How Many Years Does It Take to Write a Novel?

I don’t appeal to everyone. Or even try to.

My writing is about the things that fascinate me - things that make my brain go “Ooo, OoO!” and wave my hand to talk over you because I’m so excited. And that changes weekly, daily, oh, alright, hourly. (I may have ADHD.) 

Crafting a novel is therefore a wholly absorbing series of wanders down side streets and blind alleys, stopping to exclaim at certain points, followed by tangents through ferny foliage into impenetrable forest, being rebuffed and finding my way via pine needle-carpeted trails that take me over scrubby ranges and down into gullies, and short detours along a riverbank, and discovering that I have ended up on a promontory, overlooking where I started but with a whole different point of view. Pause, reflect. 

And then I might jump character. Or time zone.

So, I get that it wouldn’t make sense to most people that this novel has taken six years to write.

For context, I started it the summer before my dad died, when I was working at a secondary school, spending hot days in exam invigilation, watching kids with additional needs struggle in the rigid environment. A year later, with some funds that Dad left me, I took a writing retreat at the Arvon Foundation’s Lumb Bank and got some feedback, resulting in a major rewrite. Buoyed by my experience with Arvon, I asked the tutor for a recommendation which ultimately secured me a place on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, and that blew apart the whole structure of the novel until I had a three-person perspective, a much better understanding of suspense and dialogue, and only half the word count. Cue more late-night writing binges.

It took me two years part-time to complete the MA (while working full-time) but it was a springboard to a job in publishing and a sense of self-confidence. (Thinking about an MA? Do it !!! And tell me how it goes). Patrick Rothfuss has been working (or not-working) on his novel The Doors of Stone for over 12 years. Plenty of authors have taken longer - with varying excuses - but I guess it takes as long as it takes.

Last month I was made redundant from a job I loved. Three weeks have passed, where I've been applying for insane numbers of job applications for every sort of creative role imaginable, and still not one interview. Yet. The university has been supportive. They said with my CV they’d be lucky to have me on their temporary admin team  - and I’ll be glad to get some work (and money) under my belt in a week or so. 

But this week, I’ve written the final chapter of Outlandish: a novel about a boy with maladaptive daydreaming. 🙂

(Thanks to Farley Lapenna for the illustration - https://www.instagram.com/lapastaillustrations/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/farley-lapenna-19b938180/)

 When I first started this blog in 2006, I felt like a lone voice. Funny how movements galvanise groups and grow, and now SO MANY more people on the planet are following the 'Singular Cake' path - even if they don't call it such.

The idea was simple. Only take one slice of cake. 

If that is all you need, take it, share it, and enjoy it. Don't take more than you need. So YES - that means no billionaires. It means no dictators. It means no multi-national conglomerates building oil pipelines or companies strip-mining natural areas.

It's a simple philosophy and can be applied to all areas of your life. 

I actually just looked back at some of my early blog posts and re-read my God's Bet story, and still feel it's right on the nose. Do take a look; back in sweet 2006....

So, how do we persuade everyone to adopt this mantra? One person at a time? That may take too long and the planet is kinda in crisis and can't really wait ten or twenty more years.

We've gotta be more proactive. Tell a friend, who tells their friend, sure. But also tell groups, and communities and people making TV programmes and radio shows. Tell your old cranky neighbour and your 4-year old niece. Tell famous people (they get about a bit.) Tell someone you know in authority, and get them to put pressure on someone higher up.

Feels like we're ready for this change, and I have spent the last 17 years espousing it in one form or another - from the colleagues I work with to the poems and novels I write. If you want to be part of the solution (and if that means your descendants get to survive, who wouldn't?) please take the time to explain it, far and wide.

Just one slice of cake. Only take what you need. 💗

When is a First Draft not a First Draft?

