March 11th 2017:- I ended this morning’s writing, which managed to spread itself across my day until three o’clock, with the words ‘ALL THIS COULD BE A BIT TOO CLEVER AND YOU MIGHT NEED TO TAKE THE PARROT OUT.’ Oh and I probably will have to take the parrot out. I stumbled along today, at first quite pathetically and then at a certain point the writing picked up.If later, when I come to look at this chapter and think it lacking in spirit, no pun intended, then the job is to make it work and put the right tone and energy into it. I did the maths as well and discovered that since 4th February, I have, between the days, written 1,000 for each day.
What I want to say here though about writing a novel, is that those images we have of ‘troubled writers throwing away endless beginnings’ tortured, smoking too much, drinking too much, which are written onto the stereotyping part of our brain, might actually be close to reality… but what they would be close to is the experience of an amateur writer. As long as you can follow at least roughly the journey of the novel, or the novel ‘map’ that I mentioned earlier, it means that however badly the text is written, you are at least moving the novel along. And the point is that you can go back and make the words, tone, ideas and dialogue better later in a different draft. In the first draft the important thing is not to stop and look for any kind of perfection in the writing. Otherwise you are that writer who chucks away beginnings, is tortured, can’t quite get it right. Sometimes I think writing a novel is a bit like spinning a spider’s web; even before it’s finished, parts of it might be broken and you have to go back and mend it.
