Thoughts Of A Writer. Ok, Let’s Take It Back.

So, today I want to take it back to the start.

I’ve had some people ask me to go back and write the way I used to, just do a few blogs where it was just thoughts from my mind. So, this is literally a conversation between you and me, mostly me talking shit.

I want to go back to when I first started writing my blogs, back when it was raw and unedited.

Since writing my book, I’ve got myself into a scramble to perfect everything, so I want to go back to the beginning when I first started writing.

I write because it clears my mind. I got so much shit going through this mind. I’m glad people don’t have special powers to read minds, I’d be fucked.

In all honesty, they would probably get lost, something along the lines of, “This guy must have a multiple personality disorder… so many people up here.”

So, the origins of my writing, huh?

I hope it’s not boring.

This blog is going to delve deep into this weird and sometimes wonderful mind.

When I first started writing, proper writing for a reason, not just dribbling some words on paper that would never see the light of day.

This post is going to be raw, unedited and unperfected.

There will be repeats because I will be writing as it comes to my head, there may even be some grammar issues and spelling mistakes (maybe the only bits I will straighten out).

I’ll be doing this on my laptop but also my phone, because sometimes when you have the laptop open and staring at the screen, it’s like the laptop is expecting something. Like it’s saying come on dickhead get it done, thus creating writer’s block. So, here I am testing on the phone a little bit haha, it’s working for now.

I’ve been writing blogs for so many years now, got myself a good following and found so many new friends since I’ve been writing.

But since I wrote my book (MIDNIGHT, yes go and find it on kindle/amazon… https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GQZ38WGR… trust me you will love it), I had to perfect it the best I could, be all professional and stuff and trust me it looks good and it’s a damn good read… and very sexy but also deep as fuck.

That then flowed into my blog posts and they do look good, don’t get me wrong but it takes so much hard work to get them looking like that.

This is what they look like before all the editing and professionalism stuff. OK, not exactly like this because this is just a bunch of thoughts straight from my head and pretty much an update. I’ll be doing blogs like this every now and then just to free up some space in my brain.

Like make it into a little origins blog series.

You see, most of my blogs these days end up taking a few days to structure and write, then comes the research and clever people things. But it also includes all the editing and that can change the whole style of the blog.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole process, and it feels good to be creating and delving deep into something.

But the truth is I get lost in it and I feel like you, my amazing readers, deserve some of the old me.

Those of you who have followed me for years or even from the start will see that my writing has changed, not a bad thing, really. Those of you who are pretty new can always delve deep and find some of my old stuff any time you want, it really is a journey.

But yeah, I will get distracted and waffle on now and then and be all over the place, but some of you did say you wanted this raw with no structure.

So fuck it, let’s see where my brain takes us.

Over the years of my writing journey, there have been good times and tough times.

Recently, a reader from years ago got in touch through the comments and said he was glad he found my writing again after he broke his old phone.

I remember the guy, and it touched me when he told me his story, he told me I saved his life with my writing. He was going through a very very rough patch in life and it was my words that stopped him from doing something he could never come back from and made him think. My words did that, my words saved someone’s life.

If that’s not a good motivator to be a good writer, then nothing ever will be. It felt good, but it also encouraged me to keep going, to keep writing. If my words can help other people, then I want that feeling to keep going, it’s addictive. Not in a people pleasing way, but a way that makes it feel worth something.

Now my writing (after I finished my book) became polished, like I became addicted to making everything look perfect and correct. I wouldn’t say it became stressful or anything of the sort, but it just ended up taking an excessive amount of time just to finish a blog post. It was taking up my whole weekend at some points. I love it, don’t get me wrong, but it also limited what I could do. So much time became about making sure every word was perfect, every paragraph fit and nothing was repeated. Also, making sure all the punctuation was correct.

That’s what writing a novel does to you, mostly because in a novel your work is being judged. No, seriously, every word can be judged by strangers.

