With details of writers retreats and more:
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Have we got some news for you.
No, no, not *that* news.
Yes, yes, we do realise making an announcement at this exact moment
is kinda like farting into a gas storage tank but we've had this
planned for weeks and frankly we are both more important and more
interesting than the ever-disintegrating Government of the UK.
ANYWAY.
The news.
Are you ready?
Here is it.
Two years and an upturned world in the making...
Here we go...
Real. Life. Writing. Retreats. Are. Back.
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Yes,
that's right. It's time. Let us all gather and eat and write and
laugh and share gold stars.
If
you wanna skip the pre-amble (or post-amble?) here are the links. You
know what to do:
The WHQ Weekender
welcome back party and literary weekend of JOY
Tickets here >>
Real life writing
retreat tickets - currently in Brighton, Birmingham and Edinburgh
Tickets here
>>
For those of you who joined Writers' HQ after the world stopped and
don't know us in our original form: we used to run a whopping 16
one-day writing retreats across 14 locations every single month.
We'd pile a bunch of awesome writers in a room (10am - 4pm), ply you
with tea and pastries and fruit, get you to set your targets for the
day, coax any blocks and niggles and grarghs out of you, block the
internet, and then write and write and write and win gold stars for
progress with more tea and sandwiches and chatting and laughing in
between.
They were amaaazinnggg. We've had writers bash out 10,000 words in a
day. We've had writers finish novels, short stories, plan new work,
make serious progress with existing work, write academic papers,
children's books, memoirs, essays, flash fiction, poems, you name it.
And we've helped writers make FRIENDS and find COMMUNITY and CONNECT
and all those lovely things we've all been desperately missing over
the last two years (and longer tbh).
For those who do know us from the olden days: don't panic! If your
favourite location isn't on the list yet, it is coming back. Pls just
imagine the logistical nightmare of relaunching 16 events all in one
go. We're getting to you though, we promise.
Eeeeeeeeh we're so excited!
To recap:
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Ok we're done. Ish.
We know this isn't the real proper newsletter you'd expect at the
beginning of the month but we figured it was a big enough
announcement to take over the usual newsletter spot, BUT if you need
your monthly pep and support fix try this:
Writing for writing's sake is valuable and important and necessary
and you don't have to be on a production line to the publishing
industry.
It doesn't make your writing less valid to pootle around in your
notebooks with no end goal other than to enjoy it.
You can just write because you love it, because it's a soul-deep
calling, because writing is the practice, it's the use of the skill for the
joy and moment, it's not the end goal. It's the thing you do on the
regular because it's meaningful to you for whatever reason.
Getting published is so often a byword for being a successful
economic unit and that in turn is so often anathema to the act of
creating. So. Chill on the end goal situ. Write because you love it
(at our retreats).
See you IN REAL LIFE very soon
Sarah, Jo and Team WHQ
PS As ever, let us know you've read this far by sharing THIS SPECIFIC GIF on Twitter,
hashtag #whqcommunity.
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Writers' HQ, Oast Business Centre , North Frith Farm, Ashes Lane , Tonbridge,
Kent, TN11 9QU, United Kingdom
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| welcome to another
Writers’ HQ newsletter.
Here’s what we’re doing today: a kids’ say the darndest things piece,
a plea for an anarchist uprising, then circling back to that gosh
darn funny kiddo thing as a way to make your writing go ✨
zwiingggggg 💫. You ready? Let’s go!
I recently had to take my son to the
library. I say ‘had to’ like I was under duress because, well, I was.
Let me explain. My son, age 6, has a number of special interests.
These include, but are not limited to: Lord of the Rings, War of the
Worlds (the Jeff Wayne version), and Indiana Jones and the Something
of Something. These are pretty all consuming in his world. As in:
that is his entire world.
(Extra context: for his school talent
contest he performed a one man show he called Indiana Jones
Presents Jeff Wayne’s War Of The World where he recited
the entire ‘no one could have believed…’ monologue right up to the
first BAM BAM BAMMSSSSS word-for-perfect-word).
Anyhoo, a few days previously, his class
went on a school trip to the library. It was super sweet. They all
put on their little high vis jackets and walked two-by-two holding
each other’s hands. The kids who didn’t have library cards were given
them and then they could each take a book out. They got to try the
touch screen takey-outy machines and had a tour of the new little
reading nooks dotted around the childrens’ book area. Then they all
held hands again and tiny-person-walked back to school. Wholesome af.
