The Hyphen

The Hyphen is a newsletter for curious readers 🗞. If you love it, why not consider supporting it for only £6.99 a month (£1.74 a week!), you’ll gain access to all articles, my Tuesday threads, my Sunday Scroll emails, and the friendly comment section. For more of my words: I am the author of six books including a debut novel Olive. My latest non-fiction The Success Myth is out now in the UK and US — selected as “Best Book of the Month” by Apple, part of the Linkedin Book Club and voted "best self-help book in May" by the iPaper. Get yours today from Bookshop.org or Audible. Does writer’s block actually exist? It might be an overused phrase, but there are certainly ways we can increase our flow of words and ideas. Here is a guest column showing how some of the best writer's unblock themselves. Even though I don’t fixate on “routines”, I am very interested in the little things we do to keep ourselves writing and making. Those little tips, whispers of advice, small trinkets in the office, a soft blanket across your lap, a soy-burning candle on a desk, even having freshly manicured nails… anything to help the act of writing, which can often be long, hard, boring and lonely. Sometimes, you hear a little tidbit and it strikes you at just the right time. I love any writing tip offered up. One of my favourite things to do when stuck, personally: pick a book off your shelf and read a page. You will no doubt be inspired by something – a piece of dialogue, a funny phrase, a chapter title – and you will go back to your own manuscript with a slight lift. Other things that help me: Oliver Burkeman’s ‘3-4 hour rule’. Tallying up my word-count every day on a little yellow post-it (whether it was 300 words or 3 words) helped me draft my second novel. Buying a second-hand typewriter just for fun lifted my spirits. Hearing Jessie Burton once say she wrote The Miniaturist “in offices, on the train and in theatre dressing rooms” allowed me to stop being a perfectionist glued to a Word doc at a specific desk. I find the stuff we do around writing endlessly fascinating. So when the brilliant Alice Vincent got in touch pitching an article showcasing the many different ways top authors overcome the dreaded “writer’s block”, I had to say yes. Alice is a fellow Substacker, check out her newsletter Savour, and author of three bestselling books: How to Grow Stuff, Rootbound and Why Women Grow which was recently shortlisted for multiple awards including the iconic Wainwright Prize and Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. Excitingly, Alice has just launched a new Substack and podcast too called In Haste which she describes below. Hope you enjoy the treasure trove of writing advice below. How Oliver Burkeman (and others) get over writer’s block By Alice Vincent It’s up there with smoking Gauloises and wearing black polo necks as one of the biggest clichés of paying your bills with your words: writer’s block. Toni Morrison said it didn’t exist (“it’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now”); Jennifer Egan said she’d never experienced it (“because my process involves writing very badly”) and Philip Pullman questioned why writing should be the only profession to name the concept of work being difficult (“plumbers don’t get plumber’s block”). And yet, here you are, reading advice on how to vanquish it. If you write, chances are you’ll have encountered those gritty little moments when the words feel vanishingly far away. Writing: it is hard. Author Charlotte Runcie and I know this first-hand. We met a decade ago as cub reporters on the same newspaper arts desk, then we wrote and published books, left the newspaper, wrote many other things that we can’t entirely believe are still somewhere in the bowels of the internet, tried on other hats – Charlotte worked in an independent bookshop for a while, I dallied in publishing – had some kids, had some existential crises, exchanged a lot of voice notes and, eventually, came to the conclusion that there really wasn’t enough being explored about the reality of writing – and that maybe we should make a podcast about that. In Haste is just that: a podcast that explores how books really get written. Each week, we ask bestselling, Booker Prize-longlisted, TikTok-phenomenon authors about their lives as writers. How they fit it in around the school run or the day job, how they manage when they’re heartbroken or their first novel has been rejected after going on submission, or they’re parenting two small children in a van somewhere in Europe. Every guest gets asked the same two questions: what’s stopped you writing this week, and what’s kept you going? Here are some of the things they had to say about it: Keep a diary and be child-like For Amy Liptrot, writing diaries has been a lifelong tether to keeping the words flowing – as well as being a crucial basis for her Wainwright Prize-winning and Sunday Times Bestselling nature memoirs, The Outrun and The Instant. Liptrot has been keeping diaries since she was a girl and kept up the habit while in rehab for alcoholism, living alone on a deserted island in the Orkneys and trying to find love in Berlin. “Sometimes at night when I’m sitting on my knees in bed with my cover over my back writing my diary, I feel like I'm just connected back to little-girl me writing my diary. My life’s completely different now, many other things have happened, but when I’m writing my diary, that's a common thread and I feel most myself. And if I don't write my diary for a few days, I definitely start to