Writing successfully in a recession

I’m thinking a good deal about creativity at the moment, as I plan Unblock Your Creativity. In particular I’m aware that these are difficult times to let yourself go and be your full creative self.

This applies to all writers – however great the level of experience. When life is so tough for many people, the writing itself can become a problem.

It is easy to put off our most valued plans – or just find that the writing doesn’t flow as richly as it could.

The irony is that this is a vital time to be writing – the media become even more important to people in a recession. The demand for good quality writing grows stronger than ever.

From personal experience, I feel that the key to performing well under pressure lies in your unconscious mind and in learning how to stay in full contact with it.

Roughly 5% of your mind is conscious – the part that plans, runs and observes what you do. The remaining 95% is unconscious. However this 95% is a crucial source of inspiration – it is that 95% that provides you with the energy, the excitement, the ideas, the flow that you need to succeed creatively.

When the pressure is on, the temptation is to fall back on the 5% that we have direct control over. However the result is almost invariably an anaemic, over-controlled, thin kind of creativity.

By contrast, we all have experience of those moments when surprising, fresh ideas just seemed to come automatically, the words fell into place, the characters came to life – if only for a moment. That is the working of the powerful resources of your unconscious.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be able to draw on those deep, rich resources on a regular basis? That is a central skill that successful writers need to develop.

One way to do this, is to use your habits.

Habits are unconscious actions. We have bad habits – some writers procrastinate, others fall back on tried and tested ideas that have run out of steam.

We also have good habits – such as brushing your teeth, reading books or going to movies.

One quick and powerful method of training your unconscious is to link a habit you’d like to have with one you already do have – by chaining one activity onto another.

For example, immediately after a habit such as brushing your teeth in the morning, think of one thing you could do that will improve your writing.

You could (for example) spend the next ten minutes writing the first page of that draft script you’ve been meaning to start. Next day, page two…

Or you could spend an hour playing with an aspect of your writing you’ve been aware of neglecting (develop a character, explore a theme, write a joke…)

After a week or so, the new activity will become a good habit, enriching all your work.

In Unblock Your Creativity, we have great fun playing around with a whole number of powerful ways to get re-inspired and tap into your unconscious mind with all its energy and inventiveness – advanced, practical techniques.

You can learn to turn bad habits into good ones, to get rid of bad habits, to create vivid characters in a matter of seconds, to write down ideas you never thought you had and allow your story to tell you the best way it wants to be told.

To learn more techniques this go to the Unblock Your Creativity page.

Find Time for Your Real Writing

My son Oliver, whose first novel The Hollow Man came out this year (it’s great and I’m not biased) has a good insight into how writers use time in their writing – both in how we write and also what we write.

Let’s start with What.

Oliver talks about how he learned to “buy time” at the start of his novel. His story grabs you from the start, creating questions and in particular involving you in a complex and off-beat central character. This draws you in and “buys time” for the writer to step back and allow the plot to unfurl at its own pace.

You can see this technique at work in many great film scripts. Sunset Boulevard begins with a dead body (whose owner narrates the story of his own life up to his own murder) and then cuts straight to a chase, allowing Billy Wilder, and his co-writers Charles Brackett and DJ Marshman Jr to buy time to develop the central characters in a series of more thoughtful scenes that follow.

Could you imagine using this creative technique to boost up what could otherwise be a sedate first act?

The same idea also applies to How we write.

Our creative minds often need a little nudge to get going. Often we also feel guilty because there are other demands on our time. We tell ourselves we’ll sit down to write when we’ve done all the other work – but often that work is never-ending – and if it does end we are generally too tired to take advantage.

In this case, I suggest you buy time by doing a deal with yourself. Start the day with a fixed amount of time devoted only to writing. It doesn’t matter how short, you can get a great more written in regular 30 minute or 1 hour slots early in the morning than in a snatched day or two, grabbed out of your schedule at irregular intervals.

It may involve a little motivation – getting up early perhaps, or cutting down on the time you spend on other things – but the good feelings you get as you start immediately moving ahead will soon be their own reward.

If you want to learn more ways to get your creative mind working in powerful ways, then click here.

I’m running Unblock Your Creativity for Euroscript on Saturday November 26th (note this is a date change from the printed brochure).

We’ll be exploring advanced writers’ techniques for enriching your work, whether you are blocked, going slow or just want to tap into that writer’s muse to create better scripts.

These are all practical techniques that I use myself every day in my professional working life, and have kept me creating and earning now for many years.

Join me on an inspiring and invigorating journey into the essential ways of working as a creative writer. Click here to learn more.