I haven’t posted a great deal about what I’ve been working on here, and now feels like an appropriate moment. I have completed quite a few pieces of short fiction in my time, mostly written for university work, and eventually for pleasure as I found my stride with the medium. I have not, however, ever finished a novel-length piece of work before, be it fanfiction or original work, although there have been a few moments when I have come close.
Today, that changed.
Today, I finished my first complete draft of the novel I have been working on for the past decade. This is something that started its life as my best friend and I passing time during assembly in school, and has been a collaborative work of art and idea generation. Over these past ten years this story has grown and developed, evolving with me as I have grown and developed in my writing abilities. Each iteration it has been through has brought it another step closer to realisation.
The whole point of my Masters degree was to get this novel motoring. My ideal was to try and finish it in those two years, but I took that goal with a pinch of salt. If I couldn’t achieve that, I wanted, at the very least, to have myself properly motoring on the work. And that I most certainly achieved. With the help of my incredible supervisor, and the support of a fantastic mentor, (not to mention the ever constant enthusiasm, love, and support of my family and friends), my journey to almost the other side of the earth from my home came to fruition.
By the end of my degree I not only had the 40,000 words of my final thesis submission, but an additional 10,000 words on top of that. The first 50k of my novel, done, and to a publishable standard. The amount of achievement I felt in that moment was immense. Not simply because of how far I had come, how much the work and my abilities had grown in such a short period of time, but also because, for perhaps the first time in my life, I experienced a sense of total confidence and satisfaction in the work that I was submitting. I knew it was the best it could be in that moment.
This feeling was supported in my thesis results. I was marked by my Viva Committee, to a PhD level. And I passed not with minor corrections, nor even with typos. I passed with absolutely no faults. It was what I had been hoping for (due to the constraints on accommodation and other such practical concerns), and I had not allowed myself to fully believe until that moment that I could have done it. Yet I did.
I finished my final draft and submitted in June of 2019. I received my results in October of that same year. I graduated in December.
So much for the first of my three major milestones.
At this point, I had not completed the plan I had written up for the “first half” of the novel. There were still several chapters left in it, and this was all material and plans that I was confident in. After a long break when I was fortunate enough to travel extensively in Europe, and broaden my knowledge and experiences, as well as relax after a gruelling year, I was at last ready and able to sit down to work again, and I was excited to be doing so.
My thesis has a 5 year embargo on it that protects the work from publication. This protects my ownership over the material as an author, and my chances of getting this work published. Knowing this, with 8 months already down out of my 5 years, I knew that the clock was truly ticking, and that I had to write as my work. Having that schedule motivated me. It gave me a real need to push myself, to make sure that when I took breaks it was because I needed them so my mind had space to breathe, rather than because I was being lazy. And, of course, simply finishing a novel is not the sum total of what I wish to achieve. Publication is a mystery that I have not yet stepped into, at least as far as books go, and I wanted to have as much time left over for that particular feat as possible.
As I began my writing, COVID-19 made its appearance on the global stage. As it grew in seriousness, and lockdown measures began to be implemented on a global scale, my work discipline increased. After all, there wasn’t anything else I could really do. In this time, I set myself a new goal. I wanted to have my full novel draft finished either by the end of lockdown OR by the end of the year. Whichever came first. And so I set to.
By April I had finished that chapter plan for the first half. What eventually turned out to be Part One, though I did not know it at the time. My first 80,000 words. The second big milestone. I was excited by how quickly I had managed to get the words out, how easily they had come because of the immense amount of work I had done during my degree laying out the ground work. Knowing why the writing had been so easy also meant I knew why the next part would be hard.
I then embarked upon writing out my outline for the second half. These were chapters that I had less confidence in. It was extremely old material that I had not looked at seriously in literal years. I knew that this next work would not be the plain sailing of before. It would be far more cerebral and trying. And it was not simply a case of old ideas that I had to write new material for, I was incorporating old writing and in large chunks – one of my least favourite things to do.
There was no avoiding the work. I took my time with it, knowing the effort I was having to expend, and that rushing myself would be pointless. I kept in mind the knowledge that I would afterwards come back and edit, to tighten up and expand the writing where it was required, knowing that remembering this fact would help alleviate my desire for excellence to come out onto the page at a first pass.
What I was doing at this time is some of the essence of what I consider to be, as I call it, the cerebrality of writing. I was having to work with extremely old characterisations of my protagonists, remember what they had now become – how they had changed and grown, and also chart how they were developing and being influenced by their surroundings. So many mutable and fluctuating elements, all that had to be held with some degree of rigidity in the back of my brain as I worked. All these layers, things I had to hold level, close but separate in my mind.
As you may imagine, this period of work took me some time. It was never going to be something as simple as “copy and paste”. It was something more akin to suturing in old pieces of flesh onto the body of my creation, matching them as seamlessly as possible with the new, to use a Frankenstein-esque metaphor (although I flatter myself, I am a kinder creator than Victor). After this, however, was my next great hurdle. That of completely new material which I had envisioned for so long, yet never written, and which I had not recently considered in depth.
