My little secret to becoming an unstoppable writer

A juicy Q&A filled with some of my best writing advice.

I receive hundreds of messages every month asking for writing advice, but for some reason I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this one message.

I think I’m a writer. Like for real. Deep down. I think I’ve had writers block for years from male perpetrated trauma. How do I start? Where? What? Not getting it out of me is making me feel disjointed. Help/inspo required.

With love. Follower x

I shared my answer in a short paragraph online and the feedback was truly overwhelming, with some of you saying it inspired you to start writing for the first time in years. So I’ve decided to turn my tiny answer into a much longer essay here full of my best advice on writing!

If you’re new here, my name’s Floss, I have written three Sunday Times Best-Selling books and I fucking love writing! In this essay I will be sharing a short Q&A full of advice to empower you to dust off your drafts, and execute your brilliant fucking ideas.

Let’s go!

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How to start writing?!

Answer:

Everything you’ve described here is exactly HOW I started my writing practice. I promise you. I literally became so enraged at men and the pain that they had caused that it was gathering in my body and I had to EXPELL it all into something creative. I needed to find an outlet somewhere to externalise my pain, to make sense of it and observe it, instead of allowing it to fester inside me. I started a digital diary on Microsoft Word, titled it “PERPETUALLY EXHAUSTED BY MEN” and wrote angrily into it every single day until it became an elaborate, dramatic memoir of my daily life - one that I still write into every day, 6 years later.

This was how I became a writer.

I just started writing.

So, my number one tip? Create a digital diary and let yourself write delicious nonsense.

Let it sound like the diary of a scorned, enraged woman if that’s how you feel! Just be honest. Write like no one will ever fucking read it. Allow yourself and your pain this outlet to move through it. When I created my first digital diary it was on my first ever solo trip. I left for the airport to Portugal with a single tote bag containing my laptop, a few bikini’s, leopard print platforms (yes, in Lisbon, I had no idea!!!) and a slip dress. I sat in a cafe, ordered a coffee with a pastel de nata and just typed and typed and typed and typed. I blurted out whatever crap came to my mind and it felt incredible.

You just have to write about anything and let it be delicious nonsense.

I started musing about the man sat on the table opposite to me and how I thought he ‘soooooo obviously fancied me’. I started writing about how much I hated existing in a body that was both desired and disrespected by the same person who assaulted me. I wrote and wrote and wrote about how much I loved and HATED being a woman. I wrote about how alive I felt sat in a cafe with the sun beaming through, forging myself and my thoughts into existence as though I was someone important.

That was the day I became a writer.

I had journaled relentlessly for years before, but something switched inside me that day, because I began writing thousands of words every day after that. I had never set out to take myself seriously, but it was also in that cafe, on that trip, that I wrote the book proposal for my first book Women Don’t Owe You Pretty - and sent it to my book agent.

Write delicious nonsense and it will all flow out.

And romanticise it! Writing is also best done romantically! You have to romanticise everything to enjoy it! Truly. Even a deadline! I use deadlines to creatively turn me on, I have convinced myself a deadline is sexy, that the pressure is flirtatious. Will I make it? Will I not? Will I work into the early hours? HOW EXCITING!

Romanticise everything. Imagine that you are Carrie Bradshaw. Wear a cute outfit. Order a pastel de nata! Do whatever silly fucking thing you have to do to make it fun. I’m not kidding.

I don’t know if I would have had the confidence to begin writing that document - or the book proposal for my first book - had I not intentionally taken myself to a cute cafe, romanticising my first solo trip in Lisbon, cosplaying the life of a travelling writer until step by step it became my fucking reality.

You become a writer by becoming a writer.

So go, write! Start your digital diary now.

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What to do when perfectionism stops you from trying?

Answer:

The only way to start writing is to expect it to be awful.

Really.

Take every ounce of pressure off yourself. Literally just start writing anything and expect it to be awful. You have to expect it to be awful to even begin writing in the first place. Otherwise you will never begin. Your words will remain stuck in your throat, choked up and held back by the barrier of perfectionism, keeping you frozen unless it sounds instantly riveting and beautiful - which it almost never will.

Stop trying to be Shakespeare!

