Hi everyone,
Welcome to the first of many more pieces from me that I’m doing for my paid subscribers. I’m very grateful to you all for your support. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be giving more access to my writing - on everything from how magazines work, to great celebrity stories, career advice, fashion and styling ideas and more - to paid subscribers. Please do get in touch and let me know what topics, from me, most interest you. First up, a little journey through what I’ve learned that really helps me write….
If you are someone who writes to deadlines, or wants to start writing, or perhaps struggles to commit to the regularity of writing here on Subtack, I hope this post is of some use.
We all know how daunting the blank screen is. Before I started typing this, I spent probably 40 minutes dicking around on my phone - emails, whatsapp chats, checking instagram, playing a stupid game. Anything to stave off the agony of changing a blank screen into 1800 words of any sense or use. One of my favourite Peloton instructors, Jess Sims, always says, just as our feet clip into the bike pedals, ‘The hardest part of the workout is now done - you got here.’ Standing in the shower at 5.30am, because I’m due in at the Lorraine studios, is the hardest part of making it to the Lorraine studios. It’s the same with writing - if you’ve started typing, you’ve totally completed the hardest part of the whole damn thing.
I love writing and all the wonderful writers I know do too. There’s even the odd moment where something I want to write really does meteor blast its way out of my head and onto the screen. But it’s definitely more usual for me to feel that gut-deep anxiety: This ‘maths’ equation is the only one I know: ‘Time until deadline’ multiplied by ‘I am yet to get down one fucking word’ equals ‘I will fake my own death to get out of doing this shit.’
If that’s not you, you can stop reading now. I must stress: I can’t teach you how to be a writer. But I think my friend, Dawn O’Porter, herself a very brilliant and wildly successful author, has the best advice: ‘If you want to be a writer, start writing.’ It really is the only way. You will write things that suck. You will start things you don’t finish. You will abandon thousands upon thousands of words in the quest to get to the right ones. But you can’t be a writer unless you start writing - that is how you start the journey of figuring out what you want to say, and your unique way of saying it.
What I can share my thoughts on, is how I motivate myself to write, and the disciplines I try to stick to when I do it.