A FAIRLY STANDARD EVENING

Writing achievements: a checklist

Counting, but not keeping score

We were walking back from the pub, in the dark and the rain and down a steep, muddy hill.

‘I want to write a programming language,’ Jack said. During the day Jack and I sat together, designing and writing boring, complex software for a regulator in the transport industry. As we walked I asked him why.

‘I want to learn.’

‘Sure’, I said.

‘It wouldn’t be for people to use,’ he said, ‘I want do it because it would be an achievement, because I want to be a better engineer.’

The next next day he sent me a link, to a list of ways to level up as a programmer. There were plenty of achievements listed: attending a code retreat; writing a real-time application; contributing to an open source project. This is what he does when he’s not running and cycling and swimming around the South-West of England, and actually, it’s the sort of thing I used to do too. In software the autodidacts are the best engineers and, like Jack, they plan their own advancement.

I love coding but I love writing fiction more, and I work at this like I used to work at coding. I’ve written villanelles and sonnets; I’ve written a scene without exposition, and then the same scene with nothing but exposition and then cut them both down to the best bits and merged them together. In fact, I’ve just finished a creative writing course at the Open University. The course was alchemy: turning my free time into words, if not golden words. But what’s the plan now? The discipline of an academic timetable has gone. I write every day, but to what end? Where’s my list of achievements? I began writing them down, and started writing down the things I wanted to do, and then added things I don’t seem interesting now but might, one day.

It’s worth considering the utility of such a list. Writing for extrinsic reward is not rewarding. What’s the point if you can’t feel the love of the language as it lays itself out on the page? And what if it becomes an exercise in scoring points? I love Stack Overflow but, without wishing to sound like a dick but knowing I do, this is art. Do I really want a badge to proclaim my progress? No, I want better stories to proclaim my progress, I want flow and to gain confidence in my style. But I do want a list of things to try, I do want to avoid the occasional vertiginous notion that I’m just writing story after story, poem after poem, saying the same things in ways that differ only superficially.

Getting through everything on the list won’t actually mean I’m a better writer than I was. The percentage of the achievements I complete won’t reflect how close I am to being Salman Rushdie. But drawing it up did cast a clear light onto the landscape of literary achievement, and actually made the foot-hills seem less daunting.

Here’s my list.

Fiction

Writing

Write a piece of flash fiction

Write a short story

Write a novella

Write a novella that I like

Produce a collection of at least 10 short stories that I like

Write a novel

Write a novel that I like

Write some interactive fiction

Collaborate in the composition of a short story

Collaborate in the composition of a poem

Studying

Attempt to write a short story in the style of at least one writer I admire

Attend a creative writing evening class

Attend a creative writing university course

Earn a degree in creative writing

Publishing