I Just. Want. To Do It Now.

Revelations of an impulsive novelist

Portrait by ask_art888 on instagram.

I’ve been writing the first draft of my new novel since the start of this year. After a Summer of complete stasis due to my day/night jobs taking up all my time, the book is moving again, but torturously slowly. I keep thinking next week will be the week! But there are more meetings, more work commitments, more parental duties getting in the way of my writing flow. I had set myself a deadline of the end of October to finish this first draft. Now half term has arrived and I’m really starting to panic. 

You see, the first draft is my favourite part of writing novels. My previous experiences of writing them have been sort of feverish; a vomiting up of words, written over a period of a few months wherever and whenever was available to me. There was no plotting, planning, just a sort of mystical momentum (if that doesn’t sound too lofty), fuelled by impulse and instinct. With enough time and space for full immersion, the characters revealed themselves to me. I can hand on heart swear that those uninterrupted times of writing the first drafts of my two novels were the only times in my life when I have forgotten to eat. I can’t stand people who say they forget to eat! I always thought it was impossible until I went away to write the first draft of my first novel. I lost track of time completely. I looked up and I was writing in total darkness. I’d missed lunch and dinner. I remember cycling home on a lime bike at 2am in the morning  feeling utterly high. 

We already have two kills in total!

Ah. Half term. This is my son. He is lying beside me on the bed playing Fortnite on his Nintendo Switch and talking to his friend Freddie on the phone. 

It is safe to say that a room of one’s own is not a possibility this week. Yesterday I got to write for 20 minutes in a Starbucks. In that time my character took a packet of peppers from the fridge and opened it. A pepper fell on the floor and she picked it up, washed it and started to chop it. That’s it. The dinner itself could take the rest of the bleeding year at this point. 

I know what I should do. I should drop it all and surrender to the chaos of family time. I should lose myself to games of Uno and movies. But I don’t want to. Earlier my husband T suggested we watch a series together. Instead, I suggested that we come back to London in the middle of our week away and put the kids in camp, so that I can write. 

This is what I do. I become obsessed with the draft.  I tell myself that I have to have it done. I base this urgency on a deadline that I set myself. A deadline that is completely arbitrary. There is no logical thought behind being finished by the end of October. I just WANT to. 

‘Freddie drink your shield potions! You’re going to die otherwise!”

I’ve always had this sense of urgency in my life.  I’ve always just wanted to crack on. I’m a perennially impulsive person. I called my production company D.I.N Productions, an acronym for Do. It. Now.

It would be the understatement of the century to say that novel writing is not by nature impulsive. It takes bleeding years to write a novel. But this first draft business, this vomiting?  I always felt like this was the part of the process where my impulsive tendencies could shine. 

Bruh. Keep following me okay? 

 I had therapy (Yes I’m going to be that writer who talks about conversations with their therapist). I tried to explain to her about this panic I’m feeling at not having enough time to write. When I told her about my request to cut our holiday short she suggested that writing for me, was like an addiction; I’m finding excuses and reasons to have to do it. It allows me to get out of my head. 

And the more I think about it, she was right. 

 Yes I’m impulsive. Yes I’m frustrated that my flow state is being interrupted too much with all the stopping and starting. But there is another thing going on. I’m in the midst of perimenopause.

“Get in the bunker come on! “ 

 I am teary one minute. I'm cantankerous the next. I'm barking at people. I’m impatient, angry, low-level outraged with a lot of things. I feel like I'm blindsiding myself all the time with this new very abrupt way that I'm talking to people. I've become oddly self-conscious, like a teenager. I feel very alone in my head. That's the only way I can describe it.

But when I write, I’m not thinking about what I’m doing, I am just doing.  It’s not about me at all. It’s freedom. Freedom from that impossibly singular feeling of my own self-consciousness. And when I have to stop writing, it’s like being wrenched from a dream. It’s jarring. The real world is an undesirable place to be. I just want to be back in the kitchen with my character, chopping peppers. 

I know that my life experiences have been distilled through my previous novels at their time of writing in a way that sometimes I couldn’t identify until much much later, but I had never thought through the idea of my life experiences changing the motivations for why I would write in the first place. Yes, I’m writing because I am curious to know how this story will take shape, but I have realised that right now, this urgency, this NEED to write, is because I’m in the middle of a hormonal shit storm and writing allows me to escape.

“Freddie where are you going! Get out! There’s no fuel! “

There is no neat conclusion to this revelation. I still don’t have the time I want to have to write this draft. You hear of writers fucking off to remote stone houses by the sea, or getting grants to go and write in old convents in Paris. I am not in a position to do this at the moment. I'm going to have to accept that this stop-starty way of writing is all I’ve got.  

But I’m worried that it’s going to affect the quality of my book. There is a special kind of energy to the writing when it’s arrives from that feverish flow state. It might be all over the gaff in terms of syntax but there’s something pure and unsullied about it; there’s a sort of flame of intention that if you can keep burning through the editing process, without poking it too much, can define the writing of your story. I’m worried that I can’t keep my fire burning. It’s going to go out during the school run again. 

“There’s only five players remaining! Ok just follow me follow me.”

Every writer has their way of doing things. Writing this has reminded me of when I interviewed the author of Roddy Doyle on my podcast Changes. This is him talking about his booker winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which was written from the perspecitve of a ten year old boy.

“the shape of it was dictated by the rigours of parenthood. When I was writing it, I became the father of two children… we had a toddler and a baby and literally one in each arm sometimes. And I was teaching every day. So I'd wake up very early in the morning, and I'd listen out... Grand, very quiet, make a cup of coffee, do a little bit, paragraph or two, if I could. And sometimes that paragraph or two became an entire little world of its own in the book. I didn't know that at the time. Paddy just describing something, you know? So I was writing these little glimpses of a child's life. .. And by the time I got to the end and I began to realise I did have a plot, Paddy watching the collapse of his parent's marriage, I was really quite surprised because I didn't know I was going to be finishing the book that day or that I was anywhere near. And if memory serves me, I printed it all out and I put it on what was then, my office floor, I'd take a page and say, I'll put that with that page and began to see a spiral, a literal spiral, Annie, on the floor with me sitting in the middle of it.” 

Now that’s glorious isn’t it. If you read back Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the main bulk of the book is written in these vignettes. In a magical display of writerly instinct, Roddy decided to write from the mind of a ten year old boy, and the way that young mind worked was perfectly aligned to the fragmentary form that Roddy was restricted to. It just worked. 

Oh my god so many people are shooting at me

I’m not sure how being a forty six year old peri-menopausal working Mother will affect my writing. I know I’m writing about themes of loneliness and anger so that’s quite self explanatory, but in terms of form? Who knows. 

I know that I’d love to calm down. I’d love to not just move my October deadline, but remove it altogether. I’d love to be the writer that can be happy with the first draft of a book taking form slowly and steadily. I’d love to not rush the writing process for the sake of my impulsivity or my need to escape my changing hormones. For now, this story can only be written in short spurts. I just have to learn to be okay with that. 

Fellow writers, how do you navigate writing your first drafts? how do you cope with writers frustration? Is this a thing? I'd be so pleased to hear from you. 

Come on! Oh you rat. We had the same skin. That’s disrespecting the family tree. How dare you? You will be ended. 

Oh and it’s goodbye from him. 

 Happy half term to all the parents and carers out there xx