‘The first draft of anything is shit’.

When you think of people with writer’s block, you get an image of a unhappy soul staring at a blank screen, lacking all impetus. However a blank page is not a problem in my opinion. It would generally imply you haven’t started yet, which means you’ve probably got an idea and are yet to start and starting something is easy. Well I find it easy anyway.

It’s once you get the initial flush of your creative idea down onto the page that the problems really begin. Especially if you stop what you’re doing for a couple of months and fail to write anything at all. At that point when you go to sit down and start writing again you’ll be lucky if you haven’t entirely forgotten what you’ve written up until that point. This is my experience anyway. Then I have to go back and read everything I’ve written up until then all over again just to remind myself of what it is I’m actually writing and this is where the problems REALLY begin to kick in.

Once I start re-reading stuff I notice just how awful it really is and I either a) get stuck in making corrections and re-writes or b) (and the much more damning of the two) I decide I’m so terrible at writing I really shouldn’t be writing at all and end up giving up. Again. I’ve done this more times than I care to remember. The problem with writing is, it’s a solitary old game and if you’re only writing for yourself with no threat of actually being published it’s very easy to give up. No one need ever know. It’s easier than attempting to finish, and it’s probably a hell of a lot kinder to your ego than trying to forge forward, working away on something that to all intents and purposes is a load of rubbish and will very probably (and potentially, for the benefit of the entire human race) never see the light of day.

Except this time is different. Or at least, I’d really like it to be. This time, I am fighting my fickle inner voice, because this time I really want to finish. I have no idea why, but I’m just really disappointed at myself for failing to finish anything else up until now. I even signed up to do my second half marathon today, in the vague hope that having to get myself motivated to ruin all my joints by forcing myself through 13 miles, might actually get me motivated in other areas too. So I’m beginning to find inspiration wherever I can. I’ve become one of those people who put ‘meaningful quotes’ on Facebook. Yeh, that arsehole. Today’s will be Ernest Hemingway’s “The first draft of anything is shit”.

I hate myself a little for becoming this person. But I am clinging onto these things for dear life because if Hemingway wrote shit first drafts, then it leaves little old me with a slither of hope.

NB My ‘d’ and ‘s’ are now beginning to stick. I have no idea how my lack of an ‘e’ is having this effect but it’s like a keyboard disease that’s spreading daily. Soon I may not be able to write at all. At the rate I’m going of course, this could be a blessing in disguise and put everyone out of their misery. Mainly me. 

Laugh and death – I hit my first writer’s block…

I’m not sure Richard Curtis had it right about love being ‘all around’. At the moment it seems like it’s death that ‘really is all around’. This is both depressing and on a much more cynical level, also useful for my book. This is because, broadly speaking, I’m writing a novel about death. Well, life really, explored through the ever present threat of dying for all of us. Currently I’m having no lack of inspiration.

 

I flew in from Australia having lost my battle to stay a few days ago, and came back to a country that was experiencing what I can only describe as an apocalyptic level of flooding. The sky was dark and the heavens opened from the moment I stepped on British soil and didn’t close again for 3 days straight. My parents were a sandbag away from a ground floor drenching. The British weather has quite unwittingly provided a suitable backdrop for the topic of my book – who ever associates death with sunshine?!

 

A couple of weeks ago saw the first anniversary of the death of the mother of a very close friend. I saw her today, and it of course, came up. I knew her mother well too and it was heartbreaking, for me mainly because it was hard to see my friend go through something so, well, heartbreaking. I then came home and found out a friend and colleague of my father’s of 20 years had also passed away a couple of days ago. She left behind two young children and a husband. An email from another friend recently delivered the news that her first boyfriend, aged 31, was involved in an accident on a motorcycle and died on the scene.

 

All these people had families, lives, paths that they were following, most probably taking for granted before they met their fate, that they would get the chance to continue on them, just as we all do. They loved and they were loved. Their deaths leave a big mark and empty space for those they have left behind.

