We were rushed, we were sold a Romantic idea that we would find our vocation, something deep in our nature that would guide us to an ideal job for us – one that we were perfectly fitted to by nature and that would make us wholly happy. The trouble was, there was no time and we never got there.

We should have taken weeks away from everything and everyone and given ourselves over to a solitary thinking, free from the pressures of pleasing others. Working out what to do was hard, not because we were stupid or self-indulgent, but because our decisions had to be built on scattered and very imperfect bits of evidence. Confused shards of information were scattered across our experiences. What, in fact, ever were our strengths? There were moments of boredom, excitement, things we coped well with, things that were intriguing for a while and then neglected: all of these needed to be located, decoded and interpreted and pieced together. Finding accurate answers would have meant building up high levels of self-knowledge. In an ideal culture there would have been many novels which took this critical period of career direction as their dramatic focus; with the central character emerging from a heroic journey of enquiry with a clear conviction that they should – perhaps – go into events management, the civil service or ophthalmology.

Instead, the big, consequential choices around career occurred under inescapably adverse conditions. Ultimately we were attempting to make decisions for someone we couldn’t possibly fully know: ourselves in an unimaginable future.

National Novel Writing Month is the perfect way to write your first novel, or to restart writing after a dry spell.

It zeroes in on everything that non first-timers from writing. It uses and abuses our cognitive biases to get something done that looks like a novel. It’s an act of self-hypnosis without equal (and I mean that in genuine praise and awe).

It takes our human instinct for loss-aversion (“What if I FAIL?”) and uses it to the draft-writer’s advantage by manipulating the definition of “loss” to “not 50,000 words”.

It takes our fear of wasting our time on a fruitless pursuit, and says “we only want a month from you. What’s a wasted November? It’s the worst month anyway.”

It takes our herd instinct - our desire to not be alone in what we do - and says, “NaNoWriMo is a way of taking part. It is a way of engaging with the world. And not necessarily around your novel, which could be uncomfortable, but around writing itself, which cannot possibly be bad.”

For all these reasons, and many more reasons that will be personal to each writer (it’s a long story, but when I did it in 2010, it completely sorted my head out), NaNo is the perfect place to start.

But it’s also an addiction - and the way NaNo’s constructed sometimes feels designed as a facsimile of the addictions - social media, drugs, content - of our age.

It’s that balance of commitment and freedom.

The unconditional love of a temporary community.

The fetishisation of quantity of communication of quality - I can guarantee you’ve written about 50k in status updates in your life so far.

Above all, the sense of novelty. The creed that ‘new’ beats ‘better’. You can tell an unedited NaNo novel by the preponderance of space-bears, explosions and dream sequences. By just how much the scene rotates.

This isn’t theory so much as a confession. I’ve been trying to edit my NaNo ’14 novel for about six months. It’s really hard. And the fingerprints of haste are all over it - characters try desperate things, emotional arcs flip (in a bad way), and there is always, but always, something new on the horizon. Not all stories are linear journeys. But a month of writing is - it has a start, and end, and a win condition - and I’m willing to bet most of its novels have a similar shape. I know mine does, and it’s the work of the next year to try and undo that: to give characters wholeness, to make them actors upon rather than victims of the plot. Perhaps better prepared NaNo novels don’t suffer this. But most people don’t prepare beyond a high concept (and I hate to contradict myself, but if they do then yeah, they miss out on one of the great pleasures of nano. Pantsing it is fun.)

I’m not trying to be sententious, here. Or if I am, it’s to myself more than anyone else.

If you just need to get started, to understand that fingers can hit keys and a world can come out, then by all means throw yourself at NaNo, screaming with joy and stuffing Costa Coffee and Haribo Tangfastics down your throat. If you were thinking about doing it, but haven’t started yet - start now. It is not too late. If you give it your whole heart you will like it, then hate it, then love it. Watch the word mountain grow, celebrate with friends, but know that what you’re doing is the writing version of Movember. I reckon that on the 1st of December, 10% of people who’ve done Movember realise that they actually rather like the beard, and then realise that beards come in different shapes and sizes, and that getting the one that’s right for you right now takes time, effort, and that weird oil.

A novel is the same. If you now know you can write, or if you have a manuscript in front of you. Recognise without shame that NaNo is creative fast food. If you need to do it to fall in love with writing again, I can’t argue with that. But if you wish to call yourself a writer - and you wish others to call you one, too - it’s time for tough love. If NaNo is the Yellow Brick Road, then there is a longer and harder road just to the left. It’s less well-maintained. It doubles back on itself, a lot. There are far few people walking it, and they seem to have a certain grimness on their faces.

"#5: The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, rights, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged. Furthermore, they have equal rights within the composition as deliberate, conscious, or premeditated compositional actions or decisions."

