Mhairi McFarlane Writer’s Tip

Wow….well. Please let me say – having written one book, or even more, doesn’t make you an expert! Trust your own gut, always. For what it’s worth, this would broadly be my three step process: 1) Gaze out of windows and at ceilings and in baths, and let ideas drift to you. Never underestimate lazy drool daydream time. It’s essential harvesting. 2) Then write stuff down, and be prepared for the grimly prosaic truth: compared to what you spun in your head, it’ll seem a bit crap. And you rewrite and rewrite until it is less crap. And while you have wonderful moments of loving it, it’ll never be quite as great as you hoped and you have to be OK with that. You will fall in and out of love with it, on a daily basis. Most of the time, it’s more like learning to be bullish about degrees of failure, than fist pumping your own spot-on brilliance. This is the true secret grubby challenge of writing. Learning to face down disappointment and chase the good moments. 3) Finish. It seems so obvious, but, finish. Something unfinished is eternally lingering in the potentiality of perfection and ultimately is neither here nor there. Something finished is something that can make you a writer.
Mhairi McFarlane