Why I don't want to talk about what I'm writing

Sorry for being weird when you ask a perfectly reasonable question.

People often ask me if I’m writing a book. It makes sense: I interview authors, I’m doing a creative writing MA. Why so much fuss about writing unless I’m writing a book? So the enquiry really shouldn’t make me so defensive. And yet as appealing questions go, for me it’s right up there with ‘What took you so long in the bathroom?’

I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been writing the beginnings of books since I was a kid; I’ve never finished one. I’ve never even got close. So the truth is, if you ask me if I’m writing a book, the answer’s probably yes – but I don’t want to tell you, because in three months’ time I might not be writing a book. I might be in a pit of self-loathing because I’ve failed to work out how to finish the book, and I might bump into you, and you might innocently say, ‘How’s the book going?’, which I’d really rather you didn’t.

Or, in three months’ time, I might be writing a different book, and that’s embarrassing to explain too, because it reeks of something Don Draper was once accused of: only liking the beginnings of things. (Perfect writing; a line so sharp I still think of it often, 12 years after the episode aired.)

When the novelist and journalist John Lanchester came on the In Writing podcast, he told me that the desire to write a different book often lingers in the air when he’s feeling bad about the book he’s actually writing. He said:

There’s a sense of play and freedom and possibility at the idea-having, note-taking, noodling-around stage, and then once you get going, there’s a point of no return where basically you have to finish it, and for me, I always end up hating the book, or losing confidence in it, or feeling— very often actually, almost the main symptom is that this is the wrong book to be writing. That other idea I had is a much better idea and I should’ve done that instead, but it’s too late and I’ve just got to press on.

That’s how I feel too, when I’m trying to escape the very difficult and sometimes demoralising process of actually writing a book. Unlike John, I haven’t yet mastered the knack of pressing on until the end of a manuscript – although I will press on with my attempts to press on.

(By the way, John was a fascinating interviewee. Listen here or on your podcast app.)

The other reason why I don’t want to talk about the book is that I have the superstitious feeling that if I discuss it too much, I’ll spook it and it’ll run away. It is my experience that getting ahead of yourself in telling everyone about a project is a surefire way of sabotaging it. Apparently researchers at NYU found that the very act of talking about an idea gives us the sense of having already achieved it, and then we’re less motivated to bother with the actual work.

When I decided to start the podcast, I had fears too – I thought perhaps I’d bring it out and people would listen and feel a bit embarrassed for me that I’d considered it a good idea. So I hardly told anyone until several months after I’d started recording episodes, when I was quite close to releasing it, and that worked well. Something else that helped me finish the job was that I’d embroiled other people in it: generous writers like Elizabeth Day, Sathnam Sanghera and Wendy Cope were among the very first to agree to be interviewed, when the podcast didn’t even exist. It would have felt awful to then fail to release the thing, after they’d given me their time and their faith that I could pull it off.

I don’t know yet how to apply this psychology to writing a book (do let me know what works for you in the comments). Perhaps when you have a book deal and deadlines, i.e. other people expecting things of you, it’s easier to stay on track.

Then again, a friend with several books to his name once told me that the question most dreaded by authors with publishing deals is also ‘How’s the book going?’ (and in the academic world, I’ve heard that ‘How’s the PhD going?’ is a big no-no). So maybe this discomfort is just something that we have to live with, for the joy of doing this.

This Sunday morning…

…I’ll be holding the first In Writing Creative Club, by which I mean that I’ll be sending out a writing prompt to paid subscribers. It will be something simple, designed to get your imagination going. If you then feel inclined to write a novel, that’s wonderful, but what I’m going to ask you to try is just writing a paragraph or two: a piece of flash fiction, or flash memoir, or a poem, or whatever you like. I’d love you to then share this in the comments, and read and comment on what other people have done too.

A suggestion: look at your diary now and put aside an hour on Sunday to do this, if you can. Block it out, and don’t say yes to doing anything else with that hour.

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Until then, thank you for reading. Feel free to forward this to anyone else who might enjoy it. And most of all, good luck with your writing this week.