-Matthew Herbert​, Personal Contract for the Composition of Music

give it attention: little and often

you cant make it grow faster, you can only make it grow

pruning pretty parts will benefit the whole

it's alive, remember that

it sometimes helps if you talk to it

it can talk back

growing your own is more pretentious than just buying one; just admit it

taking it outside occasionally is a good idea

everyone thinks everyone else's looks better

you can't control the way it grows, but you can stick stuff next to it and sometimes it'll play with the structure of that

what you plant in one season you won't truly see until another

sometimes they sting you

sometimes they bear fruit

“...The sort of resident, who was content to sit in his overpriced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake [...] people who were content with their lives in the high rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, who had no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data processing organisations, and if anything, welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. 

“These people were the first to master a new kind of late 20th century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.

“Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later.”

Who’s the most amazing person you’ve ever met?

What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this?

What’s your kryptonite?

What’s your can of spinach?

Where do you feel most at home?

What tattoo are you waiting for “the right time” to get?

I’m here for one day. Where would you go if you were me?

What are you most afraid of, but have overcome?

Where do you see yourself in five minutes?

You are allowed to give your child one piece of advice - what is it?

Which animal do you think you’ll come back as?

What’s the one thing you’d save from a fire?

What do you find beautiful that you suspect nobody else does?

What would you steal, if you could get away with it?

What’s the one question I should have asked you?

Wotcher. By the by, I have a new story out.

This was originally drafted a couple of years ago for a little writing group. The brief was “base a story on a philosophical thought experiment” and - philosophy spoiler - I took The Ship Of Theseus. Only typing this now have I noticed the pun. 

It’s a genuinely interesting philosophical problem, and one that we will soon face, and I have a lot of heart for this creepy little story, so it’s a pleasure to get it into the brave young mag The New Accelerator, issue #4 no less. And to be paid, however small a sum - that’s gotta spur you on.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “method” recently. The Cult of Lifehack is still with us, after all, and the desire to squeeze another 5% out of work time - or worse, leisure time - lingers, as though we even knew what could be quantified and thus increased by that 5%. But with mental work, or art-work, it’s quite difficult to know what good looks like. 

Hello again. How are you? Bit of an old one, but for completeness...

Education is in a bit of a funny place. Privatisation is swallowing up schools into all-consuming and oversight-free Academy Republics on one hand, while those that remain fully public are choking on the regulations that should help them. It’s a cruel irony: push, pulled and cajoled by institutions that are bigger than them, it’s the schools themselves that are being treated like naughty children. And two groups of people are becoming less and less powerful, all the time.

Michael Rosen has done an awful lot of good writing on this. (Incidentally, isn’t it strange when you see a children’s author’s “adult writing”? I mean, they’re obviously extremely clever and experienced in order to do what they do - and yet the clash of voices always makes me look twice.)

So I was thinking about that situation, and about my old Primary school (Disclaimer: It was brilliant), and yet another piece of insipid corporate language, and wrote What Good Looks Like. It was HC in the Orwellian Dystopian Prize, which was #doubleplusgood - and shortly after, got picked up by Litro Magazine for their “Diaries” issue. (Which means that I can now say, whatever happens next, that I was once in a magazine with Chuck Freakin’ Pahluniuk) 

What with Litro being a Proper Magazine That Charges Money I can’t post the story up yet (give me six months), but I can link to it -

E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops reads like a description of a steampunk internet: the population of the world is isolated in individual rooms, all wired to each other by buzzers and bells and perfectly catered for by the apparatus of the Machine.

Which is all good, only this was written in 1909 - a feat of prediction I can't even imagine. What Forster does is what SF truly does best - he predicts not the technology of the future, but what "this development or something like it" would do to the human condition.

And he's bang-on, in an exaggerated way. A few random bits:

-'She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.'

-"Be quick!" She called, her irritation returning. "Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time."

-'Vashti"s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one"s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation - a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.'

-'At midday she took a second glance at the earth. The air- ship was crossing another range of mountains, but she could see little, owing to clouds. Masses of black rock hovered below her, and merged indistinctly into grey. Their shapes were fantastic; one of them resembled a prostrate man.

"No ideas here," murmured Vashti, and hid the Caucasus behind a metal blind.

In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, "No ideas here," and hid Greece behind a metal blind.'

...Now, the style is characteristic of that early SFnal "thought experiment syndrome" - lots of world-building (someone actually says "as you already know..."), exaggeration, huge swathes of time passing in order to make a point, and a thin character (though maybe with Vashti being a human component, that's the point) - but even the slightly too-neat ending is genuinely affecting. The Machine Stops is properly thrilling/chilling now, so I can't imagine how it would have felt over a hundred years ago. For anyone looking for the literary precedent to Black Mirror's Fifteen Million Merits, it's worth an hour of your time. Even if you are, like Vashti, Very Busy.

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html