Now I’m writing about not writing and how that helped me write
My daughter has followed me onto Medium. Her first two posts are up. I would claim she takes after her father but her posts are lucid and well-crafted. Ahem.
So, after the lessons I tried to internalise yesterday on the back of my know-it-all successful writer friend’s scathing remarks about my escape into my notebook, I cast the book aside this morning and worked on the novel first thing.
And wouldn’t you know it; after the customary moments of resistance familiar to almost everyone settling into a seat in the hope of crafting something not too shitty, an hour or so passed and I had the first five short chapters of the first draft knocked into shape.
That makes it sound like I was editing but what I was doing was reading through what I already have in an effort to find what’s missing. If that makes sense. I have, in other words, the first draft of a first draft. There are thousands and thousands of words but I know there is a hole still at the book’s centre. It is this I’m now trying to find and which this read through should help me locate.
Part of the problem is that I set the thing aside for too long. Now I can’t remember if wrote some of the stuff I wanted to write or I just thought about it for when I got back to writing. Hence the read-through.
One of the things reading it again made clear quite quickly was that I was switching between the main characters too much at the start. It meant there was no real engagement with any of them. So what I’ve done is combine the first character’s story into a continuous narrative — over those first five short chapters — until he arrives at the small town in which the main action takes place. Now I can switch to the next characters knowing that there is an emotional investment in the first character that will carry us through until we meet again a few more chapters in.
This writing lark’s easy when you know how, isn’t it?
When you do it.
When you staple your arse to the chair and smile through the pain. You know you’re winning when you can no longer feel your arse.
Good times.
