26/100, First Draft and Sore Fingers

I seem to have accidently written the first draft of a fiction manuscript over the last week.

This is a slightly disingenuous way to describe what happened.

Seventeen years ago, fresh out, or not quite out, half out really, a cult, I needed something to occupy my time. A cult takes up a lot of time. All your time really. This is a deliberate ploy, it means there’s not room for anything else. No room for the devil they said, but really what they meant was there was no room for yourself. For myself.

Suddenly I had 20 extra hours a week to myself. That’s a conservative estimate. Evenings yawned. Sometimes, I was sure I saw a type of abyss during them. I decided then I was going to become a writer. I had no idea what I was doing. Or if I could do it. Would I have still done it if I’d known how difficult it was going to be? Probably. But there’s also something beautiful about ignorance. I thought I’ll write a book, so I did. I didn’t know then that they’re called manuscripts until they’re safely on the shelf. I didn’t know everything that could go wrong along the way. There was a safety in not knowing, it meant I sat down every evening after my daughter was in bed, working at drafting a manuscript.

What I was really doing was working out where my own moral compass pointed. I was finding my own north, recalibrating scales that had until then been dictated to me. I immediately found myself drawn to telling morally ambiguous stories; do not mistake that ambiguity for ambivalence. A friend recently sent me a programme about Iris Murdoch and morals, with a message saying, this is you! And he wasn’t wrong. Of course I don’t write like Murdoch, imagine! what a thing that would be. The Sea, The Sea is one of my favourite books, but I tussle with morality as I write.. It would be a mistake here to equate morality with religion. I don’t mean the same. I mean something fundamental to what it means to be human; the goodness I believe we all strive for, the light we grow towards, the nightly reckoning and the daily failing; the things religion often presents an easy way out of doing.

That manuscript wasn’t a first novel. Now way that could’ve been my debut. I didn’t see it then. It was ambitious and complicated and the subject matter was pretty nasty. The first agent who read it loved it, I didn’t reply to their email. A friend and critic once told me you don’t just have to be the person capable of writing the book, you have to become the person who can represent it. I think this is important. You must become it; I wasn’t it, then. Over time, agent’s responses became more encouraging, although they were always still no. And by over time, I mean over eight years. Eventually, I gave myself a year to write something else. Three weeks into that year the first draft of The Last Days was written. I never read it again. How many times I re-wrote that book, I don’t know.

Four weeks ago, I heard the first line of a novel. There, fully formed, was a voice in my head, in the same way Anna and Ava first spoke to me, one May, three years ago. I was walking home from a walk in the park. I couldn’t believe it. There she was, the woman from seventeen years ago. I didn’t want her there. I was busy. I was in the middle of another project. I’ve spent the last year drafting and researching a very different novel.

To make her go away I told her I’d give her a day. She could have a day to tell me the story, I didn’t have time for any more than that. I sat all of that day, barely able to keep up. By the end of the day, the plot was there. Voice too. I couldn’t have her sound like Ava or Anna, did I have it in me to make a different voice? Turned out I didn’t need to make it. She was just there. At an event recently the chair joked about all the voices I must hold in my head. He came uncomfortably close to the truth. I’d not been able to see what I’d done wrong with the manuscript all those years ago, five years away from it and there she was, telling me. Characters have a way of doing that, revealing themselves when you least expect it.

By the end of the day, I knew I was a goner. The desire to get back to her propelled me through the hardest thing I’ve ever made, through days holed up in London over the hottest days of the year, ignoring the sounds of summer to finish something I was certain I couldn’t.

And then. I made a plan. If I wrote 7,000 words a day I could finish the first draft in a 9 days.

Typing this, it sounds insane. It was. I don’t recommend it. Why did I do it? I could only do it because I knew the character. I could also only do it because my working days are very short. I have six hours between dropping my children at school and collecting them. Six hours doesn’t sound like much but it’s enough if you use every single moment of them. I don’t have hobbies. I often want to go a walk or go to the beach or meet up with friends but during school hours, I don’t. I say no to all of it, most of the time. I set my out of office so I could ignore emails in the day time, and bit my lip and set to work.

I also did it just to see if I could. It helps, to test your capabilities once in a while.

I also need to write a first draft quickly because I become a bit (likely an understatement) preoccupied when I’m at drafting stage. I find it hard to fully inhabit a fictive world and then switch back to the real one. It’s also a good way of overcoming the but this sounds hideous ick. It’s also a good way of finding the rhythm of a story, and the bones of it. It’s also a great way of finding the book’s own moral compass. If you’re typing that quickly, the sheer physicality of it, you don’t have time to think. I’ve written before about how vital it is to get yourself out the way when you’re writing anything, but especially fiction. Not being able to think allows the characters to speak.

It also negates the sheer cliff edged fear - or nearly does - of writing something that might once again be going to far. Ava Anna Ada goes far into the dark. This is no different. I’m prouder of the first line of it than anything I’ve written. I’m also more scared of it. If the first page is supposed to reveal the moral compass of a book, the first line does it in this. As I wrote, I remembered my mother often telling me I’d gone too far, telling me I didn’t need to go so far. I used to think this was a certain paucity of imagination on her part, surely there was always further to go. I am worried, now, that I have gone too far, again.

We will see.

Now begin the years of rewriting, adding, subtraction, everything else. But the bones are there. And I hurt to my bones. I can hardly type. I woke in the night, thinking of everything that’s wrong with it. I love this stage, when it’s a kind of possession and dispossession all at once, when the imaginary is more real and more important than anything else. Surely, this writing is its own kind of sickness. I hope I never recover.

But first, I’m setting my out of office for a couple of days. If you want to email me, please don’t.