Writing Process, Routine, and Craft

Writing is craft as much as it is art. Without the strong support of a good practice, it is very hard to create good work – at least, this is what I have found with my writing. Without a strong routine, my work is haphazard and frustrating and I fall into all the bad habits, both personal and professional, that plague my work. I have spent an inordinate amount of time working on my practice and continue to spend time maintaining it. Below are some aspects of my own process and I hope you find them useful.

My daily routine:

I get up as close to 6am as possible, head into my study with my coffee, and before any other distractions, open my laptop and begin writing at the point I left off the day before. I then write until my daughter wakes up, or I have to get ready to go to my part-time job. If I have a writing day (hurray!) then after breakfast I go back to the computer and write until lunchtime. I only keep working after lunch if I’m rewriting or editing. I’m a morning worker, and by midday my creative juices have pretty much dried up. When I’m editing, however, I only break at the end of the day or when I have a headache, as I try to fit the shape of the entire novel in my head.

My planning process:

My planning process is somewhat haphazard. I tend to write chronologically, starting at page 1, chapter 1 and working chapter by chapter until the end. When it comes to plot, I often have only the vaguest idea where I want to go. An essential part of my process is to ‘discover’ the story for myself. Luckily, this is immensely fun.

However, I do plan character relationships. I sketch out what sort of journey each character needs to go on and how these journeys intersect. Therefore, even when I don’t know what plot point will happen next, I have an idea of what each character needs to do and why.  

At some point in the novel – usually when I become overwhelmed with all the details and nervous that I’ll forget something – I write a rough plan of what clues, plot points, and ideas need to resolve. I still don’t have a proper plan, but I know roughly which direction I’m headed.

All this is only for novel-writing. With short stories and poems, I write as the muse dictates. Not a very professional approach, I admit, but I’ve tried all sorts of planning and anything more than an opening line is too much. I have learnt to trust myself and only write when I know that I need to.

The evolution of a practice:

This is the process that has worked for me for a few years, and has survived, mostly intact, the arrival of my daughter (although it was disrupted by my pregnancy, when I could hardly even read, let alone write).

My process started small, writing on my days off from work, tentatively, nervously, with a pencil in a notebook.

I enrolled in a Diploma of Creative Writing, mostly because I was bored, and it was a revelation. I quickly upgraded to a Masters and started taking my work seriously. That was the first big step – to take myself seriously, to call myself a writer, and to insist my writing work had the same importance as my other work. This also helped to train my family (and my boyfriend, and the next boyfriend who became my husband) about the importance of my writing: even if I wasn’t yet published, it was not a hobby. I worked.

I was lucky, and privileged, that I had plenty of time to explore what worked best for me. I had few responsibilities or distractions, being in my mid-twenties, unmarried, renting, without a full-time job, no carer responsibilities, healthy in mind and body… I salute all writers, and artists, who overcome these pressures in order to carve out a practice.

But I did work too much for full-time study, so after a stressful year I rolled over my Masters into a doctorate with a scholarship. I was being paid to write! It was strange and wonderful and liberating. Of course, the first thing I did was go to sleep for three months…

I read a lot about the daily routines of other writers, for inspiration, a guide, for reassurance. It turns out that I’m not the only one who gets up early and does their best work in the dawn, who is distracted by everything, who constantly reworks their writing as first drafts are always rubbish. I searched blogs and articles (such as this one) for templates of other writers.

I decided to regard my pressures as positives: part-time work means that I don’t have to sell, marry, or starve, like women writers of previous eras – study meant I had access to a wonderful group of like-minded individuals – insecure work and housing, as a young woman, could offer immense freedom. I still do this: as being a parent takes so much time, I no longer have time to care what others think of my writing – breastfeeding can mean lots of time to read – playing in the park allows me to unwind after writing – a lot of good thinking can be done while hanging up the endless loads of washing.