feel a bit anxious and I feel almost like my experiences have been wasted because I haven't been able to make anything of them in my journal. It certainly sorts my head out on a personal level to put something on the page. [The journals] have also been the basis of my other published work. That's the kind of reason to keep going with it. Accept the discomfort as well as the joy Fact is, writing is just difficult sometimes. As two among the thousands of readers who have had their lives changed by Four Thousand Weeks, Charlotte and I were keen to get Oliver Burkeman’s take on how he gets things written. And he told us what we already knew – but very much needed to hear: “I think by far the most useful thing to do about this state of affairs is just to expect the discomfort. A very useful attitude to have about writer’s block is just that, like most of the time, writing is going to feel kind of difficult and a little bit aggravating. Doesn't mean there aren't some wonderful flow states, but the moment that you're just sort of expecting it to be a little bit hard, it’s far easier to stay with it because you’re not setting up this expectation that it should be like – was it Muriel Sparks who said? – taking dictation from God.” Acknowledge that timing often plays a big part (aka trust the timing!) Bestselling author and books fanatic Cathy Rentzenbrink is such a sage on writing that she’s now written books about how to write books. But that wasn’t always the case, as she explained with regards to the process of writing The Last Act of Love, her beautiful and deeply touching memoir about the death of her brother: “He was knocked over by a car and then he was alive for another eight years. So he was 16 when that accident happened and I was 17. His life ended when I was 25 and I'm now 50. I finished my book when I was 42. I had been trying to do it and failing for 20 years. I'd try and write it as other things. I'd try and forget all about it. I'd decide it was too hard and I couldn’t do the subject justice. I’d decide I should try to write a novel first. I might learn more about writing and then I might be able to do it, but then I’d write novels and it was just so obvious that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, that nothing else really mattered compared to that. So I just kept circling it and coming back to it. I do now think that it all happened in the way that it should. And I now think that when I finished writing the book, it was almost like that was the first possible moment in time where I could sustain it being out in the world. Which, of course, I have come to love and understand.” Remember why you’re doing it Namely, the joy of it. If something else gives you more pleasure – cycling, or gaming, or cooking, or deep-sea diving – then perhaps, as per that Morrison quote, writing isn’t your thing right now. But I suspect you’ve read this far because it is, and it just happens to be difficult. Sophie Mackintosh made the Booker Prize shortlist with her debut novel, The Water Cure, wrote her second novel Blue Ticket in lockdown and was announced as one of Granta’s Best of British Novelists weeks after her third, Cursed Bread, was released last year. And yet she was rejected on submission with her first, unpublished book – something that she’d spent years writing. When we asked her how she kept going – then, and now – she posed it as something that she didn’t know how to stop: “I think I've forgotten a little bit about how heartbreaking it felt [to be rejected] because it was quite a long time ago now, but I'd given five years to this book, I'd spent all my spare time writing it. I really believed in it and I got pretty close. It definitely made the process of going out on submission with The Water Cure a bit scarier because I knew that it wasn't a guaranteed thing. But I think it did help make me a bit more resilient. And it showed, for me, that I really, really love writing. I want to write. Because to start again was quite daunting but I couldn't really think of anything else to do. I didn't think about not writing another book. I was just, ‘I guess I’ll write another novel’. Charlotte and I are both working on our own books now, something which our listeners of the podcast will become familiar with, and we subject one another to the same questions we ask our guest each week: how’s your writing going? It’s been wildly invigorating to hear that everyone else struggles with the same stuff: self-doubt, boredom, loneliness and, on the good days, that addictive high that only writing can bring. In the meantime, what’s keeping you creative? You can now subscribe to In Haste wherever you get your podcasts, and the accompanying Substack channel, too. In Haste How great books really get written. A welcoming community of readers, writers and those who make things even when life gets in the way, with Alice Vincent and Charlotte Runcie. Ps! If you enjoy reading The Hyphen newsletter, why not upgrade your subscription? It’s only £5 a month if you buy an annual subscription. You’ll gain access to the hub of hundreds of posts, a supportive comment section and my bi-monthly round-up of what I’m reading/inspired by. 10% off here - sign up today The Hyphen by Emma Gannon. About me: I'm Emma Gannon, the writer of this newsletter. I’m a bestselling author and creator of the hit podcast series Ctrl Alt Delete. My latest book is The Success Myth. I am a teacher on Skillshare and trained coach. You can also connect with me on Instagram. © 2024 Emma Gannon The Hyphen HQ, London