on, under the surface, building my understanding of story, of language, of creative thought.

But the real turning point came that summer, when I travelled to America to do an enormous road trip up the west coast with two friends. We spent three weeks on the road (as well as a week or so either side and my friend’s house in Oregon), and it threw me out of myself in exactly the way that my brain needed at the time.

In his book, The Idle Traveller, Dan Kieran talks about travel as the process of forcing your brain to pay attention. When we’re surrounded by the unfamiliar, our survival mode kicks in, and we’re forced to notice everything around us. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is about assessing the new environment for potential dangers, but it also serves the mind creatively. We have to be switched on. We have to exist in the moment, and to really pay attention to what’s around us. In other words, we have to be mindful.

While travelling up the west coast of America, we stopped in San Francisco. Sitting on a bench on Pier 39, sharing fish & chips with the two wonderful friends on either side of me, listening to the buzz of people and seagulls and the distant slap of water against the docks, I burst into tears. They were happy tears. For the first time in over half a year, I felt happy. Completely and utterly happy. I was able to be absolutely 100% in the moment: that almost meditative state that’s so important for mental health and for the creative process.

That evening in our AirBnB, I jotted down a couple of lines for a poem. Back at home a few weeks later, I started writing the poems that will hopefully form my first full-length poetry collection. A couple of months after that, I wrote the first scene of my novel.

So what’s the lesson here? I’m not trying to tell you how to cope with anxiety or any kind of mental ill-health, because all our minds work in different ways, so that’s going to be different for everybody. But what it taught me is that, whenever I feel blocked in my writing (as in, really truly blocked, not just procrastinating because checking twitter is easier), there are things I can do. I can read. I can go for a walk. I can travel. Not necessarily a long way – even a day trip somewhere local will do, as long as it’s somewhere I don’t know well, somewhere that I have to be fully present in.

So I guess the lesson, if there has to be a lesson, is that it’s ok not to be writing all the time. There are so many other things we can do to feed our creativity. Whether we’re writing a poem every day or just giving our minds a fallow period – as long as we’re stimulating our minds, that creative process never really stops.

And although at times you get a messful
Other days are less successful
Some days there just ain’t no fish

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Recently, I wrote a blog post sharing five fiction prompts, to help you get to know your character. In the interests of balance, I thought I would write a post with some poetry prompts as well.

None of these prompts suggests a subject for a poem, or tells you what to write about. (I may do this kind of prompt post in the future, but I’ll see how it goes.) Instead, each of these prompts is a way of generating material using the language itself.

Language makes up the bricks and mortar of our work. It’s what allows us to build. So, to continue this possibly-a-bit-overplayed analogy: these prompts won’t tell you what kind of house to build, but they will help you create more (and hopefully better) bricks.

Ready? Got your notebook handy?

Then I’ll begin.

Poetry Cairn, Lakes Alive Festival

1 – Freewrite

Different writers use freewriting in different ways, but for me it’s a bit like practising scales on an instrument, or like doing stretches before a race. I tend to freewrite for 5-10 minutes at the start of a writing morning / writing day, just to clear away the cobwebs and warm up the writing muscles. Sometimes, the thing I write becomes the basis for a poem, and sometimes not. I doesn’t really matter either way; the point is the writing of it.

So what is freewriting?

The idea is that you write without thinking too hard about it. You set yourself a timer (3-5 is probably a good amount, particularly if you’re new to freewriting), and you start writing. You don’t stop writing until the timer goes.

It doesn’t really matter what you write, and it certainly isn’t supposed to be a poem, or anything ‘poem shaped’. The aim is to just get words down on the page without worrying whether they’re any good or not. You can’t stop to censor yourself, so you just keep going. If you get stuck, write the first thing that comes into your head – even if that’s ‘I don’t know what to write about’.

The hardest bit about freewriting is working out how to start, so it can be useful to have a stock list of phrases or first lines as a jumping off point. Some of mine are:

  • I want to give you…
  • There was something about…
  • Do you remember…
  • What happened was…
  • That was the day…
  • It tasted of…
  • My body is…

Or another good exercise, when you’re feeling particularly creative, is to come up with a list of 5-10 first lines you could use for poems that you haven’t written yet, and then use them as the starting points for freewrites – one a day until you run out of first lines, and have to come up with another list.

You can use a line from someone else’s poem as a prompt, but of course if the freewrite does turn into a poem in its own right, make sure you change your first line, or credit the original writer.

Freewriting can be useful in two ways: one is to reach past all the day-to-day fluff that clutters our brains so much of the time, and allow you to access the edge of the dream state that exists just below the conscious mind; and the other is that you actually end up writing down all of that day-to-day fluff and clutter, but at least that clears it out of the way ready for you to move onto some other writing afterwards. Either way, you’ll probably come out with some words / phrases / ideas that you weren’t expecting.

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I bought some fancy coloured gel pens for editing

2 – Phrases Breed Phrases

Sometimes, you write a phrase that won’t let you rest until you’ve written another phrase. I don’t mean those instances where you get so caught on the excitement and inspiration of writing that you can’t bear to put your pen down even though you’re desperate for the loo – though those moments can be very useful as well. Instead, I’m talking about the phrases that demand a certain syntax, which in itself demands that you write more in order for the sentence to work as a grammatically correct sentence.

