8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Tag: writing

Chapter List

  • Write Always

    Don’t stop.

    You want to be better at anything? Keep plugging away and don’t ever stop practicing, and that goes doubly so for writing. Why? It just does—filled as it is with nuance and expectation and alive right there in the heart of everything we do, say, hear, and make.

    Writers write.

    They just do. And you are almost certainly only a writer when you are writing: actively penning words onto the page, typing characters into a keyboard or brewing the thoughts in your brain for your next opportunity to do more writing. 

    Writing can be messy. It can be scattered. It can be long or short, formal or stylistically chaotic. Writing can be words strung together in a notepad app, or traced with a lusciously thick felt-tipped marker on a wall. Writing can be private scribbles in a journal or annoying daily posts in a public website launched into the universe with no clear destination or audience.

    Whatever it ultimately becomes, the writing itself is an action. To write is a verb. 

    Writing is the act of filling the gaps between words. Writing is temporary and temporal. 

    And you need to write always. Why?  If you need to ask then you are not one of us.

    Because writers write.

  • Start Writing

    At the heart of this blog, the core of this little creative project I’ve been working on here, there is but a single message burning with the inner heat that drives the whole damn thing: it is one piece of advice. Start writing.

    Oh, I get it. You don’t have the passion or the time or the urge or the patience. 

    That device in your hands is so great at capturing your attention and entertaining you with the ideas and thoughts of other people—or maybe now I should include algorithms and slop—that you can’t be bothered to use it to make something.

    But writing is at the core of creativity. It is the uber-skill that shapes and refines all the others. 

    Writing is the materialization of thoughts—reflective and critical, personal and communicative, coherent and scattered—upon the page.

    Writing makes you better at evaluating yourself and whatever you do. 

    Writing closes the loop and fills the gap and bridges the points of something you cannot articulate is missing in your soul until you start writing.

    It’s not difficult.

    Open any app that takes text: your notes, your word-processor, hell, write yourself an email… but write something. And then write some more. And keep writing after that. It will improve you in ways you cannot fathom until you’ve written enough to see it for yourself.

  • Show Tell

    The Kid is a natural performer. She comes to life when attention turns her way and she is at her creative best when she is in the spotlight.

    Me, not so much.

    I prefer the quiet toil of fingers on a keyboard in a dimly lit cafe or sketching a scene from a vantage where no one can peek over my shoulder and ask pesky questions.

    But for either of us, and all of us, there is vulnerability interlocked with the act of creative expression. We all need to turn on, activate, be our best selves and show up to tell the story we are trying to communicate through whatever form we choose.

    I would love to tell you that creativity is an easy or a comfortable thing, but I really do believe that the best of what we makes comes from opening our hearts, souls and selves to the universe.

    I type away in peace and quiet rarely seeing the people who read the words I write, but despite my shyness I still post them and send them out into the universe for anonymous adjudication. Just by reading these words you have transformed into the second half of a mysterious equation that I know exists when I write but I’ll never know much about. That is my personal vulnerability.

    Creativity comes from everything we are clashed against everything we are not.

    Under the category of Show & Tell I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Plotting Resolved

    Almost two years ago now I was deep into writing a novel.

    It was not my first.

    It would not be my last.

    But yet here I sit not having finished writing it. 

    Sure, I made a plan. I sketched out the plot. And I got it about ninety percent of the way to completion, but then…?

    Then I hit a wall.

    Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and feel guilty that I didn’t write another chapter in that novel the day before. Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and part of me ponders if today will be the day that fact changes.

    So far, no.

    At the start of 2026 I resolved that just pining about standing in front of a metaphorical brick wall, a wall that I didn’t know how to climb over, or around or through was not the right approach either.

    Instead, I started a new novel.

    No. I haven’t quit the other one, rather I just need some more time to stare at that original brick wall and figure it out. But just staring at it wasn’t helping anything either. 

    Each day I get another day further from my last effort on that story, but it is not forgotten.

    And one day I’ll wake up, ponder if today, that day, will be the day… and I will be right.

  • Smouldering Plots

    It’s difficult to start a story, and it’s difficult to end a story… but somehow worse than both of those parts there is a hump I have found that occurs somewhere in the middle.

    I have been writing a new novel and I am at the point where I need to move from the start, the inciting action where all the characters are introduced and dive into the middle, the guts of the story where all the action and the bulk of the story is going to happen.

    I did all this work on planning out a plot.

    I did all this work creating characters.

    I did all this work lighting the fire to make it all start.

    And whilst I did think a lot about how the flames were meant to keep smouldering for the next couple hundred pages of real story, getting over that hump between the start and the middle, and putting it down into actual words on an actual page is turning out to be a bigger chore than I anticipated.

    If you have been reading my meandering thoughts you know that I generally keep smouldering. I just push through and write my five hundred words each day, and (practically speaking) that’s how it goes down.

    But the effort, the mental churn, the fight to keep going is different now that I’ve moved into middle where the real plot and real works takes more than just a big idea.