Ask the Author: James Wallman
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James Wallman
Take a walk. Drink coffee. Drink wine. Play sport: run, walk, cycle, climb, play football. Or, just go work somewhere different. Or, just wear different clothes (really: it makes me feel like a different writer.) Watch The Office (US version - it's so much better and there are so many, and more interesting, characters. And it's ultimately funnier too.) Read genius writers for inspiration: especially Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, PJ O'Rourke, Laurie Lee, P G Wodehouse, Herodotus, Spike Milligan, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese (esp "Frank Sinatra has a cold" in Esquire). Read "how to write non-fiction" guides like the New New Journalism. Also, Stephen King's On Writing - the essential starter for anyone who wants to write. Remember what an editor of mine (at a magazine where I was a staff writer) told me: write it like it's just a story you're telling, then go back and find out where it's true, where you've smoothed out the edges. Remember what AA Gill wrote in the forward of one of his books: that what you leave out is as important as what you put in. Remember what Gladwell wrote in the foreword of What the Dog Saw, about how the mark of good writing isn't that it persuades you, but that it makes you think about the world in a different way. There's more, I'm sure, & I'm going to add more to this list… but this is a start. Ways of getting over writer's block are so important. It's that Stephen King-meets-Hemingway thing: you write the first draft with the door closed, it's for you, you're just having fun. And it's fine if it's, as Hemingway said, it's shit. Then you edit with the door open, for your audience. You cut all the dreadful stuff that poured out, you shape, sharpen, prune, cut back from the messy mass of stuff you started with, to create something closer to what the sculptor Alberto Giacometti would have recognised: the essence, only the stuff that has to be there, and nothing more. It's a challenge, but you have to get it out of you first, you have to let it grow wildly, before you then trim it back. Hey, everyone has their way, mine's a little like that.
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