Just write 250 words

On drafting a novel piece by piece

How do you do, fellow Parisians

I was a bit out of sorts over the past few weeks and it took me a while to join the explanatory dots. ‘Why am I like this?’, ‘Why am I doing this?’, ‘WHY?’ — oh, perhaps because I’m just out of Israeli prison! I did a blood test and it came back perfect and I concluded from this that I was fine on all levels. Then a few days after Christmas I had a sudden realisation of: holy shit, I need to take better care of myself, I need to sleep, I need to write, I need to breathe, I need to fuck off to Paris. The realisation was well-timed: I was between apartments anyway and it’s cheaper than Dublin. So here I am.

(From here I will be further fucking off further afield to Berlin. Only I would pick January to go there.)

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Anyway, it’s going well. I bought Flaubert’s last completed book Trois contes (1877) secondhand for four euro, stayed up talking in a friend’s apartment, drank some wine in a dive bar in the 11th, ate an enormous Lebanese falafel wrap. And I realised that I’m writing my first Irish-language novel the way I used to write in English before it became my job.

Now that I have an established relationship with my publisher, I can get contracts for English-language novels before I’ve finished them, making it much easier to carve out dedicated time to work on them. But I got into that position by doing a little every day, fitting it around other responsibilities however I could, making it a rule to just keep going until I had a viable manuscript. That’s what I’m doing in Irish now: 250 words a day minimum, worry about fixing it later, keep moving the story ahead for now. It takes me 5-15 minutes, depending on how much I need to stop and think. Those 5-15 minutes are the difference between ‘moving inexorably towards having a draft’ and ‘not’.

The hard part of this is not sitting down and writing 250 words. It’s keeping on doing it day after day. Most people who’ve tried and failed to write a novel are intellectually aware that they would have succeeded if they’d kept showing up. Something stops them psychologically from acting on this knowledge, and I suspect part of it is that they get distracted by contingencies they don’t need to be thinking about yet. You need a very particular kind of tunnel vision to get a first draft out: one that admits imaginative scope in terms of seeing the overall structure you’re creating, but that precludes too much worrying about the pragmatics of publication. Personally I am lucky in that I never have to shut off too many thoughts about the pragmatics of literally anything. This creates certain disasters in my life, but it does mean I can go quite a few sentences without thinking ‘What will I do with this book, whom will I send it to, is it good enough, will people like it’, etc etc.

There are plenty of skills/achievements I claim I would like to obtain, yet never meaningfully work towards. But I don’t seriously believe that I want those skills/achievements; the evidence of my inaction shows I don’t. Rather these ambitions go in a box labelled: skills/achievements I wouldn’t mind having at a lower cost. Even that is a bit dishonest, because the time spent acquiring a skill/achievement isn’t some sort of external toll to be weighed against the pleasure of having the thing; rather the time/effort are the thing. If by ‘I want to do/achieve X’ we mean that we want the actual experience of doing/achieving X, not simply the social validation bestowed on those who have already done/achieved it … then the time/effort is literally what we want in wanting X. Right?

That is to say: the 250 daily words come a lot more easily when you think of them as the thing you actually want. When you see them not as the cost of writing a novel, but as the novel-writing experience itself. Which is an incredibly simple thought, of course: that writing a novel consists of writing a novel. But from the number of people who say in the same breath ‘I want to write a novel’ and ‘How do you make yourself do it?’, I do think that somehow there’s a common separation at play here, a strange conception that being a novelist exists separately from writing a novel.

I’m not sure when that clicked for me in English. It must have at some point. Anyway, its re-clicking is what got me finally started on a draft in Irish after saying for months that I wanted to do it. Eventually I thought: if I genuinely do want to do it then no one’s stopping me. (Possibly it would be better for us all if they did. But no one has yet debarred me from writing books.)

I don’t know if it will be good. I don’t know if anyone will want to publish it. I don’t need to know these things to get a first draft out.

Three brief practical notes on process for anyone thinking ‘Okay, but 250 words of what?’ –

• I don’t plan at all; I make things up as I go along. If I don’t know what to write next, I stop and think until I’ve figured it out. Most of my ideas come from reading widely.

• For a first draft, I write neither wantonly terrible sentences nor ones I’d proudly frame. Style isn’t a gloss applied at the last minute for me; I don’t know what kind of book I’m writing if I’m unsure of the rhythm and register, so I consider those elements from the very first sentence. But I don’t agonise over fine-grained stylistic choices at this point.

• If there’s a small problem whose implications are limited, I keep writing and deal with it later. If it’s a big problem that will affect everything that comes after, I go back and fix it. If you always instantly know which is which, you’re a better writer than me.

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You might think this is a whole lot of words to say: if you want to write a novel then write a novel. And you’d be correct! So if that’s one of your goals for the year, just go do it now. I will, too.

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