My Writing Addiction and How I Do It

Hemingway said to write drunk and edit sober. Well, I have a very large glass of Aldi’s finest apple crumble gin liqueur and tonic that is mostly gone and Grammarly. Let’s see what we can do!

For those that don’t write, I have heard both complaints and encouragement. You get the ‘Oh it’s easy to just sit down and write. I wish I had a job that easy. Must be nice to be able to sit on the computer all day and play’. Then there are the non-writers that are both shocked and horrified. ‘How do you do it? OMG, I could never do that! Where do you find the time? You have so much imagination!’

For those of us that do write, by the way, I have just written, wright, right and rite before I could even figure out how to spell write! I blame the gin. Anyway, for those of us who do write, we know the truth. We spend approximately ten per cent of our time actually writing. It’s true, not only am I an author but I have many author friends.

For those of you out there in the world reading this, who are scratching their heads and wondering what we do with that other ninety per cent, let me explain it to you. Honestly, there is so much more to it.

First of all, we procrastinate. So much time is wasted with procrastination. For instance, I will have a fantastic idea. In my mind, I have a full-blown story with more detail than you can shake a stick at. The problem is I have to get it down onto some form of physical something that others can read.

Sometimes, I have a notebook that I jot the gist of it down in. Other times I sit at my desk and open plottr to plan it all out. Scrivner is also my other go-to program to make notes in. That’s when the lurking darkness of the internet waits.

Something will pop into my head. ‘Oh, I need to research that. How did the great fire of London really start?’ Three hours later and I’m watching Karen videos on Tok-Tok. How did I even get there? How on God’s green Earth did I go from researching the great fire of London to some random old white lady yelling at kids for drawing on the pavement with chalk?

I would absolutely take the hose away from the old bat and use it on her. Just saying!

I digress!

The internet is a dark insidious device that I swear was developed with the sole purpose to distract. It may be the information highway, but I swear we spend more time rubbernecking than heading to our destination!

After the procrastination. Well that never really ends, comes the timeline. That’s if you are a plotter and not a pantser. What's that you may ask? A plotter is someone that carefully world builds their story and takes it one meticulous step at a time. They know every step of their process and how they are going to get there.

There is even a template for people like that called the snowflake method. You start small, with a character, building it up and out, until you have all the facets of a snowflake. No plot holes to be seen, iron-clad and everybody in their places.

Then there are the pantsers’. Those fly by their seat writers who thrive on chaos and mayhem. They have an inkling of an idea in their head, and they let fly. Screw plot holes, and time-lapses. That can all be sorted in editing. That’s why we pay those devils to torture us, right?

You can always go back to my opening statement about the Gin in regards to editors. Writers need a hard drink when their manuscripts come back. Covered in the red of our lifeblood, where we have been butchered on the altar of improved writing. I honestly think that you have to be a little evil to edit. They know how zealous an author is about their work, yet they take utter joy in shredding our egos and reducing us to babbling toddlers.

I may be a little bitter, but let’s move on.

No matter if you are a plotter or a pantser, you still have to write. Your first draft, your second draft, possibly your third or more, before it's ready for the public eye. But before it ever gets there, you have the beta readers, the proof readers, the tester groups, and I’m sure a few more that my alcohol addled brain can’t remember right now.

Let’s say that we’ve made it to a finished manuscript. Do we have cover art? What about social media? Do you have your group that pimps you out? I mean, let’s face it, as a writer we are little more than glorified prostitutes of literature. We sell ourselves to our readers, pouring out our souls for their entertainment. Out PA’s the pimps.

I swear I have spent more time, advertising and promoting than I ever have actually writing. This leads us back to that viper’s nest called the internet. It’s a catch 22 situation. We need it, we rely on it, but we have to be strong and resist its siren lure. I guess I should be totally honest here, at least to myself if no one else. That is never going to happen. I’m addicted to TikTok. I spend way too much time and money on webtoons, and if the government or police ever searched my search history, I may be in trouble. My only Alibi is I am an Author! I have published books that contain things that you just can’t do in real life. That’s why it's fiction. No officer, I was really not planning on killing someone, I was researching what calibre bullet would go through a concrete wall for a character in my story that is an assassin. They are going to kill child sex traffickers! So, it’s not really a bad thing, right?

Somehow, I don’t think they would appreciate that.

To sum everything up, because my giant gin glass is empty, being a writer isn’t what people think it is. It’s a long process, that has so much more involved in it than just, ‘writing’. I wish I could sit down and write out a story without days, weeks, or months of planning, researching and headbanging, but alas that’s not how it works. At least not for me, or the other people I have met over the last nine years of my journey into the world of the written word. See what I did there with the alliteration? Grammar is key. But don’t expect a writer to know how to spell, cause that’s just asking for silly things.

One thing we will all agree on is writing is a passion. It a need that drives us to create, build and shape new worlds. Like the title says, Writing is an Addiction and one I will keep until my dying day.