In a way, writing a novel is like being one half of a buddy movie. At the start there is the sheer incompatibility/unfeasibility factor. You,
with your crowded, aching, gadfly brain, half-remembered micro-inspirations and
unfulfilled desires. The book, currently a void, not even a pile of paper yet,
as there is nothing to print out, not even some electronic symbols on a white
electric background because you actually have no idea what the hell it is even about.
This is a relationship that is never going
to work.
As you progress, it actually gets slightly worse. After any amount of time, but certainly after producing
30,000 of words, your self-belief undergoes a necessary
adjustment. You hit a wall. You nosedive. The words are shit. The idea might be
shit, but as yet, you are not even sure it is one. Innocence has been lost, and
you and the draft – a mean, truncated, ugly thing – stare at each other balefully.
Maybe you stop at this point and the buddy movie reaches a premature
end. Thelma and Louise get a puncture when they are barely out of town, Louise
hasn’t shot anyone, Thelma hasn’t had the benefit of Brad Pitt, everything just
fizzles. The two women think ‘oh fuck it’ and go home, stuck in their frustrating lives.
Or maybe you carry on. The novel and you patch it up, decide
to make a go of things on the basis that neither of you are much good, certainly
nothing special, probably a lot worse than the other unwritten novels and their
disappointing authors. You grind away, tapping out the terrible stuff. The
novel looks on, sceptical. Sometimes you hack bits off the novel, the intolerably
irrelevant, the magisterially over-written. The novel shrinks and winces. But you
carry on.
This, sometimes, is when it starts to go quite well. You haven’t
finished yet, there are a thousand problems still to overcome, but you have reached
the part where Thelma and Louise are in their shades, and have just blown up an
oil tanker.
Emotional self-management doesn’t come naturally to most of us. I grew up with the idea – based on Hollywood movies - that writing itself was photogenic and intense, the demented author swigging bourbon while sitting at the sweaty Remington, writing into the small hours. By dawn, the novel would be born, a work of genius, a book to change the world. One would expect no less after such a harrowing engagement with the muse.
But actually, over the years, I
have come to accept that not only is writing itself a long game; the production
of each individual book or story is itself a multifaceted, time-hungry challenge,
and that one of the most difficult aspects of this is staying sane during the peculiar
period during which something that does not exist takes shape. Moods swing between
mania and zombie-like dejection. Wine tempts. Cake beckons. Twitter
glitters. Self-control is essential at such times, tedious strategies must be adopted: eating your greens, getting fresh air, not reading rave reviews of
recently published authors.
My most effective mental strategy is treating the novel like
my wrong buddy, the person I am least likely to get on with, my irritating flatmate.
Each day we take our places and we carry on. There are goodish days, there are
bad days, and eventually, there is a thing. The novel exists. What was once a tiny shimmer of possibility is something else now, usually much less pure and perfect in execution
than in imagination, but actually a thing. By managing expectations and checking
in each day, it is possible to reach this extraordinary place. If you
are lucky, it is the edge of the Grand Canyon and you have found the ending that is
the perfect exit for you and your now beloved buddy, your newly finished book.
