Pam Alison Knits

I’m officially halfway through June’s writing challenge. This is a particularly topsy-turvy month for me, and the challenge may have added to the generally unsettled air. It is hard to move on with some aspects of life when most of the rest is stuck. Then again, sitting down each evening to work on the challenge is a chance for me to take charge. Instead of waiting on decisions to be made by other people, and regardless of how the next few months play out, this is my opportunity to look at a future and make my preparations. My goal to get back to a regular writing routine is not so very difficult; it is not about quantity or even quality, it is simply about building consistency. Of course I want to write enough and to write it well, otherwise what would be the point, but those are my own aspirations – all I am really asking myself to do is form the habit of writing.

This consistency is the main takeaway at half-time, although there were a couple of evenings this past week where my energy and my head were not in the right place. Choosing to skip those evenings was influenced by the knowledge that on both occasions there would be ample opportunity to catch up the following day. Thinking about it, that reveals an attitude I want to address during the second half. If this challenge is the opportunity to make my way back to a regular habit of writing, as I claim, then I need to eradicate the “mañana” attitude and encourage myself to write even if I am too tired, even if my soul is weary. There is a value in sitting down at the desk and setting off knowing that the result may well be brief and unsatisfactory, but that there is a possibility of transcending my current mood.

I think my favourite day so far was this past Thursday when I took myself off to a café in town and downed decadent treats whilst writing. I was very pleased that the atmosphere of the café influenced what I was writing, providing me with a different approach to a plot point which I have always viewed one specific way. It is good to have a regular routine but we need to make sure we shake it up a bit as well, or we run the risk of stagnating. Coincidentally, the chapter I was reading this weekend from The Writer’s Book of Days included a list of places you can go to write. It inspired me to begin a list and to think of options that work well for a very restricted budget. I mean, it’s all very well being able to go to a coffee shop but they can run expensive, and there are parks in good weather, or libararies in bad weather.

There are a lot of things I like about the specific challenge I am following, and there are a few aspects I’m not so keen on. Some of the prompts, especially at the beginning, were rather factual, quite “real-world”. I felt they leaned towards autobiographical writing rather than fiction. I know that some of the course members will have loved this part and they may feel less engaged now that the prompts are getting us to think about characters. The challenge really gripped me once we moved on to tasks that fall more neatly into creating fictional work. When the prompt inspires me, and I enjoy the writing task, I find myself happily writing beyond the 15 minutes suggested for each exercise. When I’m not really into the task I am not inclined to write for more than 15 minutes, but I feel short-changed. Realising this, I made a plan to supplement the challenge task on those days with a further creative prompt to keep me writing and perhaps to weave in what I’ve learnt from that day’s challenge.

The host of the challenge provides supporting material each day. I find I’m not so keen on the days where this is in the form of a link to a relevant podcast episode. Perhaps I will listen to these at some point, but they are too long to leap into at the end of a working day. I prefer the days when there is either a little video pep-talk, or a some written material to support the subject of the day. To round off the evening routine, I’m supplementing the writing task with my own little add-ons – reading that day’s entry in both an anthology of literary quotes and a poem-of-the-day book. On a weekly basis, I am also reading through “The Writer’s Book of Days” – a project that I’m expecting to take me through to the end of November reading one chapter a week up to the end of June then one every two weeks. I chose this book in particular because it has a writing prompt for each day and they are prompts I’ve returned to several times over the years.

All of the writing is done with fountain pens on William Hannah notebook paper. I started off with this in the Filofax notebook – “Scribbles” – but I moved it into a notebook made combining the William Hannah archive covers with some slimline Atoma discs. This has the advantage that I can flip the A5 book completely back on itself to save on desk space. That means that Scribbles now houses just my plans and To Do lists for my writing over the coming 8 months. I need to make a cover page for it that quotes Dr Who talking about “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” as that seems to suit the near future quite well. The planner pages are rather messy and, in that, I think they reflect very accurately the state of my world at the current time.

There are all sorts of challenges around different hobbies – challenging yourself to knit 12 pairs of socks in a year and store them all in a “box of socks” until you are finished, for example. Or using a different pen and ink combination each day for 30 days. Vlogging every day in December is another example. Do you take part in anything like this, or does the mere thought send you running for the hills?