My Approach to Writing
I’m a slow writer. First drafts come to me with a great deal of difficulty and anxiety. Once I’m onto the editing, I’m much happier – it suits my somewhat obsessive nature. I could probably edit a book until the end of time if I didn’t give myself a stern talking to.
For me, genres are ingredients, not recipes. Many writers write to a recipe (the crime thriller, the romance novel, the science fiction epic) and I have nothing but respect for them; many brilliant novels have been written that way. But the books I like the most are the ones that mix things up, and that’s what I attempt to write.
Of course, it’s entirely possible to write a terrible book by blending genres indiscriminately, in the same way it’s possible to make an awful meal by throwing incompatible ingredients together. But when the ingredients blend perfectly, you can end up with something amazing.
Writers have done this throughout history, producing difficult-to-pigeonhole classics like Bleak House, War and Peace or Middlemarch, and there are modern writers who love to mix it up too, in books like Cloud Atlas, Maxwell’s Demon or The Overstory. There is a line of thinking that this is the ‘wrong’ approach because it doesn’t fit in with the idea of genre categories and marketing expectations, but I couldn’t disagree more. If you like your books a bit different, a bit unique, then I’m writing for you.
The reader’s experience is something I take great pains over. Dramatic structure is crucial important, as are characters the reader can empathise with. I like plot, I like interesting characters and I like unique ideas. If I can wrap all of that up into an intriguing story then I’ve done my job.
As with my reading, I love music in all kinds of genres, but I don’t usually write to it. Having said that I’ll sometimes edit with a soundtrack. It generally has to be instrumental, or at least in a language I don’t understand, otherwise the language parts of my brain get distracted.
I’m strongly against the use of AI (by which I mostly mean LLMs) in writing. Books should be written by humans, for humans. Having been trained on vast swathes of knowledge (and much of that stolen) LLMs tends to favour averageness and obviousness. That’s exactly the opposite of what I’m aiming for. I want uniqueness and individuality, not consensus.
Even for research I find an LLM very limited. It’s not reasoning in any human sense, just regurgitating sentences based on a huge network of statistical relationships between words. This means everything needs to be checked very carefully, so why not go direct to an authoritative source in the first place and cut the middleman out of the process?
As a tool for something like climate modelling or medical research, I think AI can be useful. As a way of helping me express myself to other people, it’s really of very little use.
Tools of the trade:
- Lenovo Thinkpad P14s (primary writing laptop)
- Filco Majestouch Convertible 2 (mechanical keyboard for luxury typing experience)
- LibreOffice (writing, editing, typesetting)
- Calibre (ebook creation)
- Staedtler 925 25 (lovely mechanical pencil for handwritten notes)