Except my son.
Indiana (my son, not Jones) got the almighty
shits with the librarian and kicked the fuck off.
No, Indy!
The librarian’s crime? Not letting him into
the adult book section so he could get himself a copy of Lord of the
Rings. He didn’t want a stupid kids book, he said. He wanted Lord of
the Rings. The librarian and his teacher tried to explain. It’s not
that you can’t have LOTR, it’s that we can’t let you loose out there
because we need to keep 30 tiny idiots contained in here so as not
to, like, lose any of you. No, my son insisted. I want that book.
(Further context: please imagine this all being
said by a three-foot tall smoosh-face with cheeks the size of tennis
balls, a mane of lush blonde curls and the most angelic, sunshine
grin you’ve ever seen.)
The stand-off continued and, eventually, out
of time and with heels dug firmly into the civic polyester carpet,
Indiana had to return to school bookless.
Later, at home, a small and wholly
unreasonable request from me to please put his shoes where the shoes
live tipped him over the edge, and unable to contain his rage any
more he yelled.
"I don’t want to do your stupid rules.
I just want to do what I want to do."
Yes, Indy!
I can’t disagree, ya know?
He has a valid point. The rules are stupid
and I also don’t want to do them. It doesn’t matter which rules
either. Basically all of it is stupid. Just read the news headlines.
See? Stupid. Try to get mental health support for yourself. Stupid.
Try to get mental health support for your child. Unbearably stupid.
Attempt to apply for a job. Rent a house. Buy a house. Speak to a
doctor. Get financial support. Help a relative. Help someone in need.
Apply for a passport. Not contribute to climate change or other kinds
of exploitation. All those things. Stupid stupid stupid.
But here’s the thing. They’re not stupid by
accident or because the people who make the rules are out of touch.
They’re stupid on purpose because people who are exhausted,
frustrated, and stressed aren’t so good at being creative and people
who run out of creativity aren’t so good at, say, fighting for better
things. The stupid shit is there to make you tired. The cruelty, as
the famous headline says, is the point.
I’m currently into a cultural and political
theorist called Mark Fisher who talks about "psychological
privatisation" and I’ve never air-punched so hard as when I heard
that. Yes, Mark Fisher!
It’s something like this: work and life demands too much of us and
because our communities have been decimated we don’t turn to our
fellow humans for help or say ‘ya know what? How about we do
something better?’. Instead we try to make ourselves more efficient,
push ourselves harder, buy into mindfulness and productivity
strategies (ahem), bullet journal obsessively (hi, it me!), and think
the problem lies with us and not all the bullshit going on out
there. If only we could be more organised. If only we could be
faster. If only we were simply better human beings. If only we could
just bend our brains a little bit more out of whack and it will be
fine. It’s fine. It is. I said it’s FINE.
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I
know Indy’s teachers weren’t being purposefully obstreperous about
Lord of the Rings. Of course they want my absurd kid reading whatever
books he wants because, like, that’s literally their job. It’s just
that they’re too exhausted, frustrated and stressed to even manage
five minutes of 1-1 time to get him the book, or to think of a
creative solution to one kid wanting to be over there when there’s 29
of them over here, and that in turn means he won’t be up all night
with a torch under his duvet staring at the maps and learning how to
sound out Ar-a-go-rn, which in turn makes him exhausted, frustrated
and stressed and makes it harder for him to learn and do the cool,
creative stuff, which makes my
life harder and makes me
too exhausted, frustrated and stressed to do etc etc etc.
All
of which is to say, there
is such a huge amount of stupid going on right now. So much. All the
time. Constantly. It’s exhausting and it’s hard. But if we let it
kill our creativity we lose everything.
We
must protect our creativity. We cannot let tough times dull its
magical sheen.
It
is only the stories, the music, the art, the joy - the baffling
exhilaration of being alive - that will get us out of this mess.
Even
when it all feels too much, remember the Indy Rule:
Do
not do the stupid rules. Just do what you want to do.
And
let it free you up just enough to keep on going.
Go
write.
Sarah,
Jo and WHQ
PS
We eventually found the most unbelievably nerdy history of Middle
Earth with a bunch of pull out maps and Indiana is now a very happy
little sausage.
PPS If you haven't already, get yourself on board with the full Writers' HQ experience
for non-stop writerly shenanigans and a very much
un-decimated community of super friendly writer-types.
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Ok we're done. As ever, let us know you've
read this far by sharing your best INDIANA
JONES gif on Twitter,
hashtag #whqcommunity.
