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, here we are — journey’s end — the end of Week 4, with only four more days before 7th November, the end of the calendar month, the date when this 90,000-word novel was meant to be complete.
I’ve got some good news for you, and some bad news.
First, the good news: my total word count is 107,910, which means I’ve written 26,665 words this week. (For my loyal stats fans, here goes: Monday: 4,768; Tuesday: 4,671; Wednesday: 4,579; Thursday: 4,367; Friday: 4,908; Saturday: 3,372). The 100,000th word turned out to be “first”; annoyingly, the 100,005th word was “earthquake”, which would have made for a much more satisfying anecdote given the name of the theatre company I’ve jointly run for the last twenty years.
And then, the bad news. The novel is not finished. But if you’ve read any of my most recent posts, this will come as no surprise. I’m at the beginning of Chapter Fifteen, so including the rest of that one, I’ve got nine chapters and an epilogue still to write.
The pace of work is about to slow down considerably — now that the public-facing month at The Exchange is over, now I don’t have a project to manage, now I don’t have all the responsibilities that come with it, I won’t be obliged to put in those unsustainable nine-hour days that I’ve been putting in for the last four weeks. I’ve also been neglecting important things in my life which now need to be re-prioritised again. If that’s me being unkind to myself, I’ll rephrase it this way: the project was time-critical and unmovable, and now it’s over, I can take more control over my time, and that means writing will need to find its place.
I’m intending to go back to my tried and trusted J. G. Ballard method of two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon which served me so well when writing R.C., and it remains to be seen what kind of comparative word counts I achieve in those reduced hours. I suspect that there won’t be a huge difference: because I will be able to use them solidly, without distractions, I should still be able to keep up the momentum.
How is Obsolete Constellations going? Very well, I would say. I’m enjoying it, and for now, that really is all that matters.
It’s certainly been a dramatic week in the world(s) of the story. We’ve had a stampede of a huge migrating herd of animals descended from llamas, we’ve had an attack by a pack of feral dogs, we’ve had vehicle wrecks and we’ve had several violent deaths, including that of a central character. We’ve had epic treks on foot across vast open plains and we’ve had two wildly contrasting encounters between men miles from anywhere under the twinkling stars of a desert sky.
This has all propelled the plot forward in big, obvious ways, as it should — but because I’m such an inveterate digresser, the book is also being nudged along in tiny, incremental, joy-to-write ways by much smaller details of character and action: a grown man’s terror at seeing a giant tortoise for the first time, and assuming it must be a landmine on wheels; the collar around the neck of one of those feral dogs, who still pines for human contact, much to the annoyance of his pack mates; the twelve-sided gaming die gifted to our protagonist by a monosyllabic teenager, three of its sides saying ‘YES’, three saying ‘NO’ and three saying ‘MAYBE’.
One of the things that I’ve really noticed myself doing this week is lingering over details of food, invaluable as revealers of character, if not desperately significant as drivers of plot: the old woman obsessed with finding out if everyone is a ‘poor unfortunate vegetarian’; a group of soldiers shamed into overcoming their racist revulsion to ‘foreign food’ by the little boy holding out spoons for them to share his pot of stew; someone’s first bite of the sticky syrupy peanut pastry bought at a train station bakery, a tiny sweet treat to help take the edge off the absolute worst day of their life.
I don’t doubt that this is all stuff I’ll have to wrangle over with editors one day, if/when any agents and publishers ever show any interest in the book. I really hope these things won’t get dismissed as trivial, as non-essential, as too many words, as wastes of words. Lorna French, the playwright who spent this last week with me as one of my two fellow writers at The Exchange, said that we find the writing in the writing, and she’s completely correct: we can plan as much as we want, aspire as much as we want, but we discover what it is we are actually writing in the course of actually writing it.
Overwritten as many of my sentences undoubtedly are (for now, at least), they all matter to me, and they all mean something — I just need to turn the heat up under them at some point and boil them down to their most concentrated essence. I already know there’s a tighter, shorter novel lurking inside what I’m writing now, and I’ll find it, eventually — a bit like Michelangelo knowing that David was inside the block of stone all along, and knowing that all he had to do was figure out which bits to carve away. But for now, I’m content to keep digressing, to keep wandering across the universe of this strange, sad, redemptive novel — to find what I’m writing by cracking on with writing it.
