Show Your Working: Rick Morton

Show Your Working is a regular column exploring how some of our favourite writers get things done. This month, we take a peek into the writing routine of author, journalist and 2021 KYD Mentor Rick Morton, whose new book My Year of Living Vulnerably is out on 17 March from 4th Estate.

What does your workspace look like?

I live alone, which has the advantage of allowing me to keep my workspace out of my bedroom. I have a desk I’ve used since 2010 that sits by a window in my living room—directly underneath the air-conditioning unit—and this is where I find myself parked for hours on end every day. It is a temple built to honour madness and chaos. I don’t really have an organising system for files and notes beyond lining them up by approximate shape. Notepads for my journalism sit together, for example, and larger folders and bound manuscripts are similarly grouped. There’s a printer (I still prefer reading large reports in hardcopy) and some scented candles, but the space is not by any means a luxurious one. There has been one attempt in the last 18 months at cleaning the desk and ordering its contents but such things, rare as they are, serve only to delay disorder. Of course it is nice to have a clean space with room to manoeuvre; even gaps on the desk surface where one might lay out those hardcopy reports and reading material. This never lasts, however, and I find myself taking a sort of pride in the return to clutter and mayhem. It’s like looking at one of evolution’s counter-intuitive creations, the naked mole rat for example, and marvelling that something so apparently carelessly formed should produce anything of value at all.

I think I liked, or perhaps needed, the promise of that reunion when I was finished my work. Without it, the day’s end can be anticlimactic.

My preference for a writing environment changes based on what it is I am working on. For my day job at The Saturday Paper, I need to work alone so I can make phone calls, parse information and bash out a couple of thousand words on a Thursday morning before deadline. This is easy and I enjoy being caught up in the subject matter of whatever I am learning about that week. Writing books, however, is a rather lonely experience. Here I might sit and fiddle for hours by myself, but I welcome the opportunity to go to a cafe, a library or even my friends’ houses where there is buzzing company in the background. I wrote a few thousand words of my first book One Hundred Years of Dirt at a house party in Melbourne hosted by my friends who all play in a band and are known for their all-in knees-ups. I alternated between writing for large blocks then dashing to the living room to have a drink and a dance for 20 minutes or so before returning to the laptop. Similarly, sections of My Year of Living Vulnerably were written at a friend’s house during regular Saturday lunches when there was lively conversation and laughter in the adjoining room while I worked. I think I liked, or perhaps needed, the promise of that reunion when I was finished my work. Without it, the day’s end can be anticlimactic. You finish a few thousand words and then retreat to silence. Where’s the fun in that?

Are you an analog or digital writer?

As an elder millennial, I maintain a commitment to my dual worlds of the digital and reassuringly traditional. All of my actual writing that exists in fully formed sentences designed for publication is done with a computer. I find my hand cannot keep up with my brain when writing longform, which is not a humblebrag regarding my brain but an indictment on my fine motor skills. Notes, however, are another matter altogether. These happen whenever, wherever, on whatever. I make notes and observations in my phone throughout the day, keep a paper diary and planner with a more fulsome account of the day and upcoming commitments such as events or speeches or deadlines. As a cadet newspaper reporter 15 or so years ago now, I learned Teeline shorthand which is my preferred form of handwriting notes. Especially for my journalism and shorter form record-keeping, Teeline is the perfect system for noting complex information fast and in as short a space as possible. My work notebooks are filled with it, although I like to transfer these notes as they become incorporated into my writing to the computer.

What sort of software and hardware do you use to get your work done?

I write everything in Scrivener and have done since 2011. The program itself is remarkably complex should you wish it to be, but I haven’t ventured much further than setting up a basic non-fiction template and organising my journalism into one overarching folder and my broader writing into another. I found Scrivener especially useful when working on my three books, because the projects can easily be broken into chapters that are always visible and which you can toggle between in seconds. The system is constantly autosaving so every time I close my computer and reopen the program I find it precisely as I left it.

Others will use the more granular tools in Scrivener—and from what I can gather, they look phenomenally powerful and productive—but the chief service to me is that it is not Microsoft Word. This is all psychological, you see. Writing anything in Word just reminds me of handing in bad university essays before dropping out altogether. It feels so undergraduate. I don’t usually like my writing while I am writing. Not as an exercise in false modesty, I just genuinely cannot distinguish my own words from almost anything else written in the English language. Scrivener at least provides the illusion that I am writing in a grown-up program. Plus, it just works. Writing in split-screen is my default mode. My copy goes in the left pane while my research notes are easily visible and scrolled in the right-hand-screen pane.

On my phone I use an app called Notebook to organise my thoughts and keep a live record of observations, snippets of overheard conversation, funny anecdotes and similar.

There is something about the brain’s reconfiguration during travel…It has to work harder to document new smells, tastes, sights, sounds instead of generalising.

Is there a perfect writing set-up? I’m not sure. I find I have been most productive when in stimulating environments, especially somewhere new if I am travelling, which I managed to do just a smidge before the world shut down. There is something about the brain’s reconfiguration during travel because it suddenly spends more time sifting through the data of the world, owing to the unfamiliar. It has to work harder to document new smells, tastes, sights, sounds instead of generalising as it does in ordinary life back home where it has created shortcuts to save on processing power. Here, I find, creativity is provoked. Obviously travel is not always possible or realistic and, in my 20s, just wasn’t on the cards at all. So most of the work we do is on ourselves, that we might get just a few words down on the page.