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okwe'redonestaysafeloveyoubyeeeeeee
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Writers' HQ, Oast Business Centre , North Frith Farm, Ashes Lane , Tonbridge,
Kent, TN11 9QU, United Kingdom
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The other day I found myself 149 meters
above sea level in the midday sun, on a flint path with a punctured
tyre and open toe sandals, and no way home save pushing my sorry
flat-biked self 20km.
*record scratch*
*freeze frame*
I bet you’re wondering how I got here?
Also bet you’re wondering what this has to
do with writing.
You know how it works. Bear with…
Let’s rewind to the beginning of the bank
holiday weekend. The sun was shining and I had the inimitable
pleasure of sitting on the M25 and various M offshoots with sticky
bored children in the back for approximately six hours. It. Was.
Great.
When I finally got home I was kid-free for
five whole days, job-free for four whole days, and I really wanted
some of that hot sun action.
My gentleman accomplice and I decided that a
long ol’ bike ride would be lovely and duly planned a path along the
seafront, up the Adur (pronounced Ada for the non-locals, not Adieu), up onto the
South Downs Way and over some hills to Cissbury Ring where we would
sit with our books and a picnic and read and eat in the sun before
rolling down the hill home for beer.
It was gonna be great.
However.
We both have road bikes.
In fact, I have slicks on my road bike
because, well, why wouldn’t you? Such a great noise against the
tarmac. Tcshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Oh yeah.
We discussed this problem. These bikes are
wholly unsuited to off-roading. But you know what? The river path
would be fine, it’s flat, dry mud. The South Downs Way is pretty well
trodden. We walk up Cissbury Ring all the time and it’s FINE. If it
gets too crazy we can push the bikes or turn back. It’s fine.
Everything is fine. It would be fine. Fine fine fine. We wanted to
go. We had to go. The sun was calling us. Idioting through the air in
the bright blue sky at stupid speeds like kids was calling us.
Sitting on the hillside in the afternoon warmth with Octavia Butler
and Deborah Levy was calling us. So we chucked our snacks and books
in a bag and sped off.
MID ANECDOTE SEGUE! I’ve finally got round
to reading Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg and I can’t
quite believe I’ve never read it before. It’s like reading the things
we always talk about at Writers’ HQ, but better and less sweary and
written by someone who can focus on one thing for more than 20
seconds.
Goldberg says that before you can write you
have to do writing practice. She says give me your time. Give me 20
minutes or 30 minutes or one hour and just write anything. Write a
list of things to write and then write until the ideas flow through
you onto the page without you being involved all that much, except to
steer the pen. Write about the way the clouds look or how you felt
when you ran across a busy road or the feeling you get when you read
the news and there is literally nothing you can do except hope. Write
terribly. Write so poorly you’ll want to burn it all and never look
at it again. Write literally any old shit.
We do this so we can find the ideas that
become good writing. The honest ideas. The true ideas. The way we
really feel when we’re not gatekeeping our own goddam selves. It is
not just about learning to write with reckless abandon. It’s about
learning to be with reckless abandon.
So we spent a good couple of hours pootling
up the river, chatting amiably about nonsense, admiring each other’s
butts when one of us dropped behind or sped ahead, and generally
enjoying the outsideyness of outside. We pushed up the hills and
rounded a farm with sproingy lambs and went up some more and more and
more and even the rockier paths were fine and we were getting sweaty
and tired when finally Cissbury Ring was the next peak. Yay us! We
freewheeled into the valley before the final ascent and oh wait no we
didn’t even make it all the way down because psshhhhhhhhhh there goes
the air in my tyre. I’d rolled over a sharp bit of flint and that was
the end of that.
I called after the Gentleman Accomplice, a
much more cycley cycler than me, assuming he’d have a pump and
puncture repair kit.
Reader, he did not.
Woops.
He cycled back to the road we’d passed some
fields back to get help, and I began the sweaty push back up the hill
behind him. Before we knew it we were surrounded by men on expensive
mountain bikes all falling over themselves to help.
"I’ll just renounce feminism and let
you guys deal with it," I announced, sitting my bum down on the
grass and cracking out the snacks.
"It’s your lucky day," said one of
the men, "I’m a trained bike engineer. Used to do time trials. I
happen to have the thing to fix your bike even though I don’t need it
for my bike."
