A first draft, because I haven’t written anything in awhile.

When I was about seventeen, I wrote a novel. It was a sort of fantasy thing, part Tolkien, part post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It was rubbish, but then, it was infinitely better than the novels most people write at that age: most seventeen-year-olds don’t write anything at all.

The plot actually had some interesting elements, and I’m always thinking of writing it again; it was the writing itself that sucked - the way the story was presented.

“So what did you learn?”

I learned not to assume my conclusions.

As a teenager, writing stuff for school is something of a hardship. I quite enjoyed writing essays, creative ones at least, but answering questions on some text or a poem was a painful process; “a whole page on that?!”.

Because of this, I always assumed that writing a book must take a colossal amount of time; if it took me so long just to finish that bloody question, it must take frickin’ years to write even a shortish book!

But after trying it for awhile, tentatively running through the first ten or fifteen pages of my story, I found it wasn’t as difficult as I thought, and I set myself a goal.

Three pages a day.

I reasoned that with three pages a day, in a year you’d have written The Lord of the Rings. And so I set about it. Big mistake.

It should have been very obvious right from the start what the problem was, but these things have a habit of eluding us until it’s too late.

The problem is that inspiration is unpredictable, and it comes in lumps. Some days, I wouldn’t have any ideas, I’d be sick of the whole project, but I’d soldier on anyway, you know, discipline and all that, and force myself to write three pages. Other times, I’d be plenty inspired, and fly through three, maybe even four or five pages, and, delighted with myself, I’d stop, and tell myself I’d pick it up again tomorrow. ‘Course, by the time tomorrow comes around, the magic’s gone, and I don’t know what to write anymore.

Forcing yourself to write when you’re in a bad mood only makes you write three pages of crap, and settling for three pages when you’re feeling inspired makes it seem ok to stop before your creativity runs dry. The problem is that you’re assuming your conclusions.

Before you start something, you have no idea how much you’re going to achieve. None. The facts aren’t in yet. You can’t just assume some arbitrary number - three pages, ten bpm, twenty situps, whatever - and aim for that; it’s ludicrous.

Instead, the constraints you apply should be more practical. There are only so many hours in the day, so time seems a reasonable place to start. Instead of assuming how much work you’ll complete, set yourself a certain amount of time. Say an hour. And if you sit there for an hour and all you get done is two sentences, or some kind of vague outline for where the story’s going, or you just fiddle with the font or something, then that’s fine.

Maybe we could go further, and say that some days we may get nothing done regardless of how long we spend staring at the screen. Maybe it would make more sense to force ourselves to try for a shorter time, twenty minutes or so, and we can continue for up to two hours if we’re feeling inspired. Or maybe there should be no upper limit.

Point is, you can’t assume ahead of time what you’re going to achieve. You’ll underestimate yourself, overestimate yourself, or, most likely, both.

I wrote this in 2005. I was probably 17 at the time; probably a school essay. It’s unfinished, for some reason, but it’s an interesting history lesson for me. You can sort of see me playing with language, like a big English bouncy-castle. “An Ungrateful Child” was the essay title I was given.

Some completely mind-buggering height above the surface of the Earth there is, or will be, a spacecraft.

Now, this, you might think, is a completely moot point given the title, but crucially the ‘ungrateful child’ in question, or rather ‘it which will soon be ungrateful,’ is at the moment in another spacecraft on the way to the first spacecraft at a speed which, until quite recently in the big scheme of things, would have been considered very unhealthy.

The child in question would be ungrateful at this very point, if only it wasn’t so preoccupied with being terrified, what with the intense noise and g-force with which it is being propelled through, and out of, the upper atmosphere.

It would now be ungrateful at this point, if only it wasn’t so preoccupied with being stunned by the sudden silence caused by the rocket motors stopping.

In actual fact there isn’t anything like silence right now, because everyone in the spacecraft is shouting or screaming or a combination of both, but everyone will be too out of breath, by the time their hearing returns, to notice.

Anyway, after a long period of quiet acceptance, the child and its parents is and are released from the cursed space-borne shuttle-bus and into the arrivals section of the space station.

This improbably large structure is a tourist centre, if you like, because at some point in history people realised, or will realise, that no one who wants to leave the planet wants to do so in a small and pretty cramped capsule.

The small and pretty cramped capsule is still in service, but as has been mentioned, its only job now is to shuttle people to and from this giant revolving space station and is usually the least-enjoyed part of space travel.

Although, in fact, not as much of it is enjoyed as might be imagined, at least not for any length of time. As usual the tourist board gets the last laugh. You see, most people go only for a short time, a few hours perhaps, so that, of course, they find out whether they’d like to go again for a longer period. Invariably the answer to this is yes, and so they choose to go again for maybe a week. It is only then that they become aware of the problems associated with, for example, having a shower in zero gravity, owing to the rather prominent problems of A) not being able to stay “under” the water, and B) the water not wanting to go “downward” with any great conviction.