Hi,
It's wet and miserable and a lot of people are trying to write a book this month, so I thought I'd go a little bit into my process.
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I began writing novels in my early teens. After a few false starts, at age 15 I finished an abysmal draft that I never did anything with. Over the following decade, I got 50,000 words or so into several more discarded attempts, before completing my second full draft aged 24. After much editing and book-world bureaucracy, aged 28 I got it published under the title Exciting Times in 2020. After that, I wrote two more failed/unpublished novels, before finally my fifth novel The Happy Couple became the second published novel in 2023. I'm now editing the sixth novel, which will hopefully be the third published one. Between The Happy Couple and this new book were several duds, some of which I got tens of thousands of words into before tossing them, metaphorically, into the hearth.
All in all, I've achieved a full draft of maybe 2% of the novels I've started, and at most 50% of these full drafts make it all the way to publication.
What separated the published novels from the unpublished ones wasn't my level of excitement about the initial idea. I'm not primarily plot-driven as a reader; I don't even look at the blurbs in bookshops, I just skim a few pages at random and buy the book if I like the prose. Inevitably this means that as a writer, too, I care more about execution than concept. So it's not that the published books had a killer premise and the unpublished ones were lemons, plot-wise.
Nor was it necessarily my skill as a writer: I didn't suddenly get worse at producing sentences between the first published novel and the next two I abandoned.
And nor is this a tale of a persevering artist whose brilliance went unrecognised for too long. I made no serious attempt to get the failed books published; they were no good, I knew it, and I simply moved on. Probably I could have patched them up into something decent, but I found it more interesting to just start again.
No, the real difference is this: to complete a project, and complete it well, I must a) circle around it for a long time and then b) create a sense of urgency in the final stage.
To just complete a project, quality be damned, urgency is enough. I finished a couple of the abandoned novel drafts that way; I sat down, wrote, lived on multipack vegan croissants, ghosted my friends and lovers, and emerged a few weeks later with 80,000 words. But these books were empty and shallow because I'd gone in cold. Having already played the urgency card, I couldn't rise to a second bout of it that would let me expand and deepen what I'd written. So I abandoned these drafts.
And to just write something good without seeing it through to publication, circling around it is enough. My unfinished drafts contain sentences I'm proud of, gorgeous observations, sedulous research. But I lived in these books for too long, got comfortable with them as works-in-progress, and so could never muster that moment of desperation in which all the scattergun strands come together. Under a deadline, I have no trouble being ruthless; my editors more often beg me to restore something I've cut than quibble over something I've kept. But without that apocalyptic date in the calendar, I'm as prone to preciousness as anyone else. I read over these drafts, see the surgery required, and balk at wielding the knife.
Hence the formula.
1. Long period of circling around: this is when I develop my ideas, research, and let the full dimensions and nature of the project reveal themselves.
2. Moment of crisis: this is when I actually set the thing down.
That is not to say I plan the plot. On that level, I make it all up as I go along. Rather, I use the preliminary period of circling around to read widely and go on walks and play piano and draw and paint. I say yes to far too many work trips, then invariably miss a train or lock myself out of the hotel room because travel fries my limited pragmatic capabilities. I talk to the bubble tea shop owner about the weather, the Späti owner about dialects of Kurdish, the coffee shop owner about how long we've both been in Berlin. I make silly bets with myself (can I speak all six of my languages in one day? do voice notes count?) and bring friends along to parties without even thinking to ask the host. I drop and break things constantly, have frequent depressive episodes where I accomplish truly nothing, and always stop to pet any willing cat. While all this is going on, I am steadily writing, often thousands of words a day. But it's not the draft yet. It's isolated scenes, character studies, vibes.
After many months of this — a lot of writing that isn't the draft, a lot of research I may or may not end up using, a lot of miscellaneous nonsense — the urgency arrives. It might be real or it might be invented. Either way, I'm impelled, and I start.
Now I move quickly because I know what to do. I never think further than a paragraph ahead, yet each successive move makes perfect sense to me. It's not 'The characters take over and start telling me what to do' — a cliché I find unbearably cutesy. Rather, it's that the preliminary several hundred hours of reading/writing have embedded into me the secret blueprints of a cathedral which I now must erect like a low-ranking spy, only ever receiving as much information as I need to do the very next thing. The grand plan's there, nestled somewhere in my subconscious. But consciously, I move beam by beam.
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On a craft level, I don't need to know why I'm like this. I just need to know that it works. But let's speculate anyway.
The autism/ADHD juggernaut is mighty and swift, but terrible at changing course. The things I am worst at take two seconds. I cannot answer emails on a daily basis; I wait for them to accumulate until I do a cathartic Email Day where I write hundreds of the pesky things in a few hours. My plants live longer when I own many of them, such that the watering becomes a mammoth engagement I am paradoxically likelier to fulfil. I never leave dishes in the sink; the options for me are to wash them as soon as I'm done eating (therefore encompassing the washing-task within the eating-task), or to let the plates accumulate until I've blockaded my entire sink. Obviously the former is preferable, so that's the system I've built. There are many such procedures in place. I need them to maintain a base level of sanity, never mind to write books.
It makes sense, then, that I'd require a red-alert to bring a novel draft together. My energy and capacity for obsession are at their most formidable when I let them run uncurtailed, not when I have to snap out of it and go transfer money for a TV licence when I don't even have a TV. (Welcome to Germany.) Only when it's an emergency can I let those banalities slide; only when it's urgent does it feel justified to drop everything else and just write. On my bad days, autism and ADHD work against each other: I need a routine yet can't impose one, I'm sad without burrowing into random intellectual interests yet can't marshal the focus to do so. But the sheer determination of one, and animal vim of the other, work well together once in a blue moon.
Is every novelist like this? I have no idea. But that's me, and that's how I write.
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Currently I'm reading Seán Ó Cuirrín's 1933 Irish-language translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There are certain delightfully strange choices I might write about more when I'm done, like the decision to gaelicise some but not all of the names, such that Jonathan Harker becomes Seon Ó hEarcair but Quincey P. Morris remains intact. This Irish twist becomes amusing whenever Seon Ó hEarcair's stout Englishness is a topic of conversation, though of course there's nothing inherently stranger about it than my writing about Irish things under the anglicised surname 'Dolan' and not the Irish 'Ní Dhubhlainn'. Hibernian defaultism: it's a tentative yes from me.
My Uniqlo turtlenecks will get me through this winter, and most likely the spring as well.
Till next time,
N