The result of this was a lot of stop and start work. I would run into stumbling blocks of missing or now out-of-date world building, and would have to stop for days at a time, researching, thinking, building, and engineering. I filled my questions notebook with pages of handwritten notes, questions to myself about aspects that were missing or didn’t make sense, my answers ranging over multiple pages. I returned to old drawings and created new maps, new sketches for pieces of machinery that I had to design. I had to chart journeys, calculate distances and speeds and journey times, hoping against hope that the maps and scales I had created would dovetail with the story I planned. I delved into physics and allowed myself to be restrained by the constraints of natural forces at work. I adapted. I laid the groundwork.
And each time I finished my research and development, each time I answered those questions, I would then continue until I hit then next gap, and the cycle would begin anew.
Come June I was nearing completion.
My emotions in the past couple of weeks have been mixed. I realised when I was two chapters and an epilogue away from completion that this really was real. This was a thing. A thing that was happening. To me, no less. Something I had been working to for more than my entire adult life. It didn’t seem real. It had come so quickly all of a sudden. This long awaited end point suddenly upon me and approaching fast.
And then it was real.
Each time I sat down to write I got a little nearer. I am lucky in that in one sitting I can happily and easily generate anything from 1,000 words to 10,000 words, if I’m in a good flow. The rough word count that I knew I had left to write was something between 17,000 and 20,000 words. Knowing that I was so close, that this immense goal of my life was suddenly so attainable was, not frightening, but something I had not prepared for.
I already knew how I was going to handle completion. Finishing my first full draft does not mean the novel is finished. There is still plenty of editing for me to go back and do. Concurrently with that, my plan is to then begin a detailed chapter plan of my next novel, and once my editing is completed to begin that and get into a good flow to continue my writing habits as I both search for publishers and/or agents, and continue refining.
Having that plan did help me avoid the emotions that naturally tend to come with the completion of something big like this. I wanted, at all costs, to avoid any sudden lethargy or loss of momentum. I wanted to continue. However, creeping closer to the end, I began to slow down. I began to increase how much I allowed myself to be distracted. Being a Dungeons and Dragons player, and having begun (at last) to listen to Campagin 2 of Critical Role, I allowed myself to become more and more sucked into their adventure as a way of prolonging the end of my own.
None of this was happening in a void either. Around this time George Floyd was murdered. I was caught up in everything going on, trying to follow the events in America, concerned for friends, and doing my best to try and educate myself about things. On some level, I also knew that if I finished during this time when the spotlight should be on the Black Lives Matter movement, I would want to post about it, to share my achievement and mark a monumental day in my career, and felt conflicted. I did not want to take away from the importance of the reason for these protests and riots. But I also knew that ordinary life doesn’t simply stop either. Even so, I held back from my work, my focus on the politics in the news, and a desire not to take the stage with an achievement and happiness whilst so many are suffering.
In this time, I began to realise what I was doing, and what I needed to do. That distracting myself was an excuse because of processing my feelings about finishing. This is exactly what I usually try to avoid. Not being distracted by outside things per se, but rather that sense of guilt that comes from feeling like you are being distracted from something you should be doing instead of giving yourself a well deserved break. Breaks should be guilt-free. We are not automatons. Our brains are immensely complex and powerful things. They are still well beyond our comprehension, but even so, we must be careful with how we handle them.
Realising, subconsciously, that what I needed was guilt-free down time in order to prepare myself for those final few thousand words, I did exactly that. I had two days where I was just in my body instead of in my head. I went outside in the garden, I baked, I listened to Critical Role, and watched TV. I enjoyed myself, and was refreshed.
Today, I sat down again. I told myself I would just write, whatever came out, however bad it was, that was fine. However far I got, that would be fine. And so I did. I wrote, I changed up the music I listened to, changing from my usual instrumental and orchestral soundtracks to pop music that had a similar emotion to the scenes that I was writing.
Normally I don’t listen to music with lyrics. The words distract me from my work and make it difficult to focus on conveying the thoughts and emotions. This was exactly what I needed today. Being distracted by the lyrics allowed me to silence that editor voice in my head better, and I let whatever occurred to me to come out on the page.
The words began to flow. Not in the way they usually do, in a very deliberate manner, but rather in a very careless fashion. I knew that there was a strong likelihood that the writing was quite bad. But that was OK. Because I was going to come back and edit it anyway.
And so as the words streamed out, I moved through the action, and more than I initially expected came out onto the page. Then I had suddenly finished that scene. Then I had finished the chapter.
There was just the epilogue standing between me and completion.
Then there was nothing.
I had done it. My third milestone. Completed. I had achieved my goal. I had achieved something that I had been working towards for over a decade.
This is something I am still processing. The feeling is something that defies description in some ways. Almost like my brain can’t quite digest that I have actually done something that has been a goal for so many years, something that has been a part of my life and seemingly far off for so long. There is elation, that is for certain. There is satisfaction. And there is also excitement about what lies ahead in my journey with this novel, and the series that it is a part of.
This novel has guided my life for so long, and it is something that I have known, almost since its beginning, will play a huge influence in the years to come. Of that I am certain.
