The Least Glamorous Dream I’ve Ever Had

Hello chums. When I was younger, I had a fairly cinematic idea of what being a writer would look like: sitting by a tree chewing a pen, notebook in hand, beautiful old libraries for research and quiet, a lot of cafés. To note, there are nowhere near enough cafés in my life, but there are some. Long mornings scribbling in beautiful notebooks. Thoughtful conversations with other literary types who would presumably say things like “interesting use of structure” while smoking moodily beside a window (I’m Gen X, smoking was still ok back then, guys).

I don’t think I ever pictured myself trying to edit a paragraph in a freezing car park while waiting for a child to finish rugby training, eating a crushed cereal bar I found in the bottom of my bag and wondering whether I remembered to move the laundry into the tumble dryer. And yet, reader, here we are. Ok, the cereal bar is a trying to sound sensible lie, I’ve got a crumbly choc brownie. It’s very tasty.

This is the thing nobody really tells you about writing - or perhaps they do, but it gets drowned out by the prettier version. The photographs of tidy desks and annotated manuscripts, launch pictures where everyone looks clever, engaged and slightly wine-lit can exist, but often the reality is far less glamorous and, honestly, far more ridiculous.

Most writing happens around life rather than apart from it. You wedge it into the corners of the day, you write tired, distracted. You write while mentally keeping track of PE kits, supermarket lists and whether the dog has had her flea treatment. Half the time, my “creative process” is simply trying to remember what I called the document.

There are currently several versions of the same novel living on my laptop under titles that suggest a gradual psychological decline: FINAL DRAFT. FINAL DRAFT 2. FINAL_version8. FINAL_lastedit_ACTUAL. None of them are final. I’m on novel three and the current draft is called “WoS FINAL FINAL MASTER”, this seems optimistic at best. Unless someone is genuinely successful enough to quit the day job and write full-time, the writing has to be squashed into ordinary life somehow. My phone notes are full of wee snippets I no longer understand.

Absolute mysteries. “Bleach carcass. The fox. Image of Cairo. Dust desert/highlands – parallel Agnes/Kat”.  “Blue door. Wet feathers. Maybe mother angry?” Thanks, past Charlie, very helpful.

I also think there’s an assumption that writers spend most of their time actually writing. Sitting in some state of artistic flow, producing beautiful sentences while classical music, or God forbid jazz, drifts through the room. I like dreadful American television in the background. Everwood and Chesapeake Shores have seen me through some difficult scenes. A surprising amount of writing life is admin anyway.

After months feeling quietly hopeful about a project, you send it out and spiral because somebody else announced a book deal online while you were unloading the dishwasher. You can feel deeply secure in your own work right up until another writer achieves something lovely and suddenly you’re having a full dramatic breakdown clutching your childhood panda. Teddy. I mean teddy. This has happened to absolutely nobody I know personally. Obviously.

I wish I could tell you maturity cures this. It does not. What changes, I think, is that you become better at recognising the pattern, at letting the wobble happen without immediately announcing your retirement from literature forever. Mostly. Or at least you learn to keep the spiralling internal while outwardly replying “delighted for you!” with what I hope is convincing sincerity.

The weirdest part is that writing itself often looks deeply unimpressive from the outside. If somebody watched my actual process in real time, they would conclude that being a writer mostly involves staring into the middle distance while folding endless kids’ trackies and walking Fidra, my dog, who remains my most trusted story advisor.

A lot of the work happens before words even reach the page. I carry things around for ages. Snippets of dialogue. Images. Fragments of sentences. I mentally rearrange a paragraph while standing in Tesco trying to decide whether avocados are worth the risk. Note to self, they never are (I grew up in an avocado-growing region: Scottish supermarket avocados and I have unresolved issues).

My writing process is also a bit chaotic. The idea lurks at the back of my head for a while and I try not to approach it too directly, in case it bolts. I scrape around the edges first. Who are the characters? Where is it set? What’s the mood? Then eventually I have enough for a sprint at a first draft, which is usually a strange mix of fully drafted prose and notes to myself in capitals.

<WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT?><IS THIS IN CHARACTER><WHY?>

Then I leave it alone for a bit. Come back. Add scenes. Delete scenes. Wander off on a research tangent at midnight. Convince myself the ending is impossible. Have another bash at it anyway. Sometimes weeks or even months go by between drafts. There’s nothing cinematic about any of this. It’s mostly me pacing about the kitchen thinking “hmm” while ignoring emails.

Then comes the submissions process, which is its own peculiar form of psychological endurance. Submission forms, word counts, updating biographies, chasing emails, formatting documents to slightly different specifications because one lot wants twelve point Arial and another apparently considers that a crime against Gutenberg.

At the moment, because my publisher is taking a break, I’m looking for an agent or publisher for my second novel. Which sounds far more glamorous than it feels. I’ve queried eight so far. Some places say “if you haven’t heard within eight weeks, assume it’s a no”, while others cheerfully suggest waiting six months. Six months! It’s reasonable, I know, with my publisher hat on but from this side of the fence it’s tricky, to say the least. But I wait.

