Nine Questions
In this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process and craft.
1. Where do you write? (do you have an office, room, bus or train journey that you find yourself and your writing? etc)
My present flat has a spare bedroom that I use as an office. It’s nice and cramped. I’m all in favour of niches. I do most of my writing there and try to get to my desk as quickly as I can after I wake up. I will go out to write in cafes if I can, too. Somewhere with a bit of background chatter seems good for busking and sketching as well as editing and reading through work in progress.
2. How do you write? (into a notebook or straight onto a computer? etc)
It’s a bit of both. I usually write longhand notes about what I’m going to write before I ‘compose’ (bit of an up-itself word, I know), then write on the computer. I have to see the story and the paragraph before I write; otherwise the story will stall for me. I go over and over what I’ve already written in a story until I can’t make any changes then I push it on to a point in the narrative I’ve agreed with myself earlier. This is the practice I’ve developed over time. I’ve had other routines. They can always change and maybe it’s good that they do. I wrote Touching the Starfish that way but then I found that the two subsequent short stories wrote were largely written longhand in pencil. It was too cold in my then house to sit still in the morning and I found that it was more productive to get out and write somewhere else.
3. Roughly how much time do you spend each week on creative writing related activities? (writing, editing, correspondence & submissions – give a daily average if possible)
Ideally I like to write from between 7am and 10am everyday, especially if I’m writing a novel. I’ll continue this over the weekend if it’s not a very good weekend, if you know what I mean. There is a three-day rule, I think, that says it will take you three days of continuous practice for the prose to find its fluency but if you take a day off you will have to go through that three-day slog again to get back to where you were. The rest of my work is all Creative Writing-centered (editing and consultancy, teaching and marking). I probably spend about five hours a day on such things. Then another hour or two on promotion like writing my blog. I like to read a bound book for an hour a day at least as well. Probably, on average, we’re talking about eight or nine hours a day in the week but two or three at weekends.
3. What time of day do you usually write?
The morning for fiction, the afternoon for reports and the evening for the blog, in the order of, as the song says, The Knight, The Devil and Death.
5. Do you set yourself a daily target for writing?
Not in terms of words, though I usually write between 250 and 1000 a day if I’m in the middle of something. I usually write to a stage in the sequence that I want to reach or I’ve reached a point where the words are no longer there for me.
6. What does it feel like to write?
It depends. Sometimes it feels exhilarating if you’re aware a passage is coming through as strongly as you imagined it and it’s causing me to experience it like I’d hope a reader would (like, laugh or cringe or feel fear or pity, rhythm or dazzle). It can feel great too when you realize you’re doing something that you couldn’t have done previously. Then again, sometimes there are stories that I call ‘grinders’ that seem a real trial to write, that don’t come together easily. Strangely, with the pieces or passages that I’m most happy, I can rarely remember afterwards how I wrote them, or the process of writing them or even how I got the idea for the approach. It’s a very future-orientated thing for me. I’m always thinking about what to write next, rather than dwelling on what I’ve done before.
7. Are there any stimuli that will usually trigger you into writing?
A nice quiet morning and that feeling that you’re the only person awake or alive is useful. The odd mug of coffee helps, as does leaving the Internet alone until later in the day. If I do feel the need to refresh myself and just get myself putting one word in front of another, writing a diary to clear my mind of gripes is a decent filter, as is writing about randomly selected images. I always have a stack of art cards in my in-tray. I do also select passages from short stories at random and analyse how they work and why they are not useful to me in terms of what I am supposed to be doing. I do find though that most of my ‘ideas’ and realizations come when I’m doing something else (skulking around supermarkets; moping in the park; swimming). The writing is the transcribing and interrogation of these ideas.
8. Do you work in silence or have background noise? If you do have sounds, what are you listening to now?
I work in complete silence. Noise really distracts me and I will be forced to stop if I’m disturbed. I try to see the prose as music (I do mean ‘see’) so having something else interfere with that part of my mind causes me to lose the signal. In The Anatomy Lesson, Philip Roth says that he can’t write if there’s a cat in the room. I think that’s perfectly reasonable. I find it a bit hard to write when there’s a cat in the room. There was a cat in the room once upon a time and I found it a bit hard to write sometimes. I might listen to something low-key and instrumental if I’m writing the blog or editing, things like Brian Eno or Harold Budd.
9. What are you working on now?
As well as writing SubGrubStreet, which is a sort of sequel to Touching the Starfish told in blog form, I’m just finishing a collection of stories called The Syllabus of Errors that will be published by Unthank Books next year. I’ve never spent quite so long on shorts before, having now written ten stories in the three years since I finished the novel. I’ll probably write a couple of very short ones before starting a new novel and a book of essays about writing next year. There’s always a stack of things that are going to need your full attention at some as yet undetermined point. It’s a bit like knowing you’ve got something wrong with you but putting off the visit to the doctor, all the while knowing that soon you’re going to have to sit in the waiting room with the throbbing and the sweats.
*Ashley Stokes' debut novel Touching the Starfish is published by Unthank Books.
