How to write, or possibly not that at all

A useless guide to nothing whatsoever

So I wrote a note wondering what I should write about, and Dan Liebke (whose Substack you should subscribe to) said he’d be interested to read something about my writing process.

Which made me feel extremely anxious, for a number of reasons.

First of all, I do not generally consider writing about myself to be very interesting. Sometimes I will write something about my own mental health, which a few people will respond appreciatively to even though I am consumed with self-loathing after writing it, due to the preening self-indulgence that I have displayed. There are certainly people whose writing about themselves I find fascinating. I tend to think those people are fascinating people. I, on the other hand, to my own great sadness, am a very dull person, so I don’t consider myself a great subject for writing.

Of course, if there IS anything interesting about me, I guess it’s my writing, so maybe writing about how I write could be interesting. But the other thing is, I so often cringe when I read writers on their “process”. Not every writer, not every time - I’ve enjoyed authors like Stephen King and Terry Pratchett describing how they go about their work - but more often I feel something good and beautiful inside myself shrivelling up whenever I read some writer exalting themselves by banging on about their routine. So often it takes the form of humblebrags - “oh what am I like, procrastinating away, I’m such a hapless old duffer, why would anyone want to be a writer, goodness my life!” Piss off, you self-aggrandising twat.

I absolutely loathe the Thomas Mann quote, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”. It’s such fake modesty, proclaiming one’s own magnificent specialness through a completely artifical show of humility. No, Thomas Mann, that is not what a writer is. A writer is someone who pursues the profession of writing, for better or worse, and your cute little epigram doesn’t support any theory of writers’ jobs being hard, it provides evidence for the proposition that writers are inclined to a desperate need to convince the world that their job is much harder than it really is. I mean, if writing really is so difficult, Tommy, go get a proper job. There are days when I find writing hard, but I promise you that every single day I find it much easier than I did working the checkout at Woolworths. And frankly, working the checkout at Woolworths isn’t even a very hard job. So anyway.

I guess if I could put my problem in a nutshell, it would be that I think I am a wanker, and I think almost all writers are wankers, and so writing about me writing sounds like a Country Bear Wankeroo.

But hey, let’s call THAT part of my process. Do you want to be a proper professional writer, like me? Cool. Step One: get over yourself. If you think being a writer makes you a special class of human, you are very very wrong. You’ll only be special if what you write is special, so quit thinking about yourself and start thinking about your words.

My great urge here is to write a bunch of jokes about writing. I’m resisting that urge right now, but I think it’s a good urge, because in 99% of cases being funny is better than being serious. This doesn’t mean that most writers should try to be funny, because note that I said BEING funny is better, not that TRYING to be funny is better. Most writers who try to be funny won’t be, and once they’ve found that out they should stop trying.

It’s not easy to be funny - it’s so difficult that many people believe that I, who am very funny, am not funny at all. If you want to write funny stuff, you have to accept the fact that should you be lucky enough to have lots of people read what you write, most of them will probably think you’re very unfunny. A certain number of them might decide to tell you that, with comments and social media replies informing you of the fact. They will do things like putting the words “joke” and “humour” and “comedian” in quotation marks. Sometimes they will say “is this supposed to be a joke?” They are very bad people, and you should take their disapproval as a compliment.

Of course, maybe you won’t be trying to write funny things. In that case, you should accept the fact that most people will just not like you, in general. Nobody is universally liked. Nobody is even liked by a majority. If you want to be a writer, you will have to face the fact that probably you will be unknown. If you’re not unknown, you’ll probably be unpopular. If you’re popular, you’ll be disliked by huge numbers of people. Oh well. They still need people at Woolworths.

Anyway, I think when Dan asked me about my writing process he was not looking for any of this bullshit. I am just rambling, but hey! I just had a breakthrough! That’s my process! I ramble.

A hell of a lot of what I write is stream-of-consciousness. I think sitting down, meticulously plotting your piece, figuring out structure and making a good solid plan is an excellent way to go about it. I do not do any of that. I have an idea, I start writing, and I keep writing till I’m finished.

Sometimes, if I’ve had the chance to turn my idea over in my head for a while before I start actually putting words together, I’ll have come up with a few concepts: points I want to make, references I want to include, sometimes just clever phrases I’ve thought of that I think should go in there. That can result in a sort of quasi-plan: I proceed on my rambling with those bits sitting on the side, waiting till I reach the point in the piece when I can inject them.

Sometimes I have to write a whole book, and usually then I do have to plot things out a bit, because to get a publisher interested in your book you need to tell them what’s going to be in it, and that usually includes a synopsis, and if it’s a non-fiction book, a chapter plan. Of course once you’ve got the commission you can change it all, so no need to sweat it too hard, but you do then need to think about structure a bit, and what you actually want the book to be about, and what should be in and what shouldn’t be, and whether you really even have enough ideas to fill a book. Doing this kind of plan is very much against my personal instincts, but that’s what’s so helpful about it. If you’re someone like me, who doesn’t naturally think in an organised way, having tasks that force you to do so from time to time is good for you. It means that even when you are just rambling, your thoughts will be slightly more organised because you’ve had some experience exercising that organisation muscle. That means that you’ll be better at knowing how to inject those good bits in at the right time.