I try to keep working. Novel three is sitting in the middle ground at the moment, fully structured but not fully fleshed out. Part of me wants to disappear into it entirely. Another part wants to fling the laptop over the fence and become a garden centre midlife perimenopausal mum instead. Plants don’t take quite so long, do they? Also my printer has died, which feels like a personal attack because I edit heavily on paper.

If you do happen to have work out in the world already, there’s another layer of admin waiting for you. Grant applications, residency applications and event pitches. Trying to get pieces into journals and anthologies. Trying to organise events or convince people to come to them. Tiny bursts of hope followed by tiny, perfectly polite rejection emails that somehow still manage to suck all hope from your soul.

Hey, it does come off sometimes, my pamphlets with Red Squirrel Press are out in two weeks, which I’m genuinely excited about. They’re companion pamphlets called Grit & Flesh, and I’ll tell you more about those next week. I can’t wait. Some of these poems have been with me for a long time, some are still really new.

Then there’s social media. I’m genuinely very comfortable running promo for someone else, but it still feels faintly unnatural to cheer my own work, even though I understand perfectly well why we all do it. One minute you are trying to write something emotionally truthful and the next you’re wondering whether posting about an event at 8.30pm gets more engagement than 6pm.

Did you know that some publishers ask for follower numbers? Thankfully not all, but there is definitely an expectation that writers will promote themselves to a certain extent. Again with my publisher hat on, I get it. The best promo is when writers speak of their own work and engage with their audiences. I still periodically wonder whether I should have a newsletter, right before deciding I cannot emotionally sustain another platform demanding content from me. This, my blog, my thoughts for the week (ish!) is what I have settled on.

Despite all this, despite the admin and the waiting and the emotional nonsense of it all, I still love it. Or perhaps love is too tidy a word for something that regularly makes me question my own judgement and sanity. What I mean is that writing still feels important to me in a way I can’t quite switch off.

Then there are the moments around the work itself. The launches, the conversations afterwards. Dreams of radio interviews and perhaps one day gracing the red BBC Breakfast sofa, as you head off to a tiny literary events where somebody turns up clutching a dog-eared pamphlet and tells you a poem stayed with them and that blows you over. Those moments matter because so much writing happens privately, alone in your own head, second-guessing everything. You forget sometimes that the work eventually reaches other people.

I’ve written before about counting chairs at launches, trying to judge whether enough people are coming through the door to make the room feel alive. That image keeps returning to me because it says something true about creative life generally. From the outside, people tend to see the visible moment. They see the publication date, the event maybe, the book and they (hopefully) read it. They don’t see the years that build up to it: drafts, failed attempts, abandoned documents (FINAL.MASTER.10.DONTUSE). The mornings where you wrote two decent lines and considered that a major achievement. Nor do they see how ordinary most of it is.

Writers still need to put bins out. We still panic about money. We still lose entire afternoons to life admin and discover, too late, that we were meant to bring snacks to something. I think I expected creative life to feel more separate from ordinary existence than it actually does.

Writing has ended up threaded through every part of my life. It sits alongside family life, work, school runs, grief, joy, waiting rooms, holidays, dog walks, and all the other untidy bits of being a person. I think that’s partly why it becomes difficult to separate from identity after a while. Even during periods where I’m producing very little on the page, something is still quietly happening in the background. Sentences drift through my head while I’m unloading the dishwasher or driving to sportsball training. Ideas gather slowly while I’m doing completely ordinary things.

I think that’s part of the gift of it. Writing doesn’t have to exist in some pristine, separate artistic space to matter. It folds itself into real life. It absorbs what’s happening around you. The conversations, the exhaustion, the funny moments, the difficult ones, the endless practical nonsense of keeping a household running, all of it feeds the work eventually. The writing is still there, even when the desk is messy and the routine has gone sideways. It keeps pace with your life rather than waiting for life to become perfect first.

When I was younger, the dream probably involved recognition, publication. A sense of arrival. Now, if I’m honest, part of the dream is simply sustaining the practice without burning myself into the ground. Continuing to make things while still having a life around it. Staying open to possibility without attaching my entire self-worth to outcomes I can’t control. That sounds very mature and measured written down like that. In reality, I still have moments where I dramatically decide it’s all hopeless because an email hasn’t arrived quickly enough, possibly while clutching my childhood teddy. Again, no serenity here.

I think I understand now that the actual writing life was never going to resemble the fantasy version anyway. It was always going to be stranger and messier and more ordinary than that. I’ve grown to trust it more.

The café version of being a writer was performative. Don’t get me wrong, I do still write in cafés sometimes, usually while one of the kids is at some training session or another. But the real thing also involves sitting outside making notes in your phone while eating somebody else’s abandoned crisps because you forgot your lunch. It is deeply unglamorous and still the thing I keep returning to.

My writing routine is held together with determination, caffeine and whatever twenty-minute gap I can salvage from the day. I open the document again anyway, which at this point feels like the truest definition of a writing life I can offer.