Words come when you're not looking

As some of you will know, I've just started spending every Wednesday writing.

It's remarkably productive, because in the six days between Writing Wednesdays (they're so important that they absolutely deserve capitals), I think about the story I'll be writing the following week. Wednesday morning, I'm ready to get going as soon as I've drunk some coffee.

The kitchen is really clean on Thursdays because wiping down drawer fronts, washing up all the cutlery or scrubbing the fridge helps me to think about the knotty problem I've just come up against in the story I'm writing.

I'm getting fitter too. Yesterday I had a revelation about the end of a story while cycling up a particularly vicious hill. I put it down to lack of oxygen in my brain making it see strange connections.

Doing something that's not writing, but while you're writing, is the best way to see a new angle, hear a resonance, or smell a character who's been hiding in the undergrowth.

And here's another thing I've found out.

Last week I finished a story I've been writing since January. Then I looked at another story that I completed a while ago and realised that I needed to cut the first half of the first sentence. I went back to the first story and found that it needed a few teaks that I hadn't been able to see while embedded in it. I made the changes and sent both stories out - the first in ages. Reading another story helped me to step back from the one I was writing. By coincidence, Adam Marek, whose stories I admire hugely, blogged this week about working on two stories at once and how it helps him to see each more clearly - take a look at how it was for him.

Short stories at Totleigh Barton

For weeks, months, in fact, I've been positively jumping about inside with excitement about going on my first Arvon course. I'd signed up for:

six whole days dedicated to nothing but short fiction. 

Adam Marek and Tania Hershman as tutors - how awesome can you get? 

and no email, no mobile signal (and no family or work) so for the first time ever I could think about - and do - nothing but write.

How could I resist? Actually, I've been resisting for years - though it's my idea of heaven, going on an Arvon course felt wantonly extravagant. And yes, it was extravagant, but wanton, no.

It was heaven, but the kind of heaven where people drink lots of wine and get all passionate about adjectives. Where they plead for more of Tania's word cricket sadism - writing on the spot, using random words lobbed down the dining room table at one minute intervals. Where the thought of being flooded in and unable to leave a house with no connection to the outside world, only libraries, sounded like heaven to pretty much everyone.

It did rain an awful lot.

But the sun shone too, and Helen Dunmore made it through the floods for a wonderful night of readings and conversation.

And I learnt that even amazing writers can produce first drafts with some pretty dodgy prose in them (thank you Adam for being so generous - we all really appreciated it!). I learnt that I can and probably should expect to rewrite that first draft far more radically than I ever have before. I learnt that it's fine to take your time - lots of writers produce only a few stories a year that they like. I learnt that I really enjoy writing flash fiction.

I learnt loads more too (including how to make a rather delicious Thai green curry) but above all I reminded myself that I write because I love writing.

... and breathe out

At midday yesterday, despite me telling myself I was deeply calm, my body wagged a finger at me and put me right. Cold sweats, racing heart - what a wimp. So I sat myself down to finish my accounts with the radio blaring loud (The Avalanches' 'Frontier Psychiatrist' - what? Only 6 Music could play it), and that seemed to do the trick.

By the time I arrived at the Betsey Trotwood for the Best British Short Stories launch I really was as calm as I'd told myself to be - and quite right too: Nic Royle, the editor, was easy-going and so was the whole evening. Hard to be formal in a tiny cellar with standing room only, lots of beer, and tube trains rumbling under our feet. The readings were great - it's a pleasure to hear stories read the way their writers intended and I'm looking forward to re-reading the others' stories and hearing their voices in my head as I do.

So now it's launched, and I even have a copy - the ones Salt posted out last week still haven't arrived, so last night was the first time I'd seen my name in that contents list.

I have to say, it's a good collection - I haven't read it all yet, though I know the two stories by Hilary Mantel already from their original publication in the Guardian, but I love Claire Massey's Feather Girls and Adam Marek's Dinner of the Dead Alumni. Shall be reading the rest eagerly - a treat in store for when I've done my tax return. Revenue and Customs better be ready for the earliest tax return ever.

Proof I'm not perfect

Salt sent the proofs for The Best British Short Stories for me to check - hugely exciting to see my story there, and only slightly less so when I spotted a typo on the first page which I'd missed when it was first printed in the Warwick Review. Still, at least I found it before they printed the book - it's due out on 15 April, more details here http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/anth/9781907773129.htm.

I also had to check my biog in the back of the book - a pretty quick job as it's so short: "SJ Butler is a freelance writer and editor living in Sussex. 'The Swimmer' is the first short story she has published." Alongside the lists of novels, collections and illustrious magazines everyone else has published in, it looks a little sparse! Still, I'm thrilled to be alongside people like Hilary Mantel and Adam Marek, both of whom I've seen at the Small Wonder festival at Charleston and admired from afar.

Adam Marek read an utterly beautiful story about a father and son at Small Wonder last year, quite unlike the surreal stories in 'Instruction Manual for Swallowing'. I haven't seen it published, and in a way that's one of the joys of the festival - just occasionally we hear a story that feels as though it's being read once in its life, for us alone. Michel Faber read one he'd written specially for the festival, which he told us he didn't plan to publish, and it's still quite clear in my mind, all the brighter for not being written. Mind you, I'd love to read it and experience it again.