How to write when you just don't want to

I notice with pride and alarm that the last post I published was the 30^th post I have written for this blog. I started blogging in September, after I finished writing my thesis. My blog posts seem to generally run to a page of A4, roughly 500 words, so even a historian can work out that I’ve now written nearly 15,000 words for this blog. That’s 5,000 more than my undergrad dissertation, 5,000 fewer than my MA thesis. That’s a lot of words, and I’ve reached one or two conclusions.

I don’t care what anyone says, non-fiction is easy. Without an idea, you cannot write fiction. Without a clue, you can still write non-fiction.

I’m not saying that it’s necessary or advisable to hammer out whatever comes into your head, but I find that in non-fiction, whether writing an academic essay or a slightly whimsical blog post, the act of writing itself is a great way to overcome writer’s block. I was never any good at planning essays, and I certainly don’t plan what I’m going to write on here - and you can’t tell, can you?

Sometimes I have a couple of ideas about what I want to say about a particular subject, and that helps things along. Sometimes I just sit down in front of my old adversary, Document1 – Microsoft Word, and start writing.

The point is that writing your thoughts down, just like saying them out loud, helps to develop them. And writing them down has the added bonus that you don’t seem quite as odd as you might if you said whatever you were thinking out loud.

I’ve also found that the process of writing this blog helps to crystallise in my memory the books I’ve written about. It’s an alarming feeling to read a book, then think back to it a few months later and realise that you can remember virtually nothing about it. The process of writing about a book, of setting down a few thoughts about it, is an excellent way of remembering it. This seems to work even if you take my magpie-like approach and just write about what you found interesting, rather than trying to produce some kind of coherent review of the book.

I know that writing about books is a niche market. I know that not everyone likes books, and I know that not everyone who likes books likes or has read the same ones as me. But at this momentous stage, I’d like to say thank you to my loyal following of five – count ‘em – subscribers to my blog.

Now, any thoughts on how to get over fiction-writer’s block, anyone?

Autopeotomy and the OED

A brief foray into non-fiction.

Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne is the history of a former US army surgeon imprisoned in Broadmoor lunatic asylum, near Crowthorne, in the late nineteenth century. It charts his involvement with the creation of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was compiled with the help of hundreds of volunteers throughout the English-speaking world who read obscure books and sent in little slips of paper with words and quotations illustrating their meanings. The surgeon, Dr Minor, was imprisoned after he killed a man in Lambeth whilst suffering from one of his periodic, almost nightly, bouts of delusion. From his asylum cell, lined with his many books, he begins a correspondence with the editor of the OED that will last twenty years and will prove him to be one of the most meticulous and productive of the many volunteers involved in the project.

The subject matter, a murder in smoggy Victorian London and the severe conditions of a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum, are enough to make Edgar Allen Poe salivate. The story hinges on the tension between Minor’s insanity – he is convinced that he endures nightly persecution by would-be assassins who emerge from the floorboards to drug, torture and sexually abuse him – and the evident lucidity of his work on the dictionary. It is told well, with a verbosity that suits the bookish subject matter, and leaves one’s own vocabulary enhanced (see title, a late twist in Dr Minor’s already grim saga).

As with all such books – and to continue on from the previous post on Burgess – it suffers from what I perceive to be a problem. Some of the facts are clearly verifiable, and the author acknowledges his debts to many documents, institutional registers and the like. But some are obviously the product of artistic license, and this bothers me. Either write a history, or write a novel. I might sound a bit militant here, but I am a historian by training. On the back of the book, it is described as a ‘classic work of detection’. Very noncommittal. But Winchester does intersperse his narrative with enough perhapses and maybes to let us know that he is filling in a number of gaps. He is being honest, at least.

I sound very snobbish about this, I know. I enjoy a book that meddles with the line between fiction and reality, but I think I only enjoy this in a fictional context. Hopefully somewhere out there is a semi-history or a historical novel that can persuade me to take the plunge off my high horse, but I’m not quite there yet.