You’re also fighting the AI witch hunters if you write in a certain way, which is something I never thought I’d have to fucking worry about when I started writing. Apparently, if your grammar is too good, you used AI. If you use certain words, you used AI. If your paragraphs are too nicely put together, you used AI. Fuck me, if you use punctuation properly, then somebody somewhere is probably getting the pitchforks ready. It’s weird because we’re almost getting to a point where writers have to deliberately make mistakes just to prove they’re human, which is fucking ridiculous when you think about it. We spend years trying to get better at something and now apparently getting too good at it is suspicious.

I’m not going to turn this into another massive conversation about AI because I’ve written enough about that already and I’ll probably write plenty more in the future. That’s not really where I was going with this anyway. The point I’m trying to make, before my brain decided to wander off down another road, is that somewhere along the way I started worrying too much about the finished product. I started thinking about how everything looked rather than just writing what I wanted to say.

This is why I’m going to be doing blogs like this now and then, less polished and less edited, just to say a big fuck you to the haters.

I don’t think my writing got worse. Actually, I think technically it’s probably better than it’s ever been. I’ve learned a hell of a lot over the last few years, especially while writing my novel. I’ve learned about pacing, dialogue, repetition, sentence structure and all these little things I never used to think about when I first started blogging. I’ve written an entire fucking novel now, which still feels weird to say because there was a time when that was just another one of those things sitting in my head that I thought I’d do “one day”. Well, one day actually happened, and I’m proud as fuck of that.

But learning all that stuff has done something else to me. It’s made me notice everything. I’ll write a paragraph and read it back, then I’ll change a sentence because I don’t quite like how it sounds. Then I’ll change another sentence because I’ve used the same word twice. Then I’ll carry on writing, get another three paragraphs down and decide the first paragraph doesn’t work anymore, so back I fucking go. Before I know it, two hours have disappeared, and I’ve written about 600 words. Years ago I’d probably have written the entire blog in that time, found a picture for it, pressed publish and fucked off to make a cup of tea.

Was that old writing perfect? Fuck no. I can go back through some of those old blogs now and find things I’d change immediately. There’ll be punctuation in strange places, sentences that probably go on for far too long, and I’m pretty sure I repeat myself enough that occasionally you’ll wonder if you’ve accidentally scrolled back up the page. But nobody cared. More importantly, I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to create something perfect. I was trying to say something.

And I think I’ve missed that more than I realised.

I’ve missed sitting down without knowing exactly where a blog is going. I’ve missed starting with one thought and somehow ending up talking about something completely different twenty minutes later. I’ve missed writing something, reading it back once and thinking, yeah, that’s pretty much what I wanted to say, then pressing publish. There was something really freeing about writing like that because the writing wasn’t the thing I was concentrating on. The thought was.

Because nobody ever came to my blog because my punctuation was fucking spectacular. Nobody has ever left me a comment saying, “Rob, incredible comma placement in paragraph seventeen. Absolutely changed my life.” At least I fucking hope they haven’t because I clearly missed that one. People came because of what I was saying. Sometimes they agreed with me, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes we’d end up having conversations in the comments, and sometimes somebody would tell me something incredibly personal because something I’d written had made them feel comfortable enough to do that.

And apparently, sometimes, somebody sitting somewhere in the world at one of the lowest points of their life read something I wrote and decided to keep going.

That’s fucking huge to me.

I don’t really know how you’re supposed to process being told something like that. What do you even say? Thank you doesn’t exactly cover it because they’re thanking you. You don’t want to make it about yourself because it isn’t about you, but at the same time there’s this little voice in your head going, fuck… my words actually did that. Something I wrote while probably sitting at home with a coffee, rambling away about whatever was going through my head that day, reached another human being at exactly the moment they needed it.

And none of that happened because every sentence was perfect. It didn’t happen because I spent four hours checking whether I’d used the word “actually” six times. It happened because somebody felt something when they read it. Somewhere between my brain and their screen, something connected.

