Yesterday I saw this article on TheMillions blog about Fiona Mozley, a writer with a 9-to-6 job who started writing her Man-Booker-Prize-finalist novel Elmet on her commute. I really liked this quote from her:
the sentences and paragraphs I wrote on my phone during my commute were very useful for keeping up the momentum. Sometimes when you’re writing–particularly if you’re working full time–you can have periods of writing nothing at all. Even if I found myself unable to write full sections, jotting ideas down on my phone meant that I felt a constant sense of progression.
I really liked this, and I liked her journey that she went on – from writing as an escape from a job and from a life that wasn’t working for her, to moving out of London and gradually building up confidence through part-time work. It is a good article just to get a sense of one writer’s journey.
I am not usually a commuter-writer; in my Eastern Europe city, I walk to work, and in London I was usually on a crowded Tube car. But I totally get the appeal – even apart from the obvious aspects that it’s just a chunk of time you can’t ever get back. I have done it a few times, when something was burning in my head, or when I just didn’t feel right and I needed to get it down. I have written a couple of really powerful scenes or parts of scenes in the Tube, and I always feel like I’m on fire, and like I have an important secret that is somehow also public (you’re surrounded by people, after all), and it does feel like magic.
As writers (and as podcast hosts!) sometimes we read the news about different writers’ routines to find out the magic formula, what can help us to finish our novel or inspire people. But when you really break it down, like this article does, it’s just about making small steps that turn into big leaps – and suddenly you’re writing a real book.
With Mozley, maybe if she’d thought about quitting her job to do a PhD when she first started, it would have sounded like too much, too hard (I don’t know, just speculating). But after she’s spent hours and days on this book, maybe it felt more possible – more and different things feel possible about writing once you start doing the actual writing when you can. Once you start working writing into your life, it also changes your life.
Writing on your commute, like writing during your lunch break or before or work or after work, is a signal that you’re taking yourself and your private, secret work seriously. And that can be hard when you’re working full-time, or when you’re caring for others full-time, or anything else you think you should pay more attention to than your own projects. But still we do it. We wake up early, or we huddle into our jackets and write away on a tiny notebook so no one can watch us on the train. We start typing ideas in our phones, or we try to type some sentences on the Tube or train.
It helps us to become who we are, and the practice of doing it helps us to find out who we are, too.
You know how writing in a new notebook, on that first page, is super hard? I always just skip the first page and then I’m writing on the second page, and then I can move on. Or write something witty on that second page about how I don’t want to write on the first page.