For example:

Even though the dark was coming in.

is not a complete sentence in its own right. It’s only half of a thought, and as such it leads us asking questions, wanting to know more. It’s an idea that demands to be completed: Even though the dark was coming in… what?

Even though the dark was coming in, I couldn’t leave the silence of the lake.

Now I’m not saying that’s a great line, but it’s certainly fuller than it was a paragraph ago. The syntax of ‘even though’ has forced me to add a second part to the sentence, which suddenly doesn’t just contain the images of darkness and of a drawing nearer, but also contains a lake, a silence, and me as the speaker of the poem. The picture is starting to build.

Good beginnings for this kind of enforced building up of a sentence are:

  • Even though…
  • And if…
  • Because…
  • Before…
  • After…
  • Once…
  • Under…
  • Despite…

Each of these are words you can use to begin a sentence, that force you to take the sentence somewhere new part way along. And if you want to get even more mileage out of your words? Then you can repeat your start words to build up a bigger picture. E.g.

Even though the dark was coming in, I couldn’t leave the silence of the lake.
And even though the air was full of midges, I sat without twitching.
And even though someone was calling me, far away, from across the fields, I pretended not to hear.

These might not all make it into a final poem, but it’s a way of getting words and thoughts on the page.

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writing prompt - Katie Hale

3 – Repeat Yourself. Repeat Yourself.

Repeating yourself might sound like a cheat’s way of generating material for a poem, but it can actually be incredibly useful in providing a structure and a music to a poem. This can be repeating an entire line, as a kind of chorus returning us to the same idea, or it can be a word or words, woven through the poem like a tapestry.

  • Repeat the start of the sentence (anaphora): e.g. I went down the stairs. I went alone. I went because I wasn’t afraid of the dark.
  • Repeat the end of the sentence (epistrophe): e.g. The room was old. Everything about it felt old. Even the darkness felt old.
  • Repeat the end of one sentence at the start of the next (anadiplosis): e.g. I went down the stairs. The stairs creaked in the dark and the dark swallowed the torch beam.
  • Repeat a single word or its derivatives (polyptoton): e.g. The room was old and dark. In the darkness, I felt my fears darken.
  • Repeat the sentence structure (isocolon): e.g. The room was old and dark. My torch was weak and flickering.

This is a great exercise to use for generating material. Do it with your writing hat on, and leave your editing hat well and truly to the side. Don’t worry about whether you’re repeating things too much – just write and use it as a way to discover thoughts and images you didn’t know were hiding in your brain.

Afterwards (and only afterwards), you can put your editing / shaping hat on, and heed this word of caution: repeating anything has to be handled with great care, particularly in poems, which tend to be short enough that repeating any word anywhere is noticeable and so has to be deliberate. Make sure you’re repeating something for a reason, not just because it’s an easier way of making the page look fuller. Is the repetition adding something to your poem? Meaning? Rhythm? Music? Connection between apparently disparate ideas? You don’t necessarily need to be able to specify exactly what each repetition is adding, but you have to be able to feel it.

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writing prompt - Katie Hale

4 – A Brave New Word

Words have a wonderful way of suggesting other words – a bit like with the freewriting prompt, or the phrases breeding phrases prompt, above. Those two prompts both work on a syntactical level, and speak to our human need to complete and organise; we have an incomplete sentence, and we force ourselves to finish it. However, this next prompt works in much finer detail, on the level of individual sounds.

The first step is to pick some words you would like to include in your poem. These can be anything, but try to make them words that you like the sound of, and preferably words you wouldn’t normally use in your poetry. For example, for a while I had a tendency to put ‘meagre’ into everything I wrote, so I wouldn’t be allowed to choose ‘meagre’ for this exercise, as it’s already too heavily placed in my active writing vocabulary. We all know those words that we keep coming back to – our own little writing tics that we can’t seem to shake. Stay away from them – for this exercise at least. Find something more unusual to you – a new word you want to try out. Flick through books, if you like. See what kind of vocabulary other writers use. Choose one or two of their words (though not too many from each writer, or it’ll make it too easy to slip into attempting that writer’s voice as well).

My words might be: shotgun, fascinator, primal, staccato, grudge, cormorant, startle

Don’t worry – you don’t necessarily have to put all of those into the same poem. Although you can do, if that’s the sort of challenge you want to set yourself. Instead, you’re going to focus on the sounds. For each word, you’re going to build up a sentence that contains more of the same consonantal sounds.

Let’s take ‘shotgun’. The word ‘shotgun’ contains 4 consonantal sounds: ‘sh’, ‘t’, ‘g’ and ‘n’. So you might want to make a list of words that include those sounds: nag, gin, gaunt, shatter, tosh, shutters, tiger, grain, grant, train, shunt, gauche, hunt

So your sentence could be: The tiger was gaunt and hunting, but the shotgun was a train shunting through the trees, shattering the jungle.

You’ll notice the use of words that weren’t on my original list – particularly ‘trees’ and ‘jungle’. That’s ok. After all, we don’t want a completely homogenous sound world in our poems, and the sentence needs to make sense as well. Having said that, ‘trees’ pretty much belongs in this soundscape anyway, with that ‘t’, and the ‘s’ that sort of speaks to the existing ‘sh’.

