Day 19

Oh dear. Nigel Watts said there`d be days like these. An unexpected character has popped up in chapter two, which may or may not be a cracking idea, but I really wasn`t prepared for his appearance and I`m not sure I`ve handled it well. Or it might just be that the specifics of the scene were hazy from the outset. Which of course just leads me to question the sanity of the project. Is it even an idea worth writing? Should I work on another story instead?
No! We battle onwards. “Finish things” was the best advice Neil Gaiman had to offer on the radio a while back, and if you can`t trust the author of The Sandman, who can you trust?
As we have established, the first draft of everything is shit. Hell, I`m not even really working on a novel yet, just splurging out a plot. Which, it occurs to me, means things are only going to get harder.
I have little idea what will happen when the pen meets the page today, but commitment is my key word.

Day 15

It`s like giving up smoking.
The way you get that nagging little voice inside your brain going, “Why are you doing this? You`ll never give up. It`s too hard. Go on, have a cigarette. It`s been two hours. You deserve one.”
Only now the little voice says, “Hey! Why are you doing this? You`ll never finish it. It`s too big, and the words you wrote today were crap. Write some poems instead – you like them.”
Of course, in many ways the little voice is right. But as we all know the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, So I say, “Hey! Annoying voice! I have 5,500 words already, which is further than I`ve got in the last 10 years!”
I`m sure it`s thinking up a witty retort.

Day 11

Things are going pretty well so far. I`m ahead of schedule, and was substantially ahead until I came home from work a couple of days ago and did my impression of a log. It has slowed down a bit in recent days as I enter less familiar territory but I`m still working on what I had considered chapter one so it`s getting to be a decent length. There seemed to be a natural break around the 3,000 word mark that made me wonder about splitting it in two but I`m already concious of how much I`ll probably need to delete, in fact of how much work in general will need to be done, but right now it`s all about getting the story down.
(Repeats to self, “The first draft of everything is shit. The first draft of everything is shit. The first draft…”).

Day 6

All going pretty well so far. Having little clue as to what will happen next has led to some pleasing invention, but I still suspect it will end up as a big mess.
I`ve picked up A M Homes` The End Of Alice in the 12 days of Kindle, the only book I ever thought made a case for censorship, although of course I haven`t read it. Not entirely sure I will have the stomach to either, but it points up the paradox at the heart of censorship – you can`t say something should be banned without reading or viewing it, but once you have it`s hypocritical to suggest that no-one else can do so. I`m delighted with the free-for-all we have in the UK. High time the goverment addressed the issue of libel tourism which continues to hamper non-fiction writers, and has led to the High Court ordering US publishers to pulp copies of books. Did they pay any attention? Did they hell, and quite right too.

Day 1

I don`t like to think of this as a new year`s resolution (more a convienient date) but I started my second novel today. Co-incidentally, I finished my first novel on New Year`s Eve, um…1996. Maybe 1997. It wasn`t great. The plotting was wrong. And the characters. And the dialogue, the pacing, the style, the descriptions…there were one or two nice jokes I suppose…and in my determination to avoid another balls-up I haven`t seriously tried again since. I`ve been waiting. Learning. Biding my time. And my time is now!!!!

Well, it would be if I wasn`t worried that I haven`t invested enough time in characterisation. Or plotting. Or a hundred different other things. But this is the date I set myself to start. To write a 100,000 word novel in a year takes a paltry 274 words a day. I`m going to aim big. 300. That`ll frighten Stephen King!

I`m going to bear in mind the wise words of Ernest Hemingway (“the first draft of everything is shit”) and, because I`m an obsessive tinkerer, I`m not going to reread the words on the page. I`m going to heed the advice of Nigel Watts and seperate the writing and the editing processes. And then I`m going to bitch about it on here.

That`s the plan, devestating In its simplicity. Obviously I`d feel better about it if I could see beyond the end of chapter two, but if you don`t start you`ll never finish. Somebody wish me luck!