And so I’m here. I work full-time, but two of the five days are in my study, writing and doing writing-related work. I am blessed with a very supportive family, and their support motivates me to make the sacrifices I need to in order for the writing to work.

My current struggles:

1. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, eBay… I often have to hide my phone in order not to be distracted by these addictive little apps.
2. Writing vs Exercise: the Curse of Never Enough Time. The constant argument runs thus: I need to write, but if I don’t exercise I’ll get sick and then I can’t write. But running is boring and takes up so much time which I don’t have so maybe I’ll just write instead and keep myself going with biscuits but now I don’t fit into my clothes and I have a cold brewing so I need to exercise… I’m yet to find any sort of balance.
3. Writing vs Diet: the Curse of the Carrot Stick. For me, writing needs snacks, and the best snacks are chocolate, peanut butter toast, any kind of biscuit, and endless tea and coffee. Writing cannot be done on carrot sticks! I tend to binge on sweet, fatty snacks with I write, and leave the salads for the rest of my life.
4. Tiredness. This is everyone’s struggle and it doesn’t go away. When I was in my 20s I was tired from bad relationships, anxiety, and too many drinks the night before. Now I’m tired from being up with my daughter through the night and writing when I should be sleeping. I say to myself that it doesn’t get better, but my method of dealing with it does. Right now I use walks in the sunshine, tea, walnut brownies, more tea, writing in my pyjamas, ‘selfish’ reading where I read exactly what I want, and yet still more tea.
5. Time. There is never enough time to write. So how to best make use of the time that I have? I try to write like blazes when I have moments, and then let all the ideas settle in the many, many hours I’m not writing. I’ve recently also given up on internal deadlines, as I’m far too optimistic and then I feel like a failure – the writing goes at the pace that it goes. I’ve decided that I don’t have time to care what other people might think of my writing – for the first draft, I’m the best audience – this is truly liberating and goes a long way to throw off the Curse of Never Enough Time. I never knew that I spent so much time being anxious.

The goal

Write. Sometimes all the best laid plans go to waste. When this happens to me, I try to let go of my frustration and just write whenever I can. Café, bus, lunch break, in front of the TV – I have notebooks and pens and notes in my phone – sometimes we just do what we can. Sometimes this moment lasts for years. No matter. Just write; that’s the only goal. However that happens is success.  

—

Tessa Lunney is a novelist, poet, and occasional academic. In 2016 she won the prestigious Griffith University Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature for ‘Chess and Dragonflies’ and the A Room Of Her Own Foundation Orlando Prize for Fiction for her story ‘Those Ebola Burners Them’. She was also the recipient of a Varuna Fellowship. In 2013, she graduated from Western Sydney University with a Doctorate of Creative Arts that explored silence in Australian war fiction. In 2014 she was awarded an Australia Council ArtStart grant for literature.

Her poetry, short fiction, and reviews have been published in Best Australian Poems 2014, Southerly, Cordite, Griffith Review, and the Australian Book Review, among others.

Site: https://tessalunney.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TessaWynn

Instagram (book-related): https://www.instagram.com/misskikibutton/

Instagram (personal): https://www.instagram.com/tessawynn/

Kiki Button—war veteran, party girl, detective, and spy—finds that she can’t outrun her past exploits, even in the glittering world of Jazz Age Paris.

Paris in 1921 is the city of freedom, where hatless and footloose Kiki Button can drink champagne and dance until dawn. She works as a gossip columnist, partying with the rich and famous, the bohemian and strange, using every moment to create a new woman from the ashes of her war-worn self.

While on the modelling dais, Picasso gives her a job: to find his wife’s portrait, which has gone mysteriously missing. That same night, her spymaster from the war contacts her—she has to find a double agent or face jail. Through parties, whisky, and seductive informants, Kiki uses her knowledge of Paris from the Great War to connect the clues.

Set over the course of one springtime week, April in Paris, 1921 is a mystery that combines artistic gossip with interwar political history through witty banter, steamy scenes, and fast action.