And as for ‘jungle’? Well, that definitely belongs.

Why? Consonants have pairings and groupings that give them a similar music. This is easiest to spot in the voiced and unvoiced versions of consonants, such as ‘b’ and ‘p’. Try saying these two letters. You’ll notice that one of them (b) uses your vocal chords, while the other (p) is composed of nothing but air. That’s because they are, in a sense, the same letter, but formed either using or not using the voice.

The same is true of ‘c’ and ‘g’. And ‘t’ and ‘d’. And also ‘ch’ and ‘j’ – which is why I said that ‘jungle’ belongs in the sentence above: ‘j’ belongs in the same sound world as ‘ch’, and ‘ch’ is not a million miles away from ‘sh’ (the only difference being the hard beginning on the ‘ch’ sound as opposed to the ‘sh’).

So what does this mean? Effectively, it just gives you a bigger sound world to play with. Suddenly, the word ‘shotgun’ lets you play with more consonantal sounds: ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘j’, ‘t’, ‘d’, g’, ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ck’, ‘n’ and ‘m’.

So my list of words might include: danger, ticking, marked, shake, dodge, juggernaut, decode, game, knocking, cudgel, untangle, conglomerate, tug, ghost, gamut, mango, teach, crèche, niche, manchego, jumping, imagine, dawn, need, meadow… The list goes on and on.

Some consonantal sounds that go together:

  • b / p
  • c / g / k / ck / qu / x
  • d / t
  • f / v
  • h
  • j / ch / sh
  • l / r / w / y
  • m / n
  • s / z

Play around with these, using the sounds within a single word to create a sentence within the same musical soundworld. Often, this will force you to put words and images together that surprise you – and the added bonus is that it nearly always sounds beautiful and musical.

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Writing poetry in a cafe in Grasmere

5 – Challenges

This is a technique I use a lot when I’m working in primary schools, as it keeps children on their toes during the writing process, and it gives them something to work towards if they’re struggling for ideas. As with many of the exercises I do with children, I find that it can also be fun and challenging for adults, too. It’s a good exercise to use when you’re freewriting / jotting down ideas for a poem, as a way of forcing yourself to include images you wouldn’t ordinarily have thought of, or a way of taking your thoughts in new directions.

Essentially, you challenge yourself to include something in your poem. You might want to choose 3 of the following, and challenge yourself to include them in your next freewrite / your next poem:

  • an insect
  • some sort of water
  • a landscape feature
  • something made from wood
  • a municipal building
  • a plant
  • something dead
  • something alive
  • some kind of weather
  • an organ (bodily or musical – it’s up to you)
  • a piece of furniture
  • a bird

You can include these in a literal way in your poem (e.g. a grasshopper was announcing the evening), or you can use them to form your imagery (e.g. my heart was a grasshopper in the uncertain grass of my chest).

The trick with all of them is to try to be specific. So if you choose ‘water’ as one of your challenges, don’t actually use the word ‘water’, but something like ‘puddle’ or ‘dripping tap’ or ‘river’. Even better, be specific about the type of puddle, or dripping tap, or river. Is it a clear stream tinkling down the mountainside in summer? Or is it a gushing river, brown, full of silt and swollen with too much rain?

Use these challenges to force yourself to think outside the normal bounds of your creative comfort zone, and to generate imagery.

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And those are the five. Notebook at the ready – and good luck with your writing!

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Let’s not beat about the bush: we live in a time when funding for the arts is getting harder and harder to come by. Libraries are under threat, and creativity is increasingly disappearing from the school curriculum. Having said that, we are also living through an economic boom when it comes to the creative industries. So while on the surface it may feel as though opportunities for writers are few and far between, there are still plenty of opportunities to throw your hat into the ring.

In fact, there are so many opportunities, that last year I aimed to submit 100 applications in a year. I managed 87, which still barely scratched the surface of the opportunities that were available to me.

100 Submissions in a Year: notes on goals and rejection

Of course, most (if not all) of these opportunities are highly competitive. Which means that any writer (no matter how talented, no matter how successful) is going to submit a lot of unsuccessful applications. This isn’t necessarily a comment on the writer’s ability; particularly when judges have a lot of submissions / applications to sift through (literally hundreds or thousands sometimes), all kinds of other factors come into play. What the judge’s individual interests are. What they had for breakfast. Whether they need a wee. What they watched on telly the night before. How recently they argued with their spouse.

Dealing with so-called ‘rejection’

All these things are totally beyond a writer’s control. But does that mean you should stop submitting? Of course not! Because you never know – next time your work might catch the right judge at the perfect moment, and you get a lovely ‘congratulations’ email into your inbox.

So what can I apply for?

The arts world is constantly changing. As I’m sure many of us aware from the doom-and-gloom surrounding arts funding, opportunities and funding streams are disappearing all the time. Then again, new ones are always arriving on the scene as well, to the extent that it can be difficult to keep track of what opportunities are out there.

I’ll write another post sometime about how I manage my submissions, and how I keep track of opportunities I can apply to / applications I’m waiting to hear back on. But for now, I want to focus not so much on the individual opportunities themselves, but on where to look for them.