When it comes to actual practical writing setup, I think I will be supremely unhelpful to anyone looking for good advice. Most of my writing is done on the couch, usually with the TV on in the background. I like having a sort of semi-distraction, like music or a show I’ve seen before going on. This is because while it’s great to write in silence with no distractions when the words are flowing and you’re having no problem coming up with the next sentence, when things are not coming so easily and every word seems to take an age to dream up, being able to look away for a few minutes, or let your mind wander, can be a brilliant thing. I am sure I’m not typical in this respect - do not assume for one second that I am telling you that you should be like this - but personally, individually speaking, I much prefer an environment where, when I’m struggling, I can amuse myself for a bit to release the pressure valve in my own head. The distraction has to be completely under my own control, mind. Writing with someone else in the room, trying to conduct a conversation, or going about their own noisy business, can be torture. And if you’re going to have the TV on when you write, my advice (again, not really advice, it’s just what I do) is to never let it be anything you actually wish to follow. It should either be something you’ve already seen, or something you don’t care about. Or not. It’s up to you, I have no idea what’s good. In reality you should probably have a desk in an office and no TV at all. That sounds more professional to me.

I think to be a good writer you need to constantly be open to ideas and subjects. Sometimes it can be difficult to think of what to write, but I think you should always be bubbling over with ideas for what to write about. It’s a frustrating way to be, because probably you won’t ever be able to write everything you want to about everything you want to write about, but it’s better to be frustrated by having too many subjects than too few.

It’s not really difficult to find things to write about anyway. You just have to ensure you are experiencing the world. Always watch people, always listen to them, always pay attention to the news, always watch movies and TV shows, always read books and listen to music. Whenever you hear about something you’re unfamiliar with, go look it up on Wikipedia so you know at least a little bit about it. Look out into the world and absorb everything that’s coming in.

What I’m saying is, try to know as many things as possible, and be absolutely voracious in hunting down and devouring knowledge of every kind. You know how people sometimes say “I’m ashamed I know that”? Never ever say that. If you have knowledge about kids’ TV or 1990s boy bands or low-budget horror movies or Victorian underwear or every Eurovision winner ever or synchronised swimming or the career of Le Petomane…be proud. Knowing things is good. The more things, the better. And if you’re a writer, the more things you know, the more things you’ll have to write about. And the more things you have to write about, the more likely it is that some of them will suit your own writing style down to the ground.

As for being funny…well, the only proper advice, I think, is to say, try anything until someone laughs. Because the only way to know whether you’re funny or not is by whether people laugh or they don’t. It’s problematic because no matter how funny you are, some people will not laugh at you, and if the people who don’t find you funny happen to be your audience, you might go away thinking you’re not funny when actually you ARE funny - just not to them.

Also, maybe you can be funny, but you need practice. So you do have to keep trying, and not let rejection get you down. At the same time you need to be realistic. It’s a very tricky balance. Luckily, when you get it right it’s the best thing in the world.

I don’t know how to be funny, but I am almost sure it’s got something to do with taking in as much funny stuff as possible. As above: watch and read and listen to and absorb as much comedy as you possibly can, and by absorb I mean ABSORB. You want the funny to seep right into your bones. Think about what makes you laugh, and cast your net widely to see how many different things make you laugh. Build a comprehensive catalogue of funny in your head, so that connections and networks are built inside you, and thinking of one thing will always spark off thoughts of another thing. I don’t know how you should analyse comedy, or how you can make a formula of it: all I know is you need to fill yourself up with it.

I think people who want to write funny stuff should disregard the self-mythologising bullshit comedians like to spout about “telling truth to power”, and simply learn to look at everything in the world through the lens of what’s funny about it - or more accurately I guess, what might make it funny.

I don’t think you can make rules about how to make things funny. There are books with handy hints about juxtaposition, surprise, undercutting expectations and other such techniques. Useful for sure, but at the very base leincvel of “I am writing a line, and I want it to be as funny as possible”, the skill comes from a weird blend of practice and instinct that very much comes under the heading of “I know it when I see it”. The ability to know that saying this will be funnier than saying that. It’s mysterious. It can’t be taught, but it can be learnt. Just keep absorbing.

If you look up “How To Irritate People” on YouTube, you’ll find a special starring John Cleese from 1968, pre-Monty Python. It’s written by Cleese and Graham Chapman, and stars them as well as Michael Palin and Connie Booth. There is one sketch in it about a man complaining to a car salesman about his new car’s many problems, and the salesman refusing to accept there are any problems at all. This was a sketch based on a real experience, and a couple of years later it had evolved into the Dead Parrot sketch on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The Dead Parrot sketch is - like a hell of a lot of John Cleese material - about bad customer service. But it’s also - stay with me here - about a dead parrot. Now, giving the car salesman sketch an absurdist twist isn’t necessarily a huge leap, but it could’ve been about a whole heap of things. The customer could have been returning a faulty battleship, or a malfunctioning baptismal font. Or, once it’d been narrowed down to a pet shop, it could’ve been a dog or a cat or a goldfish. But it wasn’t. It was a parrot. And it wasn’t just a parrot, it was a Norwegian Blue parrot.

It is very hard to say why, but I think, though there are a million possibilities for the central theme of that sketch, very few of them would’ve worked as well as the parrot. And the fact it’s a parrot is very important to why the sketch is still iconic.

I think if you want to be funny, you have to cultivate your ability to come up with a parrot. There’s no manual for it, you just have to keep bathing in funny until the parrots start coming to you of their own accord. Good luck.