And on that note, I bet his first drafts were pretty bloody shoddy too! Every writer’s first draft is!

The best attitude for beginning writing is that you should always expect it to be bad. And when it’s good? What a delight! But you have to get the shit writing out first in order to discover the hidden gems of wisdom within you! You’ve just got to start!

Open up a word document now and write your thoughts. This is now your digital diary. Don’t worry about starting with a killer first sentence. Just start writing your thoughts like:

‘I feel so fucking silly, why am I trying to write? Floss told me to do this. It feels so embarrassing, like I’m trying to be someone I’m not, as though the world needs to hear about MY ideas, perhaps it’s because I’m afraid of failure and…’

Write, write, write! Go, go, go!

I am a published author. My books have broken records. I have thousands of reviews from people that tell me my writing has changed their life. But I still have to remind myself every time that I go to type on a blank page: expect it to suck. Because any time I feel the pressure of perfection when my fingers hover over the keypad, I can’t get my words out on the page. I start trying to sound ‘like a bestselling writer’. I become more serious. More academic. I lose my flossy-ness. My je ne sais quoi!

It fucking stinks.

To create your best most original, authentic stuff, you just have to start writing and do it in a way where the stakes feel really low. Stop taking your art so seriously and treating it like it’s going to be judged by everyone. Treat it like a diary entry first!

I realised recently that some of my best writing happens spontaneously and sloppily on my instagram stories, when replying to questions from my audience - and I believe it’s because there is zero pressure. The format of an instagram story is so informal that it all just flows and gushes out of me non-judgementally and deliciously.

Also, look at your instagram message! The blooming metaphor you used is beautiful! Look at how beautifully you write when the stakes are low and there’s no need to be perfect!

You just have to do anything that takes the pressure off.

Perfectionism is the reason I have never started writing any of my books from chapter one. I physically can’t do it. I always start writing them from the middle, or chapter two. Otherwise it feels too overwhelming, like I’m stood at the bottom of a mountain with an entire 300 pages left to go, and it keeps me stuck, paralysed in fear of writing that precious, killer first line of the book….

I’ve decided it’s impossible, it can’t be done! So I start in the middle.

Because guess what? There are no rules! Everyone made them up. Ignore every single one of them. You don’t have to start writing from the beginning if that’s the thing that’s blocking you from writing. You just have to begin. Write one sentence. Get yourself going and before you know it, you will have written a thousand words, and slowly as you get into a flow, as you trust yourself more, the stinky shit starts to sift away and at the end of it you will have a few gleaming GEMS. It’s like excavating gold! You will look back on it and surprise yourself! You’ll think, holy shit, did I write that?

And yes, you did! You did that!

Your writing doesn’t need to be good, you just need to write.

The crafting and editing process can come later. Do not try to do them at the same time. When I wrote my first book, I edited while I was writing each chapter. It made the process so much clunkier. I was afraid of sending messy chapters over to my editor and I didn’t want her to see my flaws, to see that I was shit scared to publish my first book.

Then someone gave me this advice, and it changed my life:

“You can always edit something that’s shitty. But you can’t edit a blank page”.

With my last two books, I finally let go of perfection and the words just started GUSHING out. I started to write like I was writing in my diary, talking to a best friend, letting myself go wild on the page. And so I wrote, and wrote, and wrote!

The result? The first draft of Women Living Deliciously was longer than the fucking Bible. It was 200,000 words, and it published at 100,000. That’s half a bible’s worth of material, sacrificed! Gone! Deleted! The first draft of the sex scene in my novel Girl Crush? 10,000 words. That’s a dissertation! That’s a fucking thesis!

You never see the full picture of what a writer is producing and what shitty parts were cut away. The precious ‘darlings’ they’ve had to kill to make the work as good as it can be.

So just write. Write anything.

You can always edit something shitty.

But you can’t edit a blank page.

I received hundreds of questions from you but my answers to these were so long I decided to save them for another Q&A! In the next essay I will be answering more of your writing questions and talking about why I think SILLY WOMEN and yappers need to write books.

I loved this Q&A style because it feels more chatty and I have missed this advice format so much! If you have any other questions that you would like me to answer in a future newsletter, please leave them below! I would looove to hear from you!