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1: Arts Council England

The Arts Council is one of the first places I will look if I’m searching for funding – not just for writing, but for any artform. They have a number of funds you can apply for, but the two main ones are probably their Project Grants (for outward-facing, publicly engaged projects), and their Developing Your Creative Practice Fund (which, as the name suggests, funds artists to develop their creative practice in some way).

Arts Council England (ACE) only funds artists / writers / projects based in England, but there are equivalents if you’re based in other parts of the UK: Creative Scotland / Arts Council of Wales / Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

The Arts Council also runs Arts Jobs and Arts News: a listings service for arts related job offers and industry news. These can be viewed on the Arts Council’s website, or you can sign up to weekly emails and have relevant listings arrive in your inbox on a Sunday afternoon. It’s free, and most England-based arts organisations will list opportunities and jobs on here, so it’s worth signing up to.

As well as providing their own funding streams and listings, the Arts Council has a list of other sources of funding for arts projects. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start if you’re looking for a way to fund a project.

Note: a lot of these funds require you to be an organisation to apply. This doesn’t mean that they’re inaccessible for individual artists / writers, though. It just means that whatever your project is, you have to work with an organisation to bring it into being.

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2 – Regional writing organisations

As well as funding bodies that cover the larger regions (England / Scotland / Wales / Northern Ireland), there are also dedicated writing organisations that cover sections of the UK. Mine is New Writing North. As the name suggests, New Writing North provide opportunities open to the whole of the north of England, including the Northern Writers’ Awards, which awards hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of funding to writers annually.

As well as funding, they also provide publicity opportunities for writers through schemes such as Read Regional, which gets local authors into regional libraries. They send out a weekly e-news sharing opportunities and news from regional writers.

Google your area to find your own regional writing organisation.

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3 – The British Council

From local to further afield: the British Council works to keep cultural conversations between the UK and other countries. As such, they often have opportunities for artists (including writers) that involve some kind of overseas travel. Some of these are for arts organisations, or for arts professionals who are not artists in their own right, but they also have callouts for artists, and it’s worth checkout out their Arts Opportunities page from time to time.

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4 – The Society of Authors

The Society of Authors is the writers’ union. They provide all kinds of support for writers, including grants for work in progress, and their annual prizes for both published and unpublished work.

If you’re a member, you also get all kinds of benefits, including legal advice, support with things like contracts, and money off books.

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5 – NAWE

NAWE stands for National Association of Writers in Education – but even if you don’t work in education in any way, you can still take advantage of The Writers’ Compass, which brings together NAWE’s professional development programme with the advice, listings and opportunities on their website.

One particularly useful part of this is their Events & Opportunities page, where you can filter opportunities by jobs, funding, events, competitions & submissions, mentoring & coaching, and retreats.

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6 – BBC Writers’ Room

The BBC Writers’ Room is particularly useful if you’re a script-writer, whether that’s for stage, screen or radio – although they do occasionally post opportunities that are open to all types of writers. Even better news is that their policy is only to post opportunities that are free to enter, so you’ll never have to pay an application fee for one of these.

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7 – ResArtis

If it’s writing residencies you’re searching for, then you could do a lot worse than starting with ResArtis.

The site lists all kinds of residencies, including the sort that lure you in by saying anyone can apply, but then mention that they come with an extortionate residency fee. In these cases, what you’re getting is often the equivalent of an AirBnB, but with a ‘writing retreat’ label on it that pushes the cost up exponentially, so it pays to be careful.

However, they do also list some very well respected residencies, including those that just provide accommodation and time to write, as well as some that pay you to go and live somewhere and work on your creative art. Because the site lists so many residency opportunities, finding the ones that are most appropriate for you does take some filtering. I’d recommend sitting down one evening with a big glass of wine, and exploring what the site has to offer.

Note: unlike with the BBC Writers’ Room, a lot of opportunities posted on here do require an application fee, which is another reason for making sure you’ve read the fine print.

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8 – The National Poetry Library website

As you’d expect, this one is really for poets. Mostly, I use their website to keep up to date with poetry competitions and upcoming deadlines. It lists competitions for poets at all stages of their writing development, from smaller competitions that seem to cater for emerging writers, to big ones like the National Poetry Competition. As with any listing service, it requires you to decide for yourself which are the most appropriate for you to enter.

The website also has advice for emerging poets, as well as a round-up of the UK’s major and independent poetry publishers, and a list of magazines where you could send your work.

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9 – Other listings

As well as the National Poetry Library, there are other places that regularly list competitions and submissions opportunities.

  • Creative Writing Ink has a competitions page, with regularly updated listings. As with the Poetry Library, these competitions vary in terms of size and prestige.
  • Dublin-based writer Angela T Carr posts an extensive list of competition & submission opportunities on her website at the start of each month.
  • The Poetry Society runs a number of their own competitions, which they list on their website. They also have an events listing.
  • If you want a good way of finding journals & magazines that publish your sort of writing, look at the acknowledgments sections in poetry collections & short story collections. If a writer who is stylistically similar in some way has had a piece of work accepted by a journal, then there’s a chance the editor might like your writing as well.

