4. On Writing
There are many schools of thought on how one can approach the endeavour of novel-writing, and countless pieces of contradictory advice on the subject. Some authors are rigid, writing the exact same quantity of words every day, stopping mid-sentence if they need to, while others go weeks without tasting inspiration, before embarking on a relentless odyssey of creation that births a book in just a month or two. I am yet to finish my first novel, so would never presume to offer advice on the matter, but I would like to share what has worked for me so far. I hope you find this interesting, and to my future self, let’s have a laugh and compare notes.
I don’t think there is a single “hardest part” of writing for me. To be honest, sometimes it’s all hard. I’ve written as a hobby for most of my life, but still agonise over my word choice, sentence structure and thematic direction on a daily basis. In a way, I believe the art of writing reflects my outlook on life in general – it never stops being hard, but eventually, you start to feel a bit better about your ability to do it. I still have days where I spend three hours working on a single paragraph (like clockwork, my ever-patient partner cops a weekly “who do I think I am this is all terrible” text). Sometimes, entire days go by where I feel the words are not flowing, but falling clumsily astray, piling on the page like an upended box of toys.
But the best advice I ever came across was just to start writing. Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect, for you’ll proof and edit it a dozen times anyway! But write, and keep writing, and be patient and accepting that the process of writing is just like therapy: it can messy, painful and non-linear, but ultimately, is a fulfilling exploration of ourselves and our craft.
My first concept for my novel came in a dream over three years ago, in October of 2021 (yes a dream, I know I know, calm down George Lucas). I had a few weeks off before starting a new job, and I poured myself into an early attempt at a draft. I told nobody of course, but in those couple of weeks reached a word count of about 16,000 words. Now, as an adult who had been working and studying full time for the past few years, this felt like quite a success, and was by far the most I’d written on a single project since I was about 15.
But you know what happened next, don’t you? I started my new job, went through a relationship breakdown, three moves, that thing people call ‘life’. And you know what I kept thinking? “I’ll come back to this when everything is just perfect. When I’ve got a few days off, I’ve had a good sleep, and I have nothing to distract me for the day.” And you know what happened next? Yep, nearly three years passed, during which there was a single week (where I was on holiday, naturally) where I added another 8 or so thousand words. Otherwise, I never returned to this project because everything wasn’t *just* right.
Then I went through the hardest twelve months of my life. I won’t speak to that here, but I guess some part of me realised then that there will never be a “perfect time to write”.
So I started writing, seriously. I set a goal, to write every day for fifty days. No word counts, no limitations. It could be planning. It could be unrelated short stories. It could be passages that deepen my understanding of my story but will never feature on the page. Some days, I wrote barely 300 words, addled with fatigue or stress, and on two of the days, I didn’t write at all. But, at the end of those fifty days, I emerged with an oft-revised plan, and a draft of 50,000 words. Messy, contrived, clumsy and non-linear, but words nonetheless.
And then something crazy happened.
I started to believe.
More to come next week.
With love,
JSH
Book progress update: It’s been a tricky week, I’ve been rather unwell in that foggy, creativity-destroying way, so I have barely met my quota, but here is how things stand:
Words: 63,816
Chapters: 20
Pages: 259
Words last week: 3500 (0+/- target word count)
