I am one of thousands of people who are writing a novel
draft during lockdown. (Let’s hope it’s not millions, but who knows?) The peace
and quiet, the sense of a global pause, the endless home-based hours – for those
without onerous family responsibilities, this seemed like a golden opportunity.
Still seems like it, as ‘lockdown’ segues into ‘period of confusion’. With a partner better at cooking than I am, a furloughed
adult son and a newly part-time job, it certainly seemed like a good time to
me. And still does, even though I have no idea how far to stand away
from other humans outside my current bubble, or whether I should mask-up to go
to Waitrose.
So what is the story now? I teach creative writing, this is
my fifth novel, I am half-way through the first draft. I hesitate to call myself an expert, because
writing is so peculiar, and each book so different from the last. By the end of
any novel, you are generally an expert on that novel, but not necessarily on any
other novels you might write. And I’m also the kind of writer who – foolishly,
perhaps – writes novels that are dissimilar. I don’t even stay in the same
historical period. (That is definitely not a smart move, so my future books may
well be set in the Victorian age, like my current Work In Progress.) But I am
past the ingenue stage. I know what doesn’t work, for me, at least.
Writing blind
This is the approach in which you just slam the words down, in
the spirit of Jack Kerouac. You don’t look back, you don’t read your draft before
starting work each day, you just get the darn words down. The file on your computer
grows, there are lots of words there. Therefore, you are a writer. There is
something to be said for this, because all writing has its use, and this may
help you establish a writing habit.
But the reason I know it doesn’t work for me is that I end up with a lot of pages and no story. And the germ of the idea – what the tarot calls
‘the scent of the undertaking’ seems to have been drowned in the wrong words, it’s
in there somewhere, but I don’t know how to find it. Both D.H. Lawrence and H.G.Wells used to write a new draft from scratch, rather than editing the existing
one, and I wonder if this is because they had that feeling, that they had to have
a blank sheet to imagine the story freshly.
Working to a plot outline
I’ve tried this too, bruised from the experience of churning
out words. But the problem with this, for me, is that I don’t want to know too
much more than my characters do. I have to experience their problems and issues
from their point of view, and see how they resolve things. If I already know, and
have just put the problem there so I can fill some pages, then the energy goes
out of it. The well-balanced approach is to have a rough plot outline, or plot
ideas that you think will work, provisionally, but which are subject to adjustment.
Being a perfectionist
People sometimes think that perfectionism is a desirable quality,
because it means that someone has high standards. But there are no standards which
can deliver perfection – there is no such thing as perfection in human life. No
perfect novel has ever been written, not even The Great Gatsby, which sometimes
attracts that kind of praise. And even if your finished novel is going to be a
work of genius, it has to be allowed to be rubbish at first go. (As Ernest
Hemingway famously put it: ‘The first draft of anything is shit.’) So your novel-in-progress
will often feel as if it is no good. That is its prerogative.
Talking too much
I once heard Edna O’Brien describing the way young Irish writers
sometimes go to the pub and talk their books into oblivion, carried away by the Guinness
and the craic. I am a talker myself, if I get excited I want to share
what I am working on. Currently, I am keen to bore the partner and adult son with
highlights from the life and times of H.G Wells, and they are quite keen not to
listen. That kind of stuff is fine, as is sharing drafts with other writers if that
works for you – the quid pro quo element helps, you feed back on
their work and they feed back on yours and it all feels like part of a process. But
talking endlessly about your characters and plot can kill an idea, make it seem
almost not worth writing. I try and keep quiet if I can, and jot notes down rather
than talking.
Impatience
This relates to the over-talking issue, because sometimes I want
to talk because I want the story to be out there, and I know it will be months,
if not years, before that happens. Novels are like lives or relationships, they
have phases, seasons, moods, good and bad days, periods when they seem to be spinning
down the vortex of your self-destruction (or maybe that is just me), periods of
euphoria and hope. What I try to do, at the point I am at now, with 40,000
words down and 40,000 very much to go, is focus on the provisional nature of
the writing. I try and keep a balance between clarity and wild imagination, focusing
on that first glimmer that made me want to write it in the first place, but
also thinking clearly about how that can best be dramatized and live.
I’ve just had the first half printed out (at our local,
newly reopened print shop), read it through in hard copy, covered it in notes
and corrections, and am ready to move on to the second half. I find that doing it
this way stops me from becoming anally obsessed with editing paragraphs and polishing
sentences. The editing that happens at that point is about story, more than
style.
Does it work? Is this how you write a novel? I’ll let you
know. I think it’s probably how I will write this one. For now, it’s onwards and sideways,
following this weird thing where it needs to go.