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10 – Google

I know it sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people tell me they hadn’t thought of googling writing opportunities. Every so often, I will spend an evening in front of the fire, googling things like ‘artist in residence opportunities’ or ‘poetry competitions’ or ‘writing residency’, just to search out any of those things that might have slipped through the net of the listings. Sometimes, this will come to nothing, but every so often an opportunity will come to light, which will make it all worth while.

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Good luck with seeking out those opportunites, and fingers crossed for those emails that start with the word ‘congratulations’!

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Have I missed anywhere?
If there’s somwhere you go to seek out opportunities,
pop it in the comments below.

 

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Writing is largely a solitary task. Sometimes, we spend so much time wrapped inside our own brains, that it can be useful to get a nudge from someone else.

This post consists of five prompts for writing fiction. The focus: getting to know your character.

Unless we’re writing something that’s largely biographical, we can’t be expected to fully know and understand our characters the moment we sit down to write anything. The connection between author and character is like any relationship: it grows and develops over time. Every time you write, you get to know them a little better. They become a little more real.

The following prompts are not necessarily intended to become part of a novel – although of course they may do. They’re more like dates, or date ideas. Places to take your character so you can gaze into their eyes and get to know them better.

Bookcase bookshop, Carlisle

1 – Twenty questions

The first prompt is basically the first date. It’s about getting to know your character at a fairly surface level – the sorts of things you might find out about another person if you’d only spent an hour or so getting to know them.

The exact questions you ask are up to you, but don’t make them too heavy. Keep it light, for now. Things like, what’s your favourite colour? Or, what type of food do you hate? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Where do you live? Do you prefer books or films? That sort of thing.

Make a list of twenty questions, imagine you’re sitting your character down in front of you, and jot down the answers. Some these answers might be quite banal, and some may open interesting doors. Either way, you’ll have learned enough that, on the next date, you can start to dig deeper.

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2 – Something your character wears

What we choose to wear says a lot about who we are. Do we dress to impress? Or do we just throw on the first thing we see in the morning. Do we dress carefully, but cultivate a style that looks effortless and unconcerned? Do we spend a lot of money on designer clothes – and if so, is that something we can afford, or something we have to make sacrifices for? Do we take pride in only shopping from charity shops?

If we apply this to a fictional character, it very quickly becomes about more than just surface dressing. A character who spends a lot of time cultivating an eclectic style probably cares a lot what other people think of them, and wants to be seen as individual and independent. Dig a little deeper, and this might arise from a deep insecurity and a fear of being overlooked. A character who puts very little thought into their appearance may be extremely self-confident, and totally unconcerned by what other people think of them. Then again, they may in fact be so isolated that they believe there’s no point in caring about their appearance, as nobody else will. A character who refuses to buy clothes from charity shops may have a fear of being seen as poor, or they may be so admiring of their own body that they want only the most exclusive designer clothing to adorn it.

So what does your character wear?

It might help to focus on one particular item, which exemplifies the type of clothing they tend to wear. It could be their favourite item. It could be the thing they wear most often.

Whatever it is, describe it in as much detail as possible. Describe how it fits your character’s body. How do they feel when they wear it? How did they come to own it? How do other people see it? Get to know your character through what they wear.

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3 – An object your character owns

In the same way that we can learn a lot about a person by the things they wear, so we can learn things by the objects they own. Particularly, by the objects they hold dear.

Theoretically, we can learn from the everyday objects, such as what sort of bowls and plates and cups they have. Is it antique bone china? Does everything match? Is it plain white crockery from IKEA? If they’re quite clumsy, then they may own the remnants of multiple sets. If they own everyday crockery, alongside a more expensive set that they only use for certain guests, what does that say about the character and how they relate to those around them?

All of these things tell us something about the character. But I want to dig deeper. If we choose the right object, we can find out key details about who this person is. It’s a cliché perhaps, but clichés are clichés for a reason: what object would this character save from a fire?

It has to be an object (it can’t be a loved one or a pet), but other than that, anything goes. Describe the object. What is it? What is it like? What does it mean to them? If it helps (and it may do), write the scene where they save the object from the fire. How desperate are they to rescue it, and what’s driving that desperation?

Again, this scene doesn’t have to make it into the finished novel. This is just a date.

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4 – Something that happened before they were born

This prompt is all about putting your character in context. Finding out the ingredients that went into the melting pot of their personality. Obviously, a lot of things will have happened before your character was born. What we want is a key event: something that shaped their life, before they even existed.

This could be something straightforward, like their conception – how did their parents meet? Did they know each other well? Was the pregnancy intentional?

Alternatively, it could be something on a more global scale – a political event that shaped the society your character was born into.

Whether it’s something big or small, make it something that affects your character. Something where, had these events been different, your character’s world and probably their personality would have been different too.

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5 – Put your character in a tricky situation

This final prompt builds on the third one, which had your character desperately saving something from a fire. The theory here is much the same: that we discover a lot about what drives a person in times of peril. Of course, that peril doesn’t always have to be the character’s own.

In this prompt, put your character on a bus full of people. A drunk old man is swaying violently and muttering under his breath, when suddenly he collapses. How does your character respond?

The reason I find this prompt useful is that it not only shows you how your character acts in a crisis, but it also gives an insight into how they act among people they don’t know, and how they behave in a crowd. There’s so much to unpack in a scene like this. It’s probably the most intense date you could ask for.

