A Year of The Last Days
On success, failure and outgrowing your work.
Yesterday, The Last Days was released on paperback. I tried to write a celebratory post about it, and found I couldn’t. I realise this is because, for me, The Last Days is old work.
When I started to write The Last Days, life was very different to how it is now. I was very different, writing it unmade and remade me, as I now realise every book I write will do. Writing is a dangerous game. I started the first draft in January 2019, with four very young children. I’d tried to fit writing around my life before, and it hadn’t worked. That year, I decided to fit my life around writing, and that change was vital in producing good work. I said no to more than I said yes to, I became reclusive, I worked and worked and worked, and I still work and work and work. Writing is a hard mistress. The Last Days went on submission just as the pandemic began to creep towards Britain. Life changed for everyone then. I think I felt a strange sense of relief when lockdown hit. I’d been preparing for something disastrous to happen my whole life, I’d been waiting for the last days, and then, there they were.
Covid came into the house. At first I was ill and then I was dangerously ill and then the day of my 40th birthday, I turned blue and the sirens came for me. I learnt new words: tachycardic, hypoxic; learnt good numbers, bad numbers; learnt that when medics seem the calmest you should worry the most. I was calm in those days too. It didn’t seem like a terrible thing that had settled into me. There was a strange resignation to it. I improved, but did not get better. None of us knew anything much about this strange chemical feeling illness; when or if it would fully go. I know I wrote the first draft of Ava Anna Ada that summer because it’s there on my laptop, but I can not recall any of the facts of writing it. It’s just there. Alchemy.
The Last Days sold, and I worked and worked on it, and my editor worked and worked on it and together we made it into a good book. We sat in a meeting saying this to each other, neither of us sufficiently excited. Yes, it was good, but it wasn’t what it could be. I went away, ripped it apart, pulling at its seams to insert more life, pace, complexity; life doesn’t make sense, it’s disingenuous to write it like it does. It became after that final reworking, its own thing, the thing it needed to be, and so it was finished.
And yet, I cannot read it again. This is not because it isn’t good, and it’s not because people don’t like it, or connect with it. It’s nothing to do with other people. It’s nothing to do with quality. It is instead, all to do with the fact that as soon as something is finished, I am no longer interested in it. I have for a long time liked competing with myself. I starved myself in part because it was very good fun to play a solitary game of attrition with myself. As a child I would skip in the garden every evening, each night pushing myself to do more. It is the same with my work. When it’s done, it’s done, the fun part is the what comes next, the sense that I’ve done that, now what. It’s the now what that interests me. It is the pushing myself to go further with form and style.
By the time it came to promoting The Last Days, I was editing Ava Anna Ada. Gone was the single-minded attention that was possible with The Last Days. Those first manuscript days, you don’t get back. Yes, I was writing in 2019, but I wasn’t a writer. The job of a working writer means it’s often very hard to get time to devote yourself ruthlessly to writing. My days are full now with many other things; promotion, pitching, essays, teaching, many competing demands. Promoting a book is strange because you have to move back into a work that in many ways you’ve outgrown. Not only have I moved beyond the time I was writing about in The Last Days, I would approach writing it differently. Every time I open the book, there is a conflict between the writer I am now, and the writer I was then. I think I almost feel touched by how little I knew when I wrote it, it’s almost sweet. I am also horrified by this naivety.
I suspect this will happen in the future with Ava Anna Ada, although I don’t know for sure. The first proofs of it arrived earlier this week. I took one to bed to read for errors, woke the next morning, began to read it and enjoyed it. This worries me slightly, I never like what I’ve written. By the time it’s released in six months, I hopefully will have written much of the next manuscript. I wonder if I’ll have the same sense of outgrowing. I often feel it between drafts. I tend to write a first draft very quickly, put it away and never look at it again. I don’t go back to it to edit it. It’s not robust enough at that stage to deal with editing. The second draft is the first entirely rewritten. It sometimes withstands editing. Sometimes doesn’t. I worry my writing process is strange and alarming. It alarms me. I often wish I could be more easily satisfied. Or better. I am reassured this morning though by an extract from Christopher Neve’s Immortal Thoughts, where he talks about Titian glaring at his work as if it were a mortal enemy. This describes the feeling of past work well, a mortal enemy, a necessary one, one I have often battled with, fought against, resisted making, and like most enemies, one I happen to love pretty deeply, despite the things I’d do differently.