Tipping

I had two brilliant days on The Hollows last week, and it’s entirely thanks to my friend Ali. I’d just finished reading a draft of his new novel – which is absolutely scintillating and is going to be massive – and called to talk to him about it. We spoke for a long time about lots of things, and he ended up clearing my head of cobwebs I didn’t know I was carrying.

This is how it is: I’ve been enjoying my first forays The Hollows, but it’s been tough going in places, because I’ve been trying to build the story chronologically, making each current chapter as clean and tight as possible before developing the next. It was only through talking to Ali that I remembered that I don’t write like that. I’d forgotten that I’m writing for me. Or, as Ali put it: “Writing’s a big fuck you to the world.”

This is an abstract thing to explain to myself. It’s not like I was writing someone else’s story, or writing with someone else in mind. But I think I’d spent so long redrafting The Visitors that I’d forgotten that it was rough, too, at the beginning; and, in starting to write The Hollows, I essentially picked up the same point of bug-eyed perfectionism that I left The Visitors. I was working back-to-front. I’d forgotten that some of whatever strength I might have as a writer comes from rewriting – from redrafting and reworking. I’d forgotten the unfolding joy of a first draft – of cutting loose, of jumping feet-first into all that glorious blank white empty space. Talking to Ali reminded me that this is my story, and I need to tell it my way.

When I had my next writing day, I sat down, disabled the internet, and raced through 3,500 words. The next day, I wrote the same again, as well as tearing apart swathes of what I’d already written, rebuilding the plot of the first third. It was exhilarating. I ignored the chronology and jumped ahead to work on scenes and chapters I’ve been dreaming of for months. In writing them, brand new scenes unfolded as though they’d been there all along. I worked late, and it hurt to blink by the end of day two, but I’d turned 18,000 words of clunky plot into 25,000 of viable draft. There’s a forever still to go, but the story is starting to move.

It’s funny how time and memory contrive to fool us. The Visitors didn’t write itself until I was well over halfway through. The first 50,000 words were hard, and the second didn’t need me there at all. That’s the bit I remember. Since then, I’ve been so immersed in my redrafts that I’d forgotten it took six months of slog to hit that tipping point.

First drafts are where the fun is. I’m going to dive in and get messy, and rejoice, and despair, and laugh, and burn myself out, and despair some more, because that’s how I live, and that’s how I write. It’ll take months from now, or years, but I finally feel like I’m getting The Hollows on course for where I want to go.