 

We all of course will meet our own individual ends one day. That’s why I decided to try and write a book about it. Death (and taxes) are universal to us all. At some point I think we all struggle with the idea of death, I know I have, and I wanted to explore this struggle.

 

The problem with death is, it’s so bloody depressing. So I’m still 15,250 words in because I’ve hit a bit of an impasse – how you make death attractive. Well to a reader anyway. From what I can gather through other writers who have traversed the terrain successfully, it involves sensitivity in the right places and a lot of ‘black humour’. Having spent a good few years in television production filming in places like A&E departments, I’m all too familiar with black humour and its uses. It’s out there and it’s how we as human beings, deal with the difficult stuff. But I’m fast finding out, it’s not necessarily so easy to write without belittling the process or making a mockery of my characters who are facing it. Because of course in my book, they’re just figments of my imagination on a page, but everyone has a Sophia in their life (one of my main protagonists) and everyone has a Paul (the other) and to make a mockery of them is to make a mockery of those people – my friend’s mother, my father’s friend, my friend’s ex-boyfriend – their lives, and their struggle, if they were around long enough to have one.

So how to get past this impasse of mine? Answers on a postcard. In the meantime I may go back and spend a little time with my old friends from A&E…

 

NB The ‘e’ button is still missing. It’s tedious but I’m almost getting used to it. I feel like it gives my keyboard ‘character’. So for now I’ll leave it as it is. 

 

So it began…

A blog about writing; ‘how original’ you’re thinking. Well, you’re right. It’s not original – ‘The most efficient way to blog a book’, ‘From blogging to published book’, ‘How to blog your book’, ‘Please don’t blog your book’, it seems when you type ‘writing a novel blog’ into the internet, the list goes on, and on, and on…except apparently it is more original than I thought to write a blog about actually writing a novel. As in, a first person account of attempting to do so, as opposed to just writing about how to write a book and how to become immensely successful in the process.

You see I love writing. Well I love words really. I am what you may call a ‘logophile’. I love reading them, speaking them, and of course, writing them. I think I always have. If I had a ‘super power’ (a purely selfish one, just for me not the ‘greater good’) it would be to be able to communicate in any and all languages across the world. Being in a situation where I cannot communicate my thoughts, my feelings, or be able to tell a story or understand one, is a type of hell for me whenever I encounter it. You know those people who say ‘actions speak louder than words’? Well I’m not one of them. I truly believe words can induce joy, fear, peace, war, and all the states of being in between. A picture may speak a thousands words, but without an understanding of the words those looks speak, the looks themselves are meaningless.

I started writing a diary at the age of 7; I didn’t stop until I was 15. I wrote letters to my friends, I sent my family postcards. I chose English Literature for A Level and if I’d done better I probably would have done an English degree. This of course was my first and not my last, mistake. In choosing to study English the subject soon lost its lustre. Choosing English Literature and studying other people’s novels as opposed to studying my own language, which would have given me a far better grounding to write my own novels, quashed my creativity and with it my enthusiasm. I have always been an avid reader of books, and this has never stopped, but the seedling of an idea I suppose I have always had within me to write my own, did. For a while at least.

So I took a degree in Philosophy, because why not? I graduated and got a job in TV, because, why not? Writing wasn’t going to earn me money and put food on my plate, and anyway, no one ever actually became successful through their writing did they? Not whilst they were still alive anyway. Apart from J.K. Rowling and she wrote about wizards – everyone loves wizards. So the writing took a back seat. Well in a sense. I mean I have started several books in my relatively short life, but I have never finished any of them. The furthest I have got is to approximately 17,000 words, which by anyone’s standards is at least 43,000 words off of a novel. It’s barely a novelette.