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And those are the five! I hope you find them useful. Good luck, and happy writing!

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When I was a small child in the early stages of primary school, we learned about jobs – a slightly tricky concept for a child who has very little understanding of money and absolutely no grasp of what an economy is. But I knew that I loved stories and books, and I loved making up little stories of my own. So when I learned that there were people who wrote the books I loved to read, and that writing books was a type of job, I was overjoyed. While most of my classmates were fighting over being vets and tractor drivers, I came home and proudly announced to my mum that I wanted to be an author.

In true down-to-earth motherly fashion, my mum assured me how proud she was that I’d chosen a career (at the tender age of probably about five), but that if I wanted to be an author, I’d need a ‘proper job’ as well. Writing books, she told me, was something most people did on the side. I’d need to find a way to pay the bills.

For a couple of weeks, I thought about this. At that time I’m not sure I had any idea that some jobs paid more than others, so it was a lot to get my head around.

After much consideration, I came back to my mum: ‘I still want to be an author,’ I told her, ‘but I’ve decided what I want my proper job to be as well.’

My mum was all eagerness and congratulations: ‘That’s wonderful! What do you want to be?’

I grinned from ear to ear, ‘I want to be an actress.’

Bookcase bookshop, Carlisle

As adults, we know that some jobs pay more than others. We also know that some jobs pay enough to live off, whereas others do not. And let’s be honest, writing has always had a pretty bad reputation in terms of salary. You’re either J K Rowling, or you’re stuck in a garret somewhere with no heating and only half a heel of mouldy bread. As far as many people believe, there is no in between.

Not true, of course. There are plenty of authors who make a reasonable living from their craft, without become yacht-owning multi-millionaires. Just as there are plenty of authors who make an ok amount of money, but still need to keep another job to make up the rest. As with most careers, there’s a huge range of income levels, and a lot of that depends on the writer: what they write, their level of output, and what else they do alongside the actual writing to keep the wolf from the door.

In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about different ways to make a living as a writer. I’m then going to unpack this, and (with the help of some pie charts and a couple of line graphs) talk about what this looks like in practice in relation to my own income as a writer.

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Ways to make a living as a writer:

There are many different ways that a writer can make a living. Some of these depend on what you write (for example, poetry can look very different to commercial fiction), and some just on the preferences of the individual writer. Some means of earning an income will be directly related to the writing, and others less so. It’s all about what works for the individual writer.

As I write poetry and fiction, that’s what this post is focusing on. If you write scripts of any kind, or creative non-fiction, your outlets, and therefore your potential income streams, might be slightly different – although many of the following apply across genres.

So how do you earn a living as a writer?

My Name is Monster by Katie Hale - proof copy

1 – From your book:

This is perhaps the most obvious way for a writer to earn money – though many writers probably don’t earn as much from this as you’d think. It’s not uncommon for debut authors to get an advance of £5k, 15% of which goes to the agent. Hardly enough to live on, especially if you’re only publishing a book every few years.

Other ways your book can earn you money are through royalties from book sales (once they exceed what you’ve already been paid in your advance), and through the selling of additional rights, such as film rights or foreign rights. This effort to sell further rights to your book will be done either by the agent or by the publisher, depending on the terms of your contract.

Note: the above applies to fiction / non-fiction. If you’re a poet, you might earn enough for a couple of bottles of wine from selling your book, but I wouldn’t put the deposit on that mansion just yet.

2 – Readings / talks:

Usually once the book is published, an author will do events connected with that book. These could be anything from a reading of a section of the book, to a Q&A about their publication process, to a talk or panel discussion about some theme connected with the work. Often, they’re a combination of aspects of the above.

These opportunities aren’t always paid, but they should be. (See the Society of Authors’ page about where they stand on paying writers for appearances at festivals.) Thankfully, more and more, festivals and organisers seem to be wising up to the fact that this is work, just like any other job, and that authors need paying accordingly.

As you might expect, writers who publish once every few years tend to get more of these talks & readings in the years that they have books published. And, like everything else, certain writers’ work goes in and out of fashion, as do certain ideas. Which means that, while giving talks & readings can be a good way to supplement an income, it isn’t a steady constant.

3 – Workshops / teaching:

Many writers pass on their craft to other writers. This can involve running writing workshops in schools, or for adults – either through festivals, residential writing courses, or self-organised. Many writers also offer mentoring to other aspiring writers (either paid for individually by the mentee, or funded through some sort of arts funding), and / or teach at university level.

However, like any type of teaching, each of these has its own set of skills, which are themselves distinct from the skills you need simply to be a good writer. There are plenty of writers who run workshops because it’s the ‘done thing’, who realise quite quickly that they don’t enjoy it. My advice: if you don’t enjoy it, don’t do it. Your workshop participants will pick up on your lack of enthusiasm, and you won’t be doing yourself (or your participants) any favours.

On the flip side, if you enjoy running workshops, then go for it! There’s huge benefit to anyone in being taught by a skilled writer who’s passionate about passing on the skills of their trade.

4 – Funding:

I mentioned the F-word. Sorry. But there are a number of different ways to access funding as a writer.

