Kirstin Innes: How I balance creative writing and column deadlines

For the last fifteen years, my professional life has been a balancing act. In 2008, I won the Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award for my fiction writing; at that time my day job was at The List magazine, where I edited three sections as well as helping put the overall magazine together, wrote the weekly newsletters and maintained the magazine’s social media, was a lead feature writer, as well as reviewing music, restaurants, theatre and books. 

I spewed out words from the second I’d opened my laptop on the morning train at Glasgow Queen Street, filed copy late into the night after I’d arrived home again. I was already exhausted; winning the New Writers’ Award brought me attention and eventually commissions for short stories, as well as interest from agents in a novel - my childhood dream. And the number of words – and different types of writing – expected of me in a week began to stack and stack. 

By the end of 2009, I was burnt out and blocked. Something had to give, and I really didn’t want it to be the fiction, so I moved into freelance arts PR consultancy, working with less overall writing on short-term projects like festivals or exhibitions, which freed up clear stretches of writing time. As a system, it worked for a decade – during which I wrote and published two novels – and yet, in 2021, with small kids at home and bills to pay, I was offered a (sort of) return to journalism in the form of a regular opinion column, and I jumped at it. 

“I tell students that the mentality required for novel-writing is the opposite of Twitter…the hashtag #amwriting is a dirty, dirty lie”

I am not a natural columnist (writing in the first person is not a particularly comfortable experience for me; much happier interviewing someone or narrating fictional characters), but a lot of the time my column ends up being partly about my life, so perhaps I put on a bit of a character, “columnist voice”, just to create a bit of distance.  I also pride myself on meeting every deadline my publishers and agent set me – it’s hard-wired in from my years at The List. 

My partner is also a writer but has never worked as a journalist, and I’m frequently horrified at his absolutely lax approach to deadlines (not unusual for creative writers). Conversely, without a deadline to hit I find myself much less focused and meandering, more likely to deprioritise a task, while my partner just steadily chugs away.

My most productive time as a creative writer was between May and August 2018, when I wrote almost 50,000 words of my second novel Scabby Queen, then handed in the manuscript, but that was aided by both my partner earning enough money on a contract job that I could afford to take those months off work, and the (literally) pressing deadline of my second pregnancy (the baby was born at the end of August). 

Those are the only real crossovers between what I think of as my two “modes” though – in order to avoid burning out again, I usually try and convince my brain that it’s doing two separate things. 

A dedicated writing day, 9.30-2.30 (carved out of school hours), needs to belong entirely to the fictional world I’m creating; it can’t be interrupted by emails, columns to write, or invoices to send. A novel is a marathon and it needs the appropriate head space: I usually go for a walk or run after the school run, as being under open skies or by an expanse of water helps me get my brain clear and ready for long-distance.

Teaching creative writing workshops, I tell the students that the mentality required for novel-writing is the opposite of Twitter, where you can skim through hundreds of different topics, opinions and emotional expressions in seconds; then I tell them to block it. The two cannot coexist. (The hashtag #amwriting is a dirty, dirty lie and everyone who uses it knows that.) 

For a column, however, I need to be as informed on the topics I’m writing about as possible, up-to-the-minute. I need the internet; I need all the evils of Twitter to come pouring in. That’s why I can’t toggle between the two modes on the same day; the mindset for column-mode is too distracted to settle into novel-mode.

I actually work on different platforms, too. Novels and plays happen on Scrivener, where I can create a huge binder with my notes, research, character sketches and chapters, and move easily between different sections; columns on Word or Google Docs, where one clear page is the right physical space for distilling a line of argument into 800 words. I even have an extra screen, far wider than the 13” silver laptop box, that I keep just for fiction, because I need the visual scope. 

This might all sound a bit dramatic: it’s not like I’m working between, say, brain surgery and ballet. This sort of extreme compartmentalisation is what makes it possible, though; at last, I understand how my brain works. 

Kirstin Innes is the author of the novels Fishnet and Scabby Queen and the non-fiction book Brickwork: A Biography of The Arches, as well as a number of short stories and the Radio 4 documentary Daft Punk Is Staying At My House. She writes a regular column for The Press and Journal.