My Writing Process

Who’s this, walking upstairs to his spare bedroom sometime during the first Covid Lockdown of 2020? Who’s this with the notebook under his arm and the look of abstract determination on his face? Ah that’ll be Ian McMillan on his way to what he coyly calls his study but which is actually his little bedroom. It’s the room with all the books in it, and a white picnic table with a Thomas The Tank Engine rug on it to deaden the sound when he records his Radio 3 show The Verb because he can’t go into Media City as the pandemic still rages. At the edge of the picnic table his laptop is beckoning: Come on, McMillan, it is saying. Come and get a thousand words written. You’ve got a book to finish, remember?

Yes, that’s me, sitting down to start pounding the keyboard and trying to persuade my brain to join the language-dance and not let go. I’m writing a memoir about the coast of the UK called My Sand Life, My Pebble Life and everyday after my early stroll I sit down and start to write. The book is taking shape, slowly, the keyboard muffled by Thomas The Tank Engine and all the books that crowd the space around me.

The book had an odd beginning; I’d been asked by Bloomsbury to write the introduction to another book about the coast; just 700 words of pure gold. Now, that’s the kind of commission I like. I like short form writing. If I was a composer I’d be writing duets not grand operas. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the intro and they liked it and then, when I thought that was that, they asked me if I’d like to write a book about the coast. Would I? Well, would I?

Lots of people reading this piece will be freelancers and you’ll all know that the answer to any question like this is always Yes. Yes I can. Yes of course I can. I can write it and I can write a sequel to it and I can make a series from it. That’s the freelance disease. We’re Yes Men and Yes Women.

So when I’d said Yes, and after a bit of discussion, it was decided that the book would be a series of postcards from the coast (Coastcards, if you will. Wish I’d thought of that before I wrote the book!) some of which would be written after actual visits to the seaside and some of which would be memories of visits to the seaside. I emphasised to Bloomsbury that I was no good at writing long books; I didn’t have the imagination or the staying power. I would write 50 1000-word pieces about the coast as opposed to one 50,000 word piece and they agreed. At a later stage I decided I’d throw a few poems in, and at an even later stage I decided I’d make the poems sonnets, because I was going through a sonnet craze.

At the time I was still in the throes of my ambition to do a gig in every village hall in the UK with my musician mate Luke Carver Goss and the plan was that after a gig I would stay over, go to the nearest bit of coast and write about it. Then the pandemic happened and my diary fell off a cliff and all my gigs got cancelled. I could still have travelled to the coast but it would have been an echoing, masked, haunted, silent coast.

I asked the publisher if I could just write memories of the coast for a while and then if and when unlocking ever happened I could travel to the sea and report back. They agreed and so that’s what I did and, apart from a few reports on my mother-in-law’s caravan in Cleethorpes and a visit to a holiday cottage in Beadnell in Northumberland, the book is all in the past tense.

My method is simple. I sit and think hard, sometimes with a map book open on my knee, about places I’ve been. I think harder about a single incident that might illuminate that place: me being hit in the chops by a rogue frisbee, my dad’s overexposed photographs, throwing a message in a bottle a little way into the sea. I write a phrase. I let the phrase marinade as I make a cup of tea or go for a stroll. Sometimes I go to bed. It’s not as though the piece writes itself but it seems that, by leaving it to brew, it becomes available for drafting.

So now here I am, at the keyboard, writing phrases and clauses and sentences. And watching the word count scuttle towards a thousand, by which time it’ll be time to redraft. Or have a go at a sonnet. Or put the kettle on again.

My Sand Life, My Pebble Life by Ian McMillan is published by Adlard Coles and is out now (Hardback: £10.99). Also available in ebook and audio. | @IMcMillan | www.ian-mcmillan.co.uk

Author photo credit: Bob Hamilton