The pay off, of course, was spending the
next 20 minutes being told off - in that fine intersection between
avuncular and smug - for being ill prepared. For having the wrong
tyres, for not having a pump.
I kept saying: but I know.
I know all these things are wrong.
Later, I realised why it was so important
for me to tell him that I didn’t need instructing in the way of tyres
and pumps.
I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t do it because I
didn’t know. I did it on purpose. Actively, consciously. I did it
because I was wilfully reckless. Because it was a risk worth taking.
We could have waited until everything was
perfect.
We could have researched new bikes or new
wheels. Saved up, ordered them, bought them, fitted them.
We could have carefully planned and packed.
Let friends know where we were going. We could have trained.
But we chose not to. We chose to just go. To
see what adventures happened when we allowed the ideas flow through
us without us getting in the way. When we allowed ourselves to
recklessly be.
What was the worst that could have happened?
Honestly, not a lot. A slow walk down a hill pushing a bike. An
expensive taxi ride.
A funny story to tell our friends.
A thing that didn’t go to plan.
What was the best that could have happened?
Imagine that.
Go be reckless. Go write.
Sarah, Jo and Team WHQ
Important disclaimer:
We were only ever a 10 minute walk from a proper road and a 20 minute
walk from civilisation! West Sussex is small! The hills are not very
big! There are people crawling all over them day and night! We both
know the landscape very well! I have been climbing mountains since I
was a kid! He is like McGyver! We had fully charged mobile phones and
enough water and food to keep us for a week! There was genuinely no
risk at all apart from a minor inconvenience! We laughed the whole
time and it was great! Please - please - do not take
this as a call to do something completely fucking stupid like climb
Snowdon in slippers and a pipe. Okay thanks.
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FIVE RECKLESS THINGS FOR
YOUR WRITING
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Shhh
a secret new free thing
Well okay it's not that secret because
it's on our website for like several thousand users a month to see
but you can now access our four best free courses right now and also
any time you like. That's right yes. The Guide To Productivity, Write
A Tiny Novel, Editing 101 and Five Days Of Flash are now all
available in our freebie membership 24/7. Eek. Bigger announcement
coming soon, but we thought we'd give you guys a sneak peek ;)
Newbs: get your
freebie membership here >>
Oldbs: Check out
the freebies here >>
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May is feedback month!
Gold Star WHQ members are getting a month of writerly feedback help,
starting with the Feedback Workshop on 5 May and then the Feedback
Masterclass on 12 May, in which you can watch Sarah and Jo doing some
LIVE ACTION FEEDBACK to help you give and receive (ooer) to make you
an even better writer.
Book your feedback
webinars here >>
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NEW: Tip jar
Found yourself on a long list or short list?
Got your story published? Laughed extra hard at some webinar
tomfoolery? Wang us a little extra thank you ;)
Donate your quid
here >>
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New notebook?
Almost
certainly, yes. Check out our lovely range of sweary motivational
notebooks, inc blank pages for maniacs, lined pages for rule
followers, and cross grid for the cool kids with weird-ass brains.
See all our notebooks
here >>
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Ok we're done. As ever, let us know you've
read this far by sharing your best CYCLING
gif on Twitter,
hashtag #whqcommunity.
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okwe'redonestaysafeloveyoubyeeeeeee
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Writers' HQ, Oast Business Centre , North Frith Farm, Ashes Lane , Tonbridge,
Kent, TN11 9QU, United Kingdom
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a question
for you:
What do you think writing actually is?
Another question:
Who do you think writers actually are?
We love to romanticise the tortured writer, the lonely writer, the writer
for whom everything comes out perfect first time, the writer who sits as
their desk head in hands for an entire montage before everything suddenly
clicks and they sit up all night with the words flying. That ‘good’
writers immediately get massive publishing deals.
Well. Let us dispel some of this stupid forking nonsense for you.
Artists do not have to be tortured. You can have deep and difficult
thoughts and be perfectly content, thank you very much. You do not have
to turn yourself inside out to find the truths you want to share. You can
be vulnerable and honest and beautiful and strange without also being an
absinthe-drenched arse. Sure, artistry from torment is a great story, but
it’s not necessarily your story, or even the story. The tortured artist
is revered because for years we have allowed abusive men to be our canon
and we need to build a mythology around them to justify their behaviour.
Just for a moment imagine how much more rich our cultural and artistic
history would be if Ernest Hemmingway or Jack Kerouac or William
Burroughs or Ezra Pound weren’t allowed to be assholes and the people
(women) they shat on were instead-or-also allowed to create their own art
and tell their own stories?