One of these is to do a fully funded PhD – which essentially means you get paid to write for around 3 years (which is normally the length of time a funding body will fund you for a doctorate). These aren’t always easy to come by, and you have to be certain you want to dedicate 3 years of your life to doing a PhD, but if you can get one, it’s a great way to make sure the bills are paid and still have plenty of time to focus on writing / studying some aspect of your writing.

You can also find funding to write from other sources, if you don’t fancy doing a PhD. These include things like the Arts Council’s Developing Your Creative Practice grant, which gives artists up to £10k to focus on developing some aspect of their creative practice, and so far seems to have a roughly 1 in 10 acceptance rate, which isn’t bad. The Society of Authors also gives contingency grants and grants for works in progress.

If you want to run another writing-related project, which isn’t just your own writing, then there are funding bodies you can apply to for that as well, including places such as Arts Council England (or Creative Scotland / Arts Council of Wales / Arts Council of Northern Ireland, depending on where you’re based), the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Fenton Arts Trust, and the Jerwood Foundation, to name just a few. Most of these require your project to work with other people, and have some sort of outreach / public impact. Some can be applied for as an individual, and some require you to work with an organisation.

5 – Commissions:

A commission is when somebody (an organisation or another person) pays you to write something for them. This could be anything, and commissions vary in terms of how prescriptive they are. For instance, some give you quite a bit of free reign to interpret the creative brief, whereas others have a very set idea of what they want you to produce.

6 – Residencies:

As with commissions, writer in residence positions can be extremely varied in what they offer. Because this is a post about earning income, I’m going to leave aside talking about the sort of residency where the writer pays to attend, and focus on the more generous sort – some of which will pay the writer a fee, some will pay transport & a small stipend, and some will just provide the free accommodation and maybe a few meals if you’re lucky. It all depends on the individual residency. Even the residencies that don’t directly pay a fee can be a huge financial benefit though – particularly in winter, when the heating bill can be enormous, and you’re effectively living without having to pay bills.

In the same way, different residencies will require different things from the writer. Some will require very little, and will instead allow the writer to write at their own leisure for the duration (which can be anywhere from a week to several months to even a year). Most require some sort of reading of work-in-progress at the very least, and some require engagement with the local community, either through workshops or school visits or talks.

These sorts of residencies can be quite competitive, particularly for the more lucrative / prestigious ones, but the time to write can be invaluable.

7 – Prizes:

Equally competitive (if not more so) are writing prizes. These can be prizes for anything from a single poem, to a collection of poetry, to a short story, to a full novel. As well as the famous ones like the Man Booker Prize or the Costa Prizes, there are the prizes that unpublished writers can enter. Many of these charge a submission fee, though, so some careful calculations need to be made about how many of these to enter (and which ones) if you’re going to make money rather than lose it. And even then, it definitely isn’t a reliable source of income.

8 – Other writing-related work:

I’ve already sort of mentioned this when I was talking about funding a few points up, but there’s plenty of other work a writer can that’s related to their creative practice, but isn’t just writing. Many writers work as editors, either for publishing presses or for independent magazines. Some also hold other jobs within publishing, or work as reviewers. And you know those prizes I was talking about? Most of those are judged by writers, who are (mostly) paid to do so.

9 – Other arts related work:

And if it isn’t work directly linked to writing, then there are other ways to work in the arts. There are arts organisations, theatres, galleries and museums across the country, all of which need people working in them to make them run. A lot of these also offer part-time jobs, which can be ideal if you want to work part-time, and dedicate the rest of your week to your writing. (I’ve spent the past 6 years working part-time in arts administration, on and off.)

10 – Any other work:

Or, if a writer prefers to keep the artistic section of their brain separate from their other job, then there are plenty of other ways to earn money. I know writers who earn their income working in call centres, clearing tables and pulling pints. As long as it allows them to write, and to pay the big red bills when they come through the letterbox.

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Ok – so what does all of this look like in real life?

The term for this type of living seems to be ‘portfolio career’ – which sounds much more impressive than saying I do ‘bits and bobs’. More accurate, too, because I often find that the various aspects of my career inform one another. For instance, experiences in the workshops sometimes feed into my own writing, and connections made through my arts administration roles have led to commission opportunities and appearances at festivals.

So how did I earn my income last year?

I’ve broken my income down into sections: earnings from commissions; earnings from running workshops (for young people and for adults); income from competition wins; earnings from readings / talks etc; money from my advance on my novel; income from other arts-related work (mostly, but not limited to, arts administration roles).

For 2018, the proportions are as follows:

As becomes clear very quickly from looking at this pie chart, over half of my income last year came from the advance from my novel. That makes sense. Depending on your publisher, an advance is usually paid in 3 or 4 installments. Mine is paid in 3, and because of various things to do with timings, I just so happened to get the first 2 installments in consecutive months last year. But, as I mentioned earlier, unless you’re publishing a book a year, you’re not going to get regular advance payments, which makes this year a slightly special one – and means that 2018’s income is highly skewed because of it.

(Since advances are usually negligible to non-existent for poetry, this is more of a feature of income streams for novelists and non-fiction writers.)

So let’s take that advance out of the equation, to try to get a more useful sense of proportions:

What we’re left with is a much more honest illustration of this type of portfolio career: just under half coming from workshops; around a third from other arts-related work; a reasonable chunk from commissions; and a smattering from competitions and readings.

