Write Smarter with Claire Hennessy

On this week’s Write Smarter Blog, I am delighted to introduce you all to my guest, writer and creative writing facilitator, Claire Hennessy. From Dublin, Claire is the author of several YA novels, including Nothing Tastes As Good and Like Other Girls, and is the YA book critic for the Irish Times. Her most recent book is a short story collection for adults, In The Movie Of Her Life, published by Doire Press.

You have to steal time to write. People sometimes say ‘make time’. Nope. It must be stolen, even though stealing, generally, is a bad thing (see also: burglary, generative AI).

You have to steal time to write, because no one is going to hand it over willingly. Maybe occasionally, if you’re lucky – a pal will mind the kids for an evening, or a partner will send you off on a retreat. Maybe. Mostly, though, there is an endless list of demands on your time and attention and energy. The world under late-stage capitalism is eager to exhaust us and extract whatever it can from us (possibly letting billionaires run the world was not the best idea?). We are busy and overwhelmed. We do not have time to write.

You have to steal time to write, anyway. You have to do this because it is the only way words will get on the page on anything like a regular basis, and you need to get words on the page on a regular basis if you want to write anything long enough to be a book. There are flashes of inspiration – rarer than we would like – that come and let us pour something beautiful out in one fell swoop, sure, and our hearts sing when that happens, but we can’t depend on them. (We can invite in more of these moments by sitting there and doing the work anyway, one word after another.)

You have to steal time to write, because otherwise your days are full of the things that are urgent and none of the things that are important, the things that other people want from you and nothing that you want for yourself. I don’t mean that you have to drop out of regular life entirely, or become a selfish monster. I don’t mean that you should quit your sensible job, if you have one, or your seven part-time roles in the chaos of the gig economy, if that is your situation. Food and shelter are sort of vital, and despite the ubiquity of the phrase ‘starving artist’, one cannot starve for very long. Your corpse is not going to create anything.

You have to steal time to write, because eventually we will all be corpses and we deserve to have spent some time making, rather than just consuming or despairing, even though the world as it exists today would really rather we focus on the latter two.

You have to steal time to write, even if it is not every day. Almost every piece of writing advice is a simplified version of something more complex. ‘Real writers write every day’ is one of those things. Maybe it is twenty minutes while you’re on the bus, typing a few lines on your phone. Maybe it’s seven minutes while you stir a pot of spaghetti. Maybe it’s an hour in the morning or late at night, when your life might be a little quieter, and when you would otherwise fill the time with doomscrolling or panicking about something stupid you said fifteen years ago.

You have to steal time to write. I am writing this for myself as much as I am for anyone reading this, because most writing advice is – like all advice – things that people know they should do even though they often don’t. It is easier to see what the ‘right’ thing is when it’s someone else. We have perspective, and distance, and we can identify the ‘ideal’ option, the one we would pick if we were the best versions of ourselves all the time. Writers do this a lot, when setting goals. We think about what we can do when we are at 100%, when everything goes right, which it rarely does. And then we beat ourselves up for failing. For not writing a book within a week, or a month, or a year. For not making the time to do that.

You have to steal it. Just little bits. But it’s okay. Turns out it was yours all along.

http://www.clairehennessy.com
@chennessybooks