When Jenni Diski was just a teenager in 1964, Doris Lessing – who had then just published The Golden Notebook – invited her to live at her home. Diski recalls what she learned about writing from the future Nobel winner:
Doris taught me how to be a writer. I don’t mean she gave me lessons, or talked about writing. I can’t remember her ever talking about writing, except to mumble occasionally that she was on a very difficult bit at the moment, meaning she was preoccupied, or to bellow as I thumped down the stairs past her closed door “Be quiet. I’m working”. I was very impressed with the idea that writing was work. Even now, I always say, “I’m working”, rather than “I’m writing”, if anyone asks. … I learned what it was to be a writer from being around, in the house, day by day, observing her being one. …
To sum it up, being a writer meant:
getting on with it. To Doris, it wasn’t a vanity project, but work that she had to do to earn a living and to fulfil her need to be what she was. Being a writer wasn’t glamorous and she had no patience with the notion of waiting for inspiration or writer’s block. It was all about the act of writing, beginning and finishing and then getting on with the next book, and nothing else. I don’t remember her going to launch parties, or giving many interviews, and she never did public readings back then. She wasn’t overly interested in reviews, either. She just wrote. Really, I think of her being herself only when she was behind her closed door, working the keys on the typewriter.
Diski’s takeaway:
How you go about the writing is not the main thing, nor even what you write. Knowing that you are a writer and getting on with it, is what has to happen before anything else. Focus is the point. And I will always be grateful to Doris for giving me that insight.
Meanwhile, Phyllis Rose sticks to simple writing advice for her students:
[I]f they stall, I tell them, “When in doubt, begin your piece with ‘when.’ This will push you into narrative.” That advice has helped many. The other advice I often have to give is “Bash it out.” I urge people to get something on paper and then work it. I tell them “Writers need words on a page to edit the way sculptors need stone, clay, or wood to carve or mold. You have to spew out your own material before you can shape it. So bash it out.”
The Dish 