Hi everyone, hear my thoughts on the weird writer habits!
Script – what I am saying in the video verbatim
Hi everyone, today’s video is going to be on the seven weird habits that you’ll find most writers have. So to start off with most writers have really wild, vivid imaginations. So for example, something mundane like if you’re walking down the street and you find a penny on the road, a person who’s not a writer will just pick up the penny, perhaps put it in their pocket and walk on or just ignore it.
While a writer will think ‘oh imagine if a princess dropped the penny, and she got kidnapped by a frog and he took her away’ and their imagination goes completely wild over this mundane thing, like a penny found on the road. So to a normal person this sounds abit weird because that’s not likely to happen, how often does a princess leave a penny on the road and how can she be kidnapped by a frog?
So most people find things like that abit bizarre and abit weird because they think ‘well, it’s not going to happen so why think it in the first place?’
Reason number two most writers are obsessed about one topic and that will tend to be the topic that they’re writing about, so if you can’t have a conversation about that topic, then the writer at that moment in time or that could be months or years, they can’t actually speak to you about anything else because that’s what’s going on in their head, so that’s why I think most writers tend to be introverts, because once their writing a book, they’re really immersed in it an obsessed with that topic and if somebody else or the rest of the population don’t find it interesting they really have got nothing else to say.
And I think that most people who are not writers also find this abit odd because once the writer has written the book about this topic they’ve been obsessing about which may be for a few months or a few weeks or a few years, then they just swiftly move on to another topic and for most normal people who don’t write, you just don’t do that, for example if you’re interested in football or if you really like cricket, you like that all the time, you don’t switch from one sport to another depending on the season or your mood or what you feel like.
So most people find it particularly bizarre that when they talk to an author they’ll always bring up this topic, it could even be something really bizarre like something to do with sci-fi and the author just has to talk about it. The third thing about authors is that they hate routine.
So to a normal person, who doesn’t write, I’ll put normal in inverted commas, they like to know what time they’re waking up, what time they’ve go to be at school, what time they’re going to be in the shower, what time they’re going to be at home for supper, to a writer all these things are irrelevant, especially if the writer is in the middle of a book, in fact they’re not irrelevant they’re inconveniences, an author just wants to be able to wake up, go with the flow, eat when they want to eat, go to school when they want to go to school, or go to work aswell depending on obviously how old the writer is, as long as there’s time in the day for the writer to sit down on their computer or with a notepad, take some notes do some writing, they really don’t care whether or not the world is organised and everything is in its’ place.
Next, being a writer is actually quite paradoxical, because most writers want to write a best-seller but they don’t want the fame that comes with writing a best-seller. So people who don’t write, when someone says ‘oh I’m writing a novel,’ they immediately think ‘oh you want to be like JK Rowling, you want everyone to know you, you want to walk down the street with people shouting your name, and everyone knowing your books,’ and to most writers that’s the worst nightmare.
They literally just want to write, have a fan base of people who know their writing, appreciate their writing and read their writing and just enough money to be able to continue to write. So most people who are writers aren’t looking to be zillionaires, they’re not looking to be the next JK Rowling, if that happens obviously it happens, but it’s not the reason why people who are called to write actually want to write.
They don’t like being in public, even the writers who are on Youtube, you’ll find that most of them find it quite exhausting to do the videos and would prefer not to do the videos, but because of the way publishing has changed, you actually have to market yourself to some extent, so you can’t be the writer who’s just in a cupboard writing and hoe that someone is going to pick up your manuscript from the slush pile because that’s becoming alot more rare.
Next, many writers can actually see and hear their characters in their heads, just like when you’re watching a movie, and to alot of people that’s abit strange and you’ll find that when an author says their character surprised them, or did something different, it’s because while they were interacting with the character in their head like a movie the character did something that the author hadn’t jotted down in their notes or though that the character would do.
So it can be a conversation that went differently or a scene that went differently, and I tend to think that that’s why some writers get writers block. I think it’s a fight between the character or the protagonist and what the writer actually wants to write and then in the end someone has to win that fight and it’s usually the character in the book so you have to stop writing until you actually write what the character in the book wants you to write.
The sixth weird habit of writers is that most of them tend to write in the night-time and when I say at night, I mean as in from eleven O’clock onwards so the early morning, and even the ones who don’t work late at night will wake up really early in the morning when other people are asleep to do their writing.
I think it’s a creativity thing, it’s alot more easy to be creative when you’re by yourself and cocooned in darkness and that makes it very difficult for alot of writers to have a normal daytime job because during the day that’s not when they’re at their most creative or even at their most alert.
And the seventh and final weird habit that writers have is that they tend to be extremely supportive of other writers, but at the same time they tend to be very ambitious. So the ambitiousness is not the same as say, in the office environment or at school where you want to be the top of the class, with the writer the ambitiousness is wanting to do the best that they can do with their book or their books plural and most people who are not writers find that abit bizarre because they think ‘why would you be supportive of somebody else who has done alot better than you or perhaps has doe alot worse than you,’ to a writer this is just them it’s a habit, they want to cheer people, they want to see other writers do well, because it makes you feel happy that perhaps one day you can do that aswell.
So those are my seven weird habits that writers have. If you liked this video don’t forget to subscribe, comment and like and I shall speak to you all next week. Bye!