Maybe that’s the bit I’ve been forgetting.

I’m a writer, yeah. I can actually say that now without feeling like I’m pretending. I’ve got years of blogs behind me and I’ve got a fucking book with my name on it. But underneath all of that, I’m still just some bloke sitting behind a screen throwing whatever is rattling around inside his head onto a page and hoping somebody on the other side understands what the fuck he’s talking about. That’s how this whole thing started. There wasn’t a content strategy or some grand plan. I wasn’t thinking about SEO, readability scores, algorithms or whether Google would like what I’d written. I just had shit in my head and writing helped me get it out.

Somehow, people started reading it.

And maybe I’ve spent so long learning how to become a better writer that I accidentally forgot some of the things that made me want to become one in the first place.

I don’t want to go backwards. That’s not what this is about. I’m not going to deliberately start writing badly or pretend I haven’t learned anything over the years. I just don’t think every single blog needs to be treated like I’m sending another novel off to an editor. Sometimes a slightly awkward sentence might sound more like me than the perfectly rewritten version. Sometimes I might repeat myself because that’s what people do when something matters to them. Sometimes I’ll wander completely off topic halfway through a paragraph and have to drag myself back again.

That’s human as fuck, eh?.

Actually, that’s pretty much how my brain works every bloody day anyway.

So, maybe this isn’t me trying to become the writer I used to be. I don’t think you can really do that because I’m not the same person I was when I started this thing. Too much has happened. I’ve changed, my life has changed and my writing has changed with it. Maybe I’m just letting that old version of me back into the room occasionally. Letting him sit down, talk some shit, get distracted halfway through and write without wondering whether every bloody sentence is technically perfect.

He can bring his questionable punctuation with him.

I’ll just keep an eye on the commas.

Life isn’t perfect, so why shouldn’t writing be the same?

Let’s think about it this way: making everything perfect is not realistic, life is imperfect but that’s what makes every day interesting. If everything in life were perfect, I think people would go insane or at least be robotic. Have you ever seen the film Equilibrium? Everything is colourless, all art and expression are suppressed and everyone has been turned into a lifeless drone, so why do that to my writing?

And no, I’m not saying editing a blog is the same as Christian Bale running around shooting people because someone dared to have some fucking emotions. Although now I’ve written that, I’m wondering how the hell I got from talking about my writing to Equilibrium. This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. My brain goes somewhere, I follow it and somehow you lot have ended up coming along for the ride. Welcome to my head (insert nervous laugh emoji here) there are no refunds.

But there is actually a point buried somewhere in there. Perfection is fucking boring. Think about the people you love or even just the people you enjoy being around. They’re not perfect. They have weird habits, annoying little things they do, stupid sayings, strange laughs and probably something they do that makes you want to throw something at their head occasionally. That’s what makes them who they are, though. Imagine meeting somebody who was absolutely perfect in every possible way. Never said the wrong thing, never got pissed off, always looked perfect, always knew exactly what to say and never made a mistake. You’d want to punch them after about twenty minutes. Well, maybe you wouldn’t. I probably would.

Actually, don’t punch people. That’s probably not the message I should be putting out there.

See, this is what happens when I don’t edit.

Anyway, where the fuck was I?

Perfection. That’s where I was.

I think we’ve become a little obsessed with it, haven’t we? Not just with writing either. Everything has to look perfect now. You take twenty photos and delete nineteen because your face looked weird in one, your hair was doing something stupid in another and apparently the fucking lighting wasn’t right in the other seventeen. Then you upload the good one and everyone else sees this tiny perfect snapshot of your life while you’re sitting there in your pants eating crisps with a pile of washing you’ve been ignoring for three days.

That’s probably why I’ve always liked people who are a little bit fucked up around the edges. I don’t mean completely fucking unhinged, although apparently my friendship history might disagree with me there. I mean real people. People who have stories. People who’ve fucked things up, learned things the hard way, made mistakes and can laugh about some of them now. The people who don’t pretend they’ve got everything figured out because, let’s be honest, does anybody actually have everything figured out?

