What I've Been Doing

I haven't really been writing anything on this blog lately, but there is a reason: I've been writing a novel. This is something I've tried before, but I've never really got beyond a couple of chapters until now.

One evening, not long after moving to Birmingham, I was cooking pasta and sauce for about the fourth night running in an empty house, when I had an idea for a book. I can't claim it was a particularly brilliant idea, since the idea was essentially to write about my current life with a few subtle changes and a bunch of invented characters. But it was an idea nonetheless, and I set about planning a story around it.

After a couple of days' planning, I began to write, and was stunned at how fast the words poured out. The dissertation I wrote for my degree took me a long time; possibly, months I can't remember. However long it took me, it was certainly longer than a day-and-a-half, which is how long it took me to write the same number of words for this book.

Three-and-a-half weeks later, my productivity has gone up and down, but I've been trying to write a decent quantity every day and somehow I've ended up with 39,000 words. Wikipedia says that a novel is at least 50,000 words long. I know that my book won't magically be complete when I hit that marker, but being lazy as hell, I've pretty much planned it that way. I have 28 chapters planned, of which 18 are finished, 4 are incomplete and just 6 are completely blank. The whole thing should clock in around 55,000-60,000 words, which makes it nearly three-quarters finished.

Of course, even when I type the 'final' word and head to Lidl for a cheap celebratory Carlsberg, that's far from the end. Proof-reading 60,000 words is not a quick task if you're just looking for grammatical errors, but if you looking for plot holes and stylistic mis-steps or whatever...that's going to be a boring few days. And even once that's done, I'm not at all convinced the book is any good.

I'm not sure it's possible to assess your own writing, but I do worry that my story is just not interesting enough for people to want to read. I'm also not convinced I know enough words to be a writer. I'm constantly looking in the thesaurus so I don't have to write 'nice' or 'good'. Still, I'm over the main hurdle I've had with writing novels in the past, which is running out of steam. Until today I had been writing nearly 3,000 words a day recently. Today is a zero so far, but that's because I have the internet in my house at last so I've allowed myself a day of being sad and pissing about on YouTube and Facebook.

And now, just as I did when I was writing my dissertation and my blog simultaneously, I feel like I've wasted a good quantity of words that could have gone somewhere else.