Litt-craft: The Art of Writing Recklessly

It's always those insights into craft, into how a writer works that excites me the most, so please bear with me being a little self-indulgent here. Toby Litt nicely confirmed one of my own prejudices - the enourmous value of writing at speed, producing quantity and letting quality take care of itself.

I'd noticed from the articles and interviews that I'd read on the Internet that Litt frequently confessed to putting himself under time pressure, by for example setting himself the task of writing 100 poems a year while at university; writing "an unpublished novel length thing" in two months at the rate of a thousand words a day while he was staying in Glasgow; aiming to write a short story a week while he was on the UEA Creative Writing MA course (and much of his writing was actually done on the train); and then at the end of his contract teaching TEFL in Prague he found that he had some time before he had to fly home and says "I decided I would write a novel in two weeks and I would write about those two weeks."

"I'd just try to write a lot. ... I thought it would help me to become a better writer generally."

And he found that "When I wrote faster I wrote more interestingly ... this is one of the dirty secrets of modern fiction writing", adding also that it is necessary to write "fast and heedlessly". (He believes that strongly that it is necessary "to make a complete arse of yourself" in the hope that something fresh and original will emerge from the page.

Keroac, one of his great heroes, used always to go with the first draft feeling that it was the truest, Litt said (and I etch this particular quotation on my writer's heart!): "Writing is performed in the same way that improvised music is performed". Of course, he adds, writing year after year, you develop the reflexes and skills that make this improvisation possible.

He says that he tries to give as much energy as possible to the first draft, because you can't put that in later. He revises immediately, but subsequent revisions are just to make small adjustments.

Litt writes onto paper - doesn't use the computer at all. He says that he finds a pen more satisfying, whereas typing is more mechanical. He gets his work typed up as "proofs" which he corrects with a pen. He doesn't like making corrections onto the computer where it's so easy to delete words.

He knows immediately, he says, whether something he has written is going to be material for a short story or a novel. If he has a clear idea of where a piece is headed and he can see the end of it then it is a short story. If he finds there are ideas that are having little battles with each other then it is material for a novel.

Litt is fascinated by how new developments in technology change us and the way we communicate. "There's an ease of communication which almost attacks storytelling," he says. For all that, Litt has enthusiatically embraced several web-based writing projects.