I certainly fucking don’t.

I’m nearly forty years into this whole being alive thing and I’m still making it up as I go along. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I just know slightly more than I did ten years ago, and even some of that is questionable. That’s basically adulthood, isn’t it? When you’re a kid, you think adults know everything, then you become one and realise everyone is just wandering around pretending they know what the fuck is happening.

Maybe writing is the same.

When I first started, I didn’t know the rules, so I wasn’t worried about breaking them. I just wrote. Then the more I learned, the more rules appeared. Don’t repeat words. Don’t overuse this. Don’t do that. Watch your sentence length. Think about structure. Think about pacing. Think about the reader. Think about Google. Think about SEO. Think about whether people will keep scrolling. Think about whether the title is good enough. Think about whether the fucking featured image matches the mood of paragraph twelve.

Jesus Christ.

Sometimes I just want to write some shit. Even unhinged fucked up shit or edgy shit, or just talk a load of shit like, and that’s basically what you’re reading right now.

The funny thing is, I reckon some people will probably prefer this to the blogs I spend days putting together. There’ll probably be someone reading this thinking, yeah Rob, this is what I fucking missed, while I’m sitting here wondering why I spent half of last Saturday rearranging three paragraphs because I used the same word twice.

But that doesn’t mean all the other stuff was pointless either. That’s where my head keeps getting stuck with this. I don’t want to make it sound like polished writing is somehow fake and raw writing is automatically better because that’s bollocks too. I love researching something properly. I love taking a massive subject apart and putting it back together in my own way. I love looking at a finished blog after spending days on it and thinking, fuck yeah, that looks good.

I also wrote a novel (yes, I will keep repeating this, I’m a proud published author… ok?). You can’t really write 80,000 or however many bloody words and just go, yeah that’ll do, then fire it onto Amazon with three spelling mistakes on the first page and a character whose name mysteriously changes halfway through.

Well, you can. Probably shouldn’t, probably frowned upon.

So I don’t think I’m choosing between the two. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong by even thinking about it that way. I can still write the big researched stuff. I can still obsess over those blogs when I want to. I can still spend hours fucking around with a sentence because one word is annoying me and I don’t know why. But I can also do this.

Open the laptop.

Start typing.

See what happens.

Although technically I said earlier I’ve been writing some of this on my phone, so I’ve already contradicted myself.

Fuck it.

I’m leaving that in too… see, friends and readers, I told you no editing.

Actually, I think that’s probably what I’ve been trying to say for the last however many words this has turned into. I haven’t checked the word count yet and I don’t think I want to. I started this wanting to talk about going back to the way I used to write and somehow we’ve ended up talking about AI witch hunters, Equilibrium, punching perfect people, sitting around in your pants eating crisps and probably a load of other shit I’ve already forgotten about. But that’s the weird thing, I fucking enjoyed writing it. I didn’t know where it was going and I wasn’t thinking three paragraphs ahead. I just started typing and followed whatever popped into my head next, which is pretty much exactly how I used to do this.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been missing. Not the old writing exactly, because I don’t want to pretend I’ve learned nothing over the last few years, but the freedom I had with it. Writing has always been somewhere I can dump everything that’s rattling around in my head. Sometimes that’s something funny, sometimes it’s something serious and sometimes it’s something dark as fuck. Sometimes I don’t even know what I think about something until I start writing about it, then I’ll get halfway through and realise I’ve just argued myself out of my own fucking opinion. That’s happened before. I’m sure it’ll happen again. Humans are weird like that, we change our minds and contradict ourselves all the time, although apparently on the internet you’re supposed to choose an opinion when you’re eighteen and defend the bastard until you die.

