Top tips for how to get writing before you even begin

A lot of the process of writing is NOT writing. By that I mean, a lot of writing is, as you might guess, thinking. Not just plotting your story out, but thinking in general. Taking in things you see and turning them over in your mind.

I’ll list two simple tips I think you need to get started doing nothing, the very first thing you need to do before you begin. And then we’ll look at the way forward from nothing, into something (in your mind and on the page)

Tip One: let yourself be bored

A good way to get thinking is to be bored. Every great human achievement has probably begun with someone going, hmm, what might happen if… and you can only do this kind of dreaming by letting yourself be still, apart from the world.

This might look a few different ways. Going to an art gallery and mulling over the pictures. Going for a walk by yourself. No music in your ears, no screen in your hand (or perhaps even your pocket!). Just letting yourself walk and think and breathe. You don’t have to walk somewhere particularly interesting. You carry so many of the seeds of ideas around with you already. You just need the time to let them germinate.

You can have a shower – something about the steady sound of water helps me work out images and lines I might never have found on dry land. You might even just lie on your bed staring at the ceiling. Remember: you are not being lazy! Writing can even come from daydreams, so give yourself permission to do just that.

Tip two: do plenty of reading

If you want to be a writer, you are probably a reader. Luckily, you have access to more books and stories than anyone before in the history of humanity. The library is there, the internet, with the Gutenberg Library listing many out-of-copyright and strange old texts for you to peruse, from spellbooks to cookbooks to ancient poetry. Wonderful – then read. First because you want to, then because in reading you will absorb the endless possibilities of language and storytelling, and that will enrich your work.

I like to have a poetry anthology nearby before I start writing. Sometimes just reading something beautiful and true, funny or thorny, even something a bit rubbish, reminds me that writing is an incredible human act and that I can join in – write back, write against. Sometimes I can take a line of a poem or a song and make that the title of the story, to see where I can take it from there. Some examples:

“but there is no road through the woods” - Rudyard Kipling

“But, look, the flowers you nearly brought/Have lasted all this while” - Wendy Cope

“And the soul creeps out of the tree.” - Louise Gluck

All your life, you will never run out of things to look at, songs to hear, films, books, stories, poems. It’s like the human equivalent of birdsong – so join in!