Now let’s talk about perfection. Do you know how many drafts Kurt
Vunnegut wrote of Slaughterhouse
5? A LOT. Like, many many many. Possibly hundreds. It
reportedly took TWENTY THREE FREAKIN’ YEARS.
Here’s what Tom Roston, author of The
Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five
has to say about it: "He really did write some toilet paper–worthy
material…He may have been uniquely gifted but it took so much work to
make his writing appear almost childlike and off-the-cuff. The evidence
is in all those rough drafts. Vonnegut hammered away at making
accessibility an art form."
So. You don’t need to be tortured. You don’t need to be perfect. What
about those late night montages where it all just clicks together? Meh
not so much.
You know the thing where Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains Of The Day in a month? Yeah he did
not. Here’s what’s missing from that story: he’d already spent many many
many many many months (years?) researching the novel. He already knew
what he was trying to write. He had already tried to write several
drafts. He eventually bashed out a shitty zero draft in 30 days,
NanoWrimo-style, and then spent many many many many many months editing
it.
We are telling you these things because very often writers need
permission to be free. Here is your permission to be free. Right here.
Here is your permission slip. Free of expectation, free of nagging doubts
that you’re somehow not doing it right. Free of the weight of genius of
all the writers who came before you. Free of the idea that you’ll ever
not be a neurotic mess. Everyone is a mess. No one knows what they are doing.
People are often terrible and confused and do things badly. The stories
we think we know about the creation of stories are often misrepresented
and packaged as much as the stories themselves.
The inner critic will be with you forever so you may as well make friends
with it right now.
There is no one way to be a writer.
There is no one way to write.
As Zadie Smith said, "there is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that
matters is what you leave on the page."
What you need considerably more than the intensity of angst, the
intensity of perfection, the intensity of the all-night writing binge, is
consistency.
Five minutes a day. Ten minutes a day. Fifteen minutes a day. One hour a
week. One day a month. Whatever it is that you can do regularly, reliably,
and whatever brings you joy and satisfaction and that sense of
completeness when you write the thing you’ve been trying to write.
Whatever feels like you, and not a romanticised idyll of how you think
writing should work. (Disclaimer: we of course recognise that for some people daily
writing isn’t possible. The aim is to find a practice you can do, that makes you
feel good without thinking you should be doing it another way.)
In the words of the glorious Octavia Butler: "Forget inspiration.
Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired
or not".
Go flush your writerly preconceptions down the bog and crack out your
notebook.
Sarah, Jo, and Team WHQ
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FIVE HABITUAL THINGS FOR YOUR WRITING
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Join an online writing retreat - it's tomorrow! It's
free!
Smash your keyboard into writerly oblivion!
Squeeze some word juice out of your jittery fingers! Online writing
retreats run weekends and mid-week and there's one tomorrow for you
lovely lot
Book your retreat place here
>>
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Get your first month of Writers' HQ membership for a
tenner!
That's right. 22 webinars every month, 22 creative writing courses (and
growing all the time), forum access, and the most word-writing,
tea-drinking, story-slinging, biscuit-dunking, productivity-boosting
super supportive community for writers this side of the internet.
Get your gold star membership goodies here >>
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Editing 101 starts on Monday 4 April
You've got a couple more hours to sign up for our next free course.
Editing 101 is a practical, adaptable five-day writing course to help you
to deconstruct, reconstruct, fine-tune and redraft your work until it’s
ready to send out into the world. Go now!
Find out more and sign up
here >>
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NEW: Tip jar
Found yourself on long list or short list? Got your story
published? Laughed extra hard at some webinar tomfoolery? Wang us a
little extra thank you ;)
Donate your quid here >>
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The Writers' HQ NFT
We’ve minted the first Writers’ HQ NFT on
the Scrotium blockchain! This radical innovation in Decentralised Tea
(DeTea) is a real life product which physically exists in time and space.
By owning one mug, you own the original and only mug like it.
Each mug might look identical, and we can replicate them pretty much
infinitely, but given the only world we can comprehend is the one we
construct in our minds and reality is inherently unknowable, each one is
unique to the owner and can be sold and traded according to the caffeine
ledger.
Admit it, you want some Nice Fucking Tea.
Get your NFT here >>
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Ok we're done. As ever, let us
know you've read this far by sharing your best FALLING
OVER gif on Twitter,
hashtag #whqcommunity.
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