Signing your life (or at least, a chunk of it) away is all too easy these days. I signed up for NaNoWriMo for the first time on October 3rd–long ago enough that I’ve already forgotten my site password. I know of no quicker route to instant fear. What if I can’t think of anything to write about? What if I start out really well and then can’t sustain it? What if I “freeze” on the first night and make a false start that leads me somewhere I didn’t want to go?
Well, I suppose the sky won’t fall if any of those things happen. But it’s still scary to make this kind of commitment.
I’ve made two attempts to write a novel before now. The first was for my degree; we had the option of writing a novel, a short story collection or a dissertation for our final project. We were encouraged to plan our project, regardless of the chosen format. And I did. I sweated blood during the planning phase. I had the whole thing sketched out on sheaves of A4 paper, literally as a pattern (eyes down, Matt!), with snippets of dialogue scattered among the circles and arrows. My tutor seemed pleased with me. I felt confident. And then, just a few short weeks before the first actual writing was due in, my grandmother died in my arms.
Suddenly I didn’t want to write my clever novel any more. I wanted–needed–to write about her. And that’s precisely what I did. I wrote non-stop for just over a week, deadline looming, and presented my tutor with (I thought) a complete mess. He loved it. It wasn’t until I was typing up my flatmate’s dissertation (on Feminist Post-Modernism) that I found out why he loved it. The mess I’d produced ticked all the Feminist Post-Modernist boxes. It included recipes and cooking–lots of cooking–and different styles of writing for different historical periods, and split PoV, and hey–it was about my Irish grandmother! I’d written precisely the kind of novel educated females were publishing in the late 1980s; in short, I’d written the promising first draft of a novel at the height of contemporary literary fashion, without even knowing it.
My second attempt, a decade down the line, also began with circles and arrows–and this time around, I actually started to write the novel I’d planned to write. Man, it was dire. The dialogue was turgid; every character represented something to somebody else, as in Thomas Hardy; the landscapes I’d found so easy to convey in my grandmother’s story were static and empty and devoid of colour in this.
I learned my lesson then and there. I am not someone who can plan a book and expect my writing to live on the page. In my experience, it won’t. I’m the same with sewing projects; if I rough-cut the cloth and tidy up later, it all pans out nicely. If I try for precision from the start, the mistakes I make in the early stages are too big for redemption.
So. I already knew, on October 3rd, that I wouldn’t be scribbling circles and arrows for my NaNo attempt. What I didn’t know was what on Earth I could write about that might sustain itself for 50,000 words. But more of that next week.
