From 7th October, I’ll be leading True Voyage Is Return, a literary experiment which turns The Exchange, University of Birmingham’s city centre public engagement space, into a hub for new writing. Every Monday, two different professional writers will each join me to produce new pieces in a week. There’s a public callout inviting submissions of new work from across the region. There’ll also be writers’ surgeries and panel talks and (eventually) an anthology and a podcast.
Alongside managing all of that, I’ve courageously/foolishly (delete as you see fit) committed to writing a novel of at least 90,000 words in the space of a calendar month (7th October to 7th November). Most days, I’ll be writing in full view of visitors and cafe customers at The Exchange. I’m terrified and exhilarated at the same time. My blog posts throughout this period will focus on documenting this experience as the project progresses and as the new book, I hope, takes shape. I really, really, really hope it does take shape!
So, at the beginning of this week, I started writing my second novel. I can tell you its title now, since I was asked about it during an interview on BBC Radio WM on Wednesday, and saw no reason not to reveal it. It’s called Obsolete Constellations, but I can imagine a future publisher one day telling me I’ll have to change it, because they think hardly anyone would buy that book.
I’ve written (by hand) a total of 24,136 words this week. (If you’re REALLY interested, it breaks down as follows: Monday — 2,759; Tuesday — 3,858; Wednesday — 3,730; Thursday — 4,979; Friday — 5,661; and Saturday (surprise bonus) — 3,149.)
Considering I pledged to finish a 90,000-word draft this month, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m well on course. As we know, though, word counts are tricky beasts. Numbers on their own do not tell the whole story. It looks like I’m more than a quarter of the way into the book, doesn’t it? I’m not. Those 24,136 words represent the Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and about half of Chapter 3. For context, the novel is meant to have a prologue, 23 chapters and an epilogue.
I hit the wall of panic early in the week, torn between feeling the need to start pulling back, to write more economically in order to realign myself with the word counts I’d assigned to each chapter in my synopsis, or else to lean fully into the overwriting, and risk having to produce a draft which could stretch anywhere up to 180,000 words. Both prospects terrified me in their own way, and I was seriously struggling.
The backdrop of the public-facing project makes me feel a strange and daunting kind of accountability to get the book finished in the space of a month, a fear that I’ll have failed if I don’t — failed myself, failed the book, and most of all, failed anyone out there who’s remotely interested in what I’m doing and might feel let down, or discouraged in their own writing efforts, if I miss this self-appointed deadline. If Phil can’t do what he said he’d do, why should anyone else bother?
I was calmed and encouraged both by Gareth (my husband, my most perceptive critic and my greatest champion) and also by Catherine O’Flynn, one of the two writers in whose company I spent the last six days. Each of them in their own way has supported me to reach a place of acceptance — acceptance of the need to write the book that needs to be written, the book that the book itself currently wants to become. Catherine said I should not stand in the way of my book, and that will be the mantra I keep returning to during these subsequent weeks of writing, not just to quell future panics, but also to keep me going through what I now realise will be a much, much longer journey than I had at first anticipated.
I know now that a more simplistic, more conceptual novel would probably have been more completable within a calendar month, but Obsolete Constellations is simply not that novel. I suspected it before I started writing it; the novel told me so in no uncertain terms this week.
In its first draft, it’s going to be a (big) book-length answer to a tantalising question: “What would happen if two people meet and fall in love, only to find that the two planets they live on are going to crash into each other?”
Along the way, I’m exploring ideas about politics, power, religion, race, sex, civilisation and communication. I’m picking and choosing the elements of astrophysics, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology that suit the story I want to tell, and conveniently overlooking the rest for now. I’m inventing worlds and societies ostensibly inspired by the history and geopolitics of Europe and Africa, but which are, in fact, more specific responses to the state of the contemporary Birmingham I live in.
I’ve found time this week to fall in love with some of my characters who appear in a single chapter and will never be seen again, such as the garrulous eighty-eight-year-old volunteer museum guide and the glimpses into the relationships, adventures and emotional highs and lows of his life that I’ve elaborated for him. I’ll miss him next week, for sure — but I know I’ve got some brand new characters to meet, and the opportunity to spend a few hours in their company before they too disappear behind the turn of a notebook page is already getting me excited to pick up my pen again. (Once I’ve wrapped my thumb and middle finger in fabric plaster first, to soften the pain of hours of writing by hand…)
