Write With Me Club: May

The theme this month is planning

This morning I woke up, went down to the kitchen and stared out at my sun-drenched garden. I stood in the sun for a moment just outside my back door and closed my eyes. In the summer this is part of my morning routine, sitting or standing with the sun on my face before I do anything else. I’m grateful there is a bit of sun here, finally.

But when I opened my eyes, I was disappointed. Since I moved into my house five years ago, my garden has been a mess. Firstly, because it had laid overgrown for years after it clearly became too much for the old lady who lived here before me, then secondly, when I had an extension built just before lockdown, the builders left the garden … well, looking like a building site, and not somewhere my then eight-year-old daughter could play.

Although we still managed to find somewhere to play…

In my panic that we were only granted one walk a day under those ridiculous rules, I had some plastic grass laid down and it remains there to this day, soulless.

When the fake grass was ‘freshly’ laid…

That’s why I was disappointed when I opened my eyes.

It’s not all bad, I have one bed held up with railway sleepers down one side of the garden, and from that bed last year I harvested a dozen or more cherry tomatoes each day and lived off gazpacho. I also made cavelo nero gnocchi and parsley to stick in my smoothies, but the rest of my garden is fake. Fake grass and concrete.

I’m currently gearing myself for

Jo Thompson

’s small garden design course over on her substack. Although I’m a little overwhelmed by the task at the moment — I do hope one day I will be able to create a beautiful place that won’t leave me disappointed when I open my eyes, but what I have learnt so far from my tentative exploration of Jo’s course is that it is all about the planning.

And that got me thinking, let’s make this our writing theme for May because, as with gardens, sometimes it’s really hard to know where to start.

In The Sunday Times today there is an interview with JK Rowling about her writing life and practice, and this is what she had to say when asked whether she enjoys the planning process:

‘I absolutely love it because you’re still in that amazing optimistic state where you think this will be the book that you have no regrets about. And everything is possible. All the pages are blanks. So I really like that. I have various quotations about writing in my writing room all around the walls. This one by Faulkner expresses it perfectly: “The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.” Never. But in the planning stage, you can kid yourself, this is going to be the one. I also enjoy the construction part of it. Weirdly as I’ve got older I’ve enjoyed that more and more.’

Hmmm, ‘the work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with…’ I need to remember my garden is also a work in progress, just like our books.

So anyway, all this is to say, that planning (and not the garden kind) is what we will be discussing at tomorrow night’s Write With Me Club. I will as usual be sharing with you some secrets of my own planning when writing a book, whether that is fiction or non-fiction, and also be talking a little about how other writers plan. There will also, of course, be an exercise.

So, tomorrow night (Monday May 6th), 7pm-8pm BST, around my kitchen table. I will send out the zoom invitation at midday tomorrow, and I look forward to seeing you all there.

And just a reminder that these little creative workshops are only available for paid members, so if you would like to upgrade and come along, which means you also get to enjoy all the other perks of being a paid member of White Ink like access to all my posts, my archive, and more than 25 guest author posts on creative writing, then you will need to click this button below.

I hope to see you there!