Life doesn’t work like that though, does it? I’m nearly forty and I definitely don’t think the same way I did when I was twenty. Thank fuck for that because twenty-year-old me was probably a bit of a dickhead. Thirty-year-old me probably was too. Current me almost certainly still is sometimes, but hopefully slightly less often. That’s the thing about getting older that nobody really tells you. You don’t suddenly become this finished version of yourself. There’s no little notification that pops up one morning saying, Congratulations Rob, you’ve completed adulthood. All future decisions will now be correct. You just keep going, fucking things up occasionally, learning something, forgetting something else and pretending you know what you’re doing when somebody younger asks you for advice.

Maybe writing should be allowed to do the same thing. It can change with me without every change needing to be an improvement. That’s a strange thing to say because we’re always told we should be getting better at things, but maybe different is enough sometimes. My polished blogs can still exist because I fucking love writing those too. I love disappearing down research rabbit holes and finding something I didn’t know three hours earlier. I love getting to the end of a huge blog and looking at the finished thing thinking, yeah, I’m proud of that. I’m not throwing any of that away just because I’ve suddenly rediscovered the joy of rambling.

I just want room for this as well. A place where I don’t need a plan before I start. I don’t want to turn Thoughts Of A Writer into another bloody schedule either because knowing me, I’ll make a plan, then I’ll make a spreadsheet in my head for the plan, then I’ll spend longer making the fucking spreadsheet look nice than I would have spent writing the blog in the first place. Before long I’ll have somehow managed to professionally organise the thing I created specifically because I didn’t want it professionally organised.

So there isn’t going to be a schedule. I’m not promising one every Friday or twice a month or whatever else sensible bloggers are supposed to do. When I’ve got something in my head and I fancy emptying it onto here, I’ll do it. It might be 500 words, it might be 5,000. I might start talking about writing and somehow end up ranting about supermarket trolleys because why the fuck does every trolley seem to have that one wheel that refuses to go in the same direction as the other three? Actually, don’t get me started on that because this blog will never fucking end.

That’s probably the nicest part about doing this again, though. I genuinely don’t know what the next one will be about because I don’t know what will be going through my head when I sit down to write it. Maybe something will piss me off. Maybe something amazing will happen. Maybe I’ll have one of those weird thoughts that arrives while you’re doing something completely unrelated and suddenly your brain decides this needs investigating immediately. That’s usually how half my blogs begin anyway. One stupid little thought that won’t fuck off until I write about it.

And if you’ve been reading my stuff since the early days and this feels familiar, then hello again. This is still me. Older, hopefully a little wiser, published author now- yes, I’m mentioning the fucking book again, deal with it- but still the same bloke underneath it all. And if you’re relatively new here and you’ve only ever seen the more polished version of my writing, well, welcome to whatever this is. This is basically what happens when my brain is allowed near a keyboard without adult supervision.

The funny thing is, after everything I’ve just written about not editing this, I already know what’s going to happen when I finish. My finger is going to hover over publish and that little voice in my head is going to start. You should probably read it again. That paragraph might be too long. You used that word twice. Is that comma supposed to be there? And I’m going to have to resist the urge to spend another three hours fucking around with it, because if I do that after writing an entire blog about not doing that, then I’ve basically just wasted everyone’s time, including my own.

I’ll probably read it once because I’m not a complete fucking animal. I’ll fix anything that makes absolutely no sense and maybe correct a spelling mistake if it’s staring me in the face. But I’m leaving the rough bits. I’m leaving the rambles, the contradictions and probably a few commas that have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re doing. I’m even leaving that question mark and full stop together from earlier because I spotted it and it made me laugh. That little bastard has accidentally become the mascot for this entire blog… extra points to anyone who can find it and send me a screenshot to one of my socials (the “?.” must be circled, so I know you have read this).

And maybe that’s the point I was looking for when I started writing this.

Actually, fuck that. I wasn’t looking for a point.

I was just writing… and I hope I entertained you enough to read the next one.

Fuck, I’ve missed this.

THEPLAINANDSIMPLEGUY

Still writing. Still listening.

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