So staring down both barrels of the ’30^th birthday’ gun, and bored with starting things I never finished, I set myself a goal: to write a book. A whole one. It didn’t matter if it was crap, it didn’t matter if it never got published, never saw an agent, never netted me a penny. The goal was to finish. I suppose it’s how some people feel about running a marathon. Except you see I don’t write for some higher purpose. I’m not sure that what I write is any good and would want to be read by anyone other than me, and maybe not even then. I write simply because I enjoy doing so. I write because when I’m sat in front of a computer tapping away on a keyboard and catch a glimpse of a reflection in my screen I see this half smile that appears to be constantly etched on my face. I write because it makes me feel content in a way that nothing and no one else ever has. I write because when I’m writing and so far only when I’m writing, do I feel at my most authentic. How I feel about writing reminds me of a quote I read once about travelling by a man called Andy Hayes; ‘Decide how you want to feel, and go wherever it takes to feel that way’. I know how I feel when I write is how I want to feel. So I write. I am writing and this is going to be a blog about it.

So now if you’re anything like me, you’re thinking to yourself ‘Then just write. Why are you bothering with the blog?’. Well, I suppose the reason is three fold: 1) It is weirdly cathartic to do so, because it is a struggle. I mean I love writing, but that doesn’t mean I find it easy. Plus people love reading about other people struggling, that’s just a given 2) People also like reading funny things. I have a feeling my attempts at writing this novel will inevitably lead me into some ridiculous and (for the reader if not for me) potentially amusing situations. Much like the time I went for a group interview in Radio (what are THEY all about?!). These may prove especially hilarious if, heaven forbid, I do attempt to get aforementioned agent and/or try and get whatever the product of my writing might be, published 3) and now I come to the most important of all the reasons (make of me what you will) but if I put out into the public sphere that I’m writing a book, then I actually have to write one. I have no qualms in admitting that by making this public I am aiming to shame myself into finishing. It is quite possibly the only way that this book will get finished, because although I love writing, I am terribly lazy and extremely easily distracted. It’s not a great combination for a writer. (I have looked at social media at least 3 times during the course of this entry alone, checked my phone more times than I could tell you, read my horoscope – I shouldn’t force the hand of destiny this week if you’re curious – and made two cups of tea).

So I’m hoping this is an undertaking that can work both for writer and reader. In return I promise I will not be ‘blogging my book’, this is not a platform for me to ‘get recognised’, indeed I anticipate a total of approximately four followers (mum, dad, sister, uncle) perhaps the odd life coach (cos frankly they’ll follow anyone), and the occasional visit from someone who is looking for a legitimate blog telling them how to get recognised with their novel and who will end up clicking away in a mix of disappointment and quite possibly confusion. No, I will share my endeavours with you, in return for knowing you’re all just out there and at a click of a button could actually end up reading this, thinking things like ‘she’s only on 17,001 words, it’s been 9 months. I could have procreated and produced an entire child in that amount of time’. Essentially I am writing this blog under the threat of judgement, because there is only one thing I hate more than I love writing and that is being judged.

So I’m starting this blog 15,250 words in to the latest book. Mainly because I like round numbers and that’s a good one. I set myself the ‘goal’ to finish nearly a year ago on the eve of moving my entire life to the other side of the world. I am starting this blog on the eve of moving it all back. My life that is, not the world. That would be weird as well as making no sense. When I set my goal, I gave myself a year. I am at least 44,750 words off of a finished novel. The year is 9 days from being up. You can see why I need this blog. I’m not suggesting I will finish in 9 days – that way madness lies – but I would like to give myself another 6 months, which I believe to be a more realistic time frame for 44,750 words. (surely?!) 

So there it is. Here I am. I have only one more thing to preface this with. The button to my letter ‘e’ recently fell off* my keyboard. Considering I’ve lost the (easy) use of the most common vowel in the English language, it’s making the task ahead all the more daunting. So if you ever see one missing, don’t judge me for it.

*I may have pulled it off myself when I was slightly over aggressively cleaning.