CAVEAT: These proportions are specific not only to my career, but to this very particular year of my career. For example, the 2% for readings / talks is because I only appeared at one festival in 2018. This isn’t particularly surprising, when you think that the only book I had out was my pamphlet, which had come out the previous year (and I’d already done quite a number of events for it in 2017. If I do another pie chart at the end of 2019, when I have a poetry chapbook and a novel coming out, it’ll probably have different proportions here.

(Not included in these figures is the grant I received from the Arts Council’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund, as all of the work that will pay for is happening this year, and so I haven’t yet allowed myself to treat it as income.)

So how does this variation play out throughout the year? If a writer’s earnings can vary so much from one year to the next, what do they look like from month to month?

Again, these levels are skewed because of the novel advance. If you compare this graph to the first pie chart, we can see that I received 63% of my 2018 income in two consecutive months. But, as I said, this is kind of an anomaly – at least for me.

If we show the monthly income without including the advance, those August and September plot points look a little less drastic – though hopefully the varying of levels of income throughout the year is still apparent:

Even without the anomalous skew of the advance affecting the shape of the graph, April was a tough month. If every month was an April, then I’d definitely have had my electricity cut off by now. But then, April in 2018 contained Easter, along with all its attendant bank holidays, not to mention the school holidays. So suddenly this dip starts to make a lot of sense.

But if we look at the overall picture of the graph, rather than just month-by-month, my income has (generally speaking) improved as the year has progressed. Certainly I earned more in the second part of the year than I did in the first. I’m attributing this to the general progression that my career has undergone this year, rather than to some sort of shift in availability of work in the earlier to the later months.

But whatever the reason, it certainly shows that a writer’s income is far from reliable. It’s sporadic to say the least, and generally requires not only a willingness to juggle a portfolio of different income streams, but an ability to save for the leaner times as well.

 

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January gets its name from Janus, the Roman god with two heads. One head for looking forwards, the other head for looking back. Because of this, he’s the god of doorways, gates and transitions. Hence, January: the door of the year, when we look back at how the year before has gone, and forward to what the new one will bring.

It’s true I’ve spent a little bit of time looking back this month. A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the submissions and applications I made in 2018, and how I fared with them. I also spent some time editing a poetry sequence that I had begun the year before. But mostly, I’ve spent this month looking forward.

And what am I looking forward to? Well, a few things, as it happens.

One of these is, of course, the publication of My Name is Monster in June. Summer months always sound such a long way off in January, when there’s ice on the road and I’m wearing about fifty layers just to sit at my kitchen table. But it’s going to come round unbelievably quickly, so I’ve already started preparing for it, organising launch events and planning readings etc. But more on that as and when the dates are confirmed.

I’m also looking forwards to a poetry-based project, Gretna. Part of a trilogy of theatre pieces exploring the borderlands between England and Scotland, Gretna gives a taster of a new collaboration between myself, Théâtre Volière and Lori Watson. For this project, I’ve been researching the history of women in and around Gretna Green, and writing a poem sequence in response. These poems will then be used to create a theatre piece, Gretna, which will then be presented at Ye Olde Mitre in London on 23rd & 24th March.

The third forward-looking thing I’ve been working on this month is actually kind of a secret. Well, not so much a secret as something I’m keeping close to my chest for now, and will talk a bit more about on here when I’m further into it. For now, I’ll just say that it’s a new project, and that it involves me roaming round Cumbria with a very fluffy piece of recording equipment!

Work-wise, that’s pretty much been the sum of my January. I spent the first few days of the new year crashed out ill on the sofa – which was partly to do with a horrendous bug that seemed to be going around, and partly because I’d been pretty much non-stop on the go for several months, and I think it was my body’s way of telling me to take a break.

I’ll be honest – I probably don’t take enough breaks. And, looking forward to my schedule for the first half of this year, 2019 isn’t shaping up to be particularly restful, either. Even holidays aren’t exactly relaxing, because I tend to want to see and do everything. (I went to Prague & Budapest for 6 days this month, with my friend Jessi, which was an incredible and inspiring and beautiful trip – but also very busy trying to wander round and see as much as possible!) So this year, I want to try and snatch some breaks, as and when I can. And if it’s nothing more than taking the full weekend off now and again, then so be it – it’s still better than nothing. After all, by the time the book launch comes around in June, I’m going to need those energy reserves.

The month in books:

My main 2019 resolution is to carve out more time for reading. Looking back, I know that I sacrificed a lot of reading time last year in favour of things like admin. Now, admin is undeniably important, as it’s what gets things done – but it doesn’t feed me creatively. Admin drains the creative tank, whereas reading fills it up again. So, looking forward (thanks, Janus), I resolved to do something about it. I resolved to force myself to make time for reading.

I probably still haven’t read as much as I’d have liked to this month, but let’s face it, when will I ever? It’s a start, and a habit I hope to build on in the months to come:

  • The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber
  • American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, by Terence Hayes
  • Fup, by Jim Dodge
  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli
  • Everything, Everything, by Nicola Yoon
  • Poems of a Molecatcher’s Daughter, by Geraldine Green
  • Selected Poems of Susanna Blamire, ed. Christopher Hugh Maycock
  • Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman

The month in pictures: