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.
Rick’s desk: “A temple built to honour madness and chaos”. Image: Supplied
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.
Image: Supplied
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.
Describe your writing practice?
For almost all of my 34 years, I thought I might be an incurable night owl. I was most productive in the evening and couldn’t rise early no matter how hard I tried. Breakfast, to me, was a time as alien as the paleolithic. Then, without warning, 2020 happened and I found myself rising inexplicably at 5.30am or 6am. No rhyme or reason, though I suspect it was stress as I juggled the busiest year of my life. I was writing the manuscript for My Year of Living Vulnerably in the early hours before switching to my day job and working on The Saturday Paper news features during the day. I would still do a little work in the evenings, especially reading or thinking, but mostly this freed me up to devote that time to cooking and relaxing with a television series. Weekends didn’t change this formula much except that I would spend more time on the book and, usually, take the late afternoons and evenings off to recharge.
This is the most organised my writing routine has ever been and, honestly, I hope it stays because I have found the morning writing sessions quite productive and lovely. That said, there have always and will always be weeks or entire months where I am squeezing in writing wherever I can do it. Recent examples include filing an opinion column from a train in between a meeting in the city regarding a book award for which I am a judge and returning home to conduct an interview for a feature piece. I also filed a news story in Newcastle on the way to Queensland for the summer holiday and pulled over at a rest park somewhere north of Coffs Harbour to complete the edits. This is increasingly the new normal.
As it happens, I am pathologically incapable of reading my writing back to myself before sending it to my editor or publisher. It is the same in journalism and in my book-writing. I wrote the final word in my latest manuscript and immediately send it to the publisher without reading back through the 90,000 words or so. My friends were mortified. It’s a terrible habit and not one I necessarily recommend, but I think it mostly works because of the way I write which is, often, very slowly. I write this way because I need every sentence to be as I want it before I move on to the next. Others might fly through a first draft in the knowledge that the edits will come and they will have time to finesse and work on the details but, sadly, I just cannot work this way. In this sense, I suppose, I edit each sentence as I go but never return until I am made to by a sub-editor of book editor. For most of my life I have been a ‘first draft is the best draft’ kind of person and, still, this is largely true. It is hard enough for me, as it is, to hand over anything I have written to an editor or really any other human being. The process can be slow, but my foundational fear of being caught out as a fraud sometimes delivers a good product.
I am pathologically incapable of reading my writing back to myself before sending it to my editor or publisher…It is a terrible habit and not one I necessarily recommend.
You might think this would make me something of a planner in my writing; figuring out what I will say and how I will get there. Not so. I just sit down and write. The discovery of what I really want to say often comes out on the page with no prior forethought, or so it seems. Still, with my most recent book, I found myself doing just as much general thinking and mind-wandering as I did writing. It was a state of affairs I found somewhat embarrassing, especially when home visiting my mum Deb, because no one in any generation of her family or my father’s had ever considered that work could or should be done in the head. It was a thing for the hands only. In that way it felt awkward as I navigated this new territory. Whether it is in my reporting or my writing generally, I start with the kernel of a truth or sentiment and work my way out from there. Not necessarily in chronological order, or according to a structure decided on in advance, but just as the words form. The only exception to this is with both my Dirt book and the latest on vulnerability where I had the work split into chapters and knew what each chapter’s theme would be. Touch, masculinity, the self, class and so on. Just a word. I wrote from that beginning.
Has your writing practice changed over the years? If so, how?
I write more now than I ever have before. It is definitely a process that is much more disciplined than the meandering, nebulous approach I took in my early adult life. But this is as much about being established, with projects and contracts on which to deliver, as it is about being a better practitioner. Without a pressing deadline, I am still a fairly poor self-starter.
How do you encourage inspiration to strike?
Related to the above, writers’ block seems to hit when I don’t have an approaching deadline. For me at least, this is a condition that springs from my sense that I am not good enough. The block comes because I doubt my own work and am unable to continue with it. The only force powerful enough to override this pervasive sense of inadequacy is an oncoming deadline; the fear that I might disappoint an editor or boss by turning in nothing at all. Look, I never said it was a particularly healthy way to work but this consistent tension does eventually deliver.
In this regard, the best advice I ever received was annoyingly simple. You can’t edit nothing. By extension, you can’t be a writer if you don’t write. It’s like telling people you’re a chess grandmaster who has only ever played Connect Four. Play the game. Of course, this feels more like a philosophical urging than a concrete strategy to overcome keyboard paralysis and I often grow contemptuous of it myself. I contain multitudes! When truly stuck, I find reading helps to remind us of what is possible in the written form. Have a break, go for a walk. Make a coffee. Take a shower. Even if you’re not thinking about it your brain is doing the work. On the most pleasant days, you may find the solution bubbling up to the surface of your consciousness like flotsam in the surf.
Or, you know, just quit! Move to Tunisia. Breed chickens. Sever all contact with the people who knew you in the life you left behind; the one where you failed. They must never know your secret.
My Year of Living Vulnerably is available from 17 March at your local independent bookseller. Rick will be appearing at online and in-person events to launch the book: for details visit rickmorton.com.au/appearances.
Want to work one-on-one with Rick (or our five other mentors) on your own writing project? Applications are open for the KYD Mentors Program until 5pm AEDT 26 March.
