{"id":880,"date":"2010-11-10T16:42:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T16:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=880"},"modified":"2020-12-09T16:12:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T16:12:12","slug":"what-makes-writers-tick-novelist-ashley-stokes-answers-ists-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/what-makes-writers-tick-novelist-ashley-stokes-answers-ists-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"What makes writers tick – Novelist Ashley Stokes answers IS&T's questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nine Questions<\/span>

In this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process and craft.<\/span>

1.    Where do you write? <\/span>(do you have an office, room, bus or train journey that you find yourself and your writing? etc)<\/span>

My present flat has a spare bedroom that I use as an office. It\u2019s nice and cramped. I\u2019m 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.  <\/span>


2.    How do you write?<\/span> (into a notebook or straight onto a computer? etc)<\/span>

It\u2019s a bit of both. I usually write longhand notes about what I\u2019m going to write before I \u2018compose\u2019 (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\u2019ve already written in a story until I can\u2019t make any changes then I push it on to a point in the narrative I\u2019ve agreed with myself earlier. This is the practice I\u2019ve developed over time. I\u2019ve had other routines. They can always change and maybe it\u2019s good that they do. I wrote Touching the Starfish<\/span> 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. <\/span>


3. Roughly how much time do you spend each week on creative writing related activities?<\/span> (writing, editing, correspondence & submissions \u2013 give a daily average if possible)<\/span>

Ideally I like to write from between 7am and 10am everyday, especially if I\u2019m writing a novel. I\u2019ll continue this over the weekend if it\u2019s 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\u2019re talking about eight or nine hours a day in the week but two or three at weekends.<\/span>


3.    What time of day do you usually write?<\/span>

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. <\/span>


5. Do you set yourself a daily target for writing?<\/span>

Not in terms of words, though I usually write between 250 and 1000 a day if I\u2019m in the middle of something. I usually write to a stage in the sequence that I want to reach or I\u2019ve reached a point where the words are no longer there for me. <\/span>


6. What does it feel like to write? <\/span>

It depends. Sometimes it feels exhilarating if you\u2019re aware a passage is coming through as strongly as you imagined it and it\u2019s causing me to experience it like I\u2019d 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\u2019re doing something that you couldn\u2019t have done previously. Then again, sometimes there are stories that I call \u2018grinders\u2019 that seem a real trial to write, that don\u2019t come together easily. Strangely, with the pieces or passages that I\u2019m 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\u2019s a very future-orientated thing for me. I\u2019m always thinking about what to write next, rather than dwelling on what I\u2019ve done before. <\/span>


7. Are there any stimuli that will usually trigger you into writing?<\/span>

A nice quiet morning and that feeling that you\u2019re 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 \u2018ideas\u2019 and realizations come when I\u2019m doing something else (skulking around supermarkets; moping in the park; swimming). The writing is the transcribing and interrogation of these ideas. <\/span>


8. Do you work in silence or have background noise? If you do have sounds, what are you listening to now?<\/span>

I work in complete silence. Noise really distracts me and I will be forced to stop if I\u2019m disturbed. I try to see the prose as music (I do mean \u2018see\u2019) 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\u2019t write if there\u2019s a cat in the room. I think that\u2019s perfectly reasonable. I find it a bit hard to write when there\u2019s 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\u2019m writing the blog or editing, things like Brian Eno or Harold Budd. <\/span>


9. What are you working on now?<\/span>

As well as writing SubGrubStreet<\/a>, which is a sort of sequel to <\/span>Touching the Starfish<\/span> told in blog form, I\u2019m just finishing a collection of stories called <\/span>The Syllabus of Errors<\/span> that will be published by Unthank Books next year. I\u2019ve never spent quite so long on shorts before, having now written ten stories in the three years since I finished the novel. I\u2019ll probably write a couple of very short ones before starting a new novel and a book of essays about writing next year. There\u2019s always a stack of things that are going to need your full attention at some as yet undetermined point. It\u2019s a bit like knowing you\u2019ve got something wrong with you but putting off the visit to the doctor, all the while knowing that soon you\u2019re going to have to sit in the waiting room with the throbbing and the sweats. <\/span>


*Ashley Stokes<\/span>' debut novel <\/span>Touching the Starfish<\/span> is published by Unthank Books<\/a>.<\/span>
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Nine QuestionsIn 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\u2019s nice and cramped. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23861,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions\/23861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}