I watched a video from a romance author yesterday about how much time she spends writing. She fits it in with her full time job, which happens to be a creative writing instructor at a university. Some footage shows her going for a little hike in the desert, which was beginning to spruce up for autumn. It doesn’t seem like she has a family (as in kids and partner – I don’t know for sure and it’s none of my bloody business either way) which might be another reason why she is able to find time to write. I don’t mean that in a judgemental sense, as I really do need to find more time for my writing and I think the only way I can do so is by following some of her advice and ambushing myself – finding myself at the precipice of a doom-scroll before firing up the notes app or flipping open a notebook instead.
This is also why I’m a poet rather than a romance novelist. I only have time for these little explosions of thoughts or vibes before something cuts me off. If there’s a category of fiction writer that’s on a par with the sports journalist, then it’s the Romance author. Blasting out so many novels a year is always going to be impressive and I would love to blast out poems and essays at the rate but the kind of brain that writes poems and essays is often not the brain that writes romance novels. Neither is better than the other both are fed and watered in different ways.
I have a feeling that the poet needs to spend more and less time with their thoughts before they put the words down: time without thoughts – so they can really notice the texture of things – and time with thoughts to see how they might be able to speak of these textures.
Incidentally, the romance writer was writing a novel about London and described her writing time as spending time in London. I live in London, more in a social realist sense than in a romantic novel sense. My specialisms preclude me from vanishing into another world, in the sense that I’m not much cop at building them. Which means we’re both writing about London, though one of us is writing about London an exotic place of escape and one of us is writing about London as a place that is, in all it’s simultaneously cosy and problematic ways, home. Neither approach is better, it’s all just words just finding their ways out of a brain and onto a page.
As a Londoner, I have the benefit of being inspired by someone that already ploughed this particular furrow, someone that showed how London can be a site of bleak realism and a revelatory domain of the imagination – William Blake. Perhaps I have to get back to that sense of the place, the way it seems to exist in two worlds, to see if there are still angels roosting in the trees of Peckham Rye, or in my case, Brockwell Park.
I’m glad I watched her video because it made me want to write. There would have been a time when I might have been a bit sniffy about taking advice from romance authors whereas nowadays I see them as the triathletes of literary productiveness and poets are the equivalent of really niche sport like dressage or curling. Every now and again, one of us does something cool and the whole world notices before we’re once again forgotten for another four-year cycle.