     When it's been edited along the way, over the past four years, locked down in a third floor flat during a pandemic with a view of treetops, and subsequently workshopped and torn apart and reconstructed during MA seminars and a week long Arvon course, and with writer-ly friends, and shared with my target audience ie other Maladaptive Daydreamers for feedback, and then scoured for themes and foreshadowing and nitpicky errors during hot sweaty nights after work.

I mean, it is STILL technically a First Draft.

But boy, she's almost watertight.

If I were giving advice to anyone but myself, I'd be saying this is STILL a First Draft. 

Because? 

1. You don't have the distance from the text that you need for rigorous copy-editing.

2. If you had it published tomorrow, are you SURE you wouldn't want to change a thing?

3. It isn't a Final Draft until cold hard professionals have had their hands on it, and she still sails.

Sigh.

Okay, so maybe I can call it a First Draft (Revised with buoyancy aids). 

It's painful, and I am impatient, but I'm off for another tack around the bay....

Rites of Passage

In almost all known societies, from Amazonian tribes to the Incas to modern Europe, there exists the concept of a Rite of Passage. In its basic form this is a journey that every person goes on, to travel from a child to an adult. Human groups have highjacked this concept to serve many purposes. But historically, this is for the good of the society – to bind its individuals together with common experiences, to strengthen the society as a whole and preserve its societal norms and beliefs. Stories which do not encourage acceptance may exist within small groups but will not reach a wider audience so Rites of Passage tend to have broadly agreed themes. Scholars have also proposed that a rite of passage is about our mental history – our shared folklore of what it is to be a human.

Rites of passage may have three parts or five, depending on custom and variance. But broadly speaking, the sections are birth, separation and death, or child, transition and adulthood. They are the biological processes of life mirrored in our mental journey to maturity. For this reason, much of our culture, literature and art reflects on these rites of passage.

One of the common themes of this journey is about finding oneself, and one’s place. It can therefore be very important in reinforcing what the group (tribe, culture, society as a whole) believes is the ideal – whether that be an idealized type of person, or a role that a person must play. So, for instance, in a patriarchal society a rite of passage is commonly seen to be about a boy’s transition to become a man. Whether this is the stereotypical story of a child who must undertake a trial or challenge to be worthy of leading the tribe (The Lion King) or a boy who is different, awkward, unloved who leaves the tribe to explore the world and returns an adult hero, loved by all (Hercules) – many of the stories will be about the male lead. That is not to say that there are no female hero’s in the making, but the patriarchal society may have to cloak their rite of passage story in order to reveal it (Mulan). This tells us much about that societal group – it has to re-frame a women’s story in the pattern of a man’s in order to show the woman as a hero. Mulan would not be acclaimed a hero if she stayed at home and dealt with the challenges of a woman’s life, (as women were oppressed and confined in her society). Instead, her rite of passage had to be shown in the male mould – going to war and fighting our enemies.

I notice that another theme is often gender – because this mirrors our life processes when a child seeks out who they are, discovers the confines of their gender, and rebels against it to emerge triumphant as their own version of their gender. This is seen in novels by women who were ‘not allowed’ to be authors, taking on a male name in order to tell their story (George Sands). There are also many rites of passage stories that help us to overcome our limited beliefs and understanding of others. A child may not know their own true nature, but by testing themselves against societies rules, they may discover their full adult self (Boy in a Dress) or it may allow the author to scrutinise our prejudices and bigotry where we follow a person’s journey through these challenges to emerge victorious and redefine our society as a result (The Elephant Man).

Ancient societies often had strict definitions of roles for men and women, but recent historical finding reveal that some societies may have accepted non-binary definitions. But in many cases, someone who defied these basic descriptions was hard to categorize and place in society. This is reflected in stories where a person was born one gender but aspired to the role of another gender – and their rite of passage story would be crucial because it would allow both the person and society to understand how they might find their place. A tribe that can support all of its members to be active, useful participants would be a stronger unit, so it has always been important for society to understand that some people are gender-fluid, and others are non-binary, and their story from child to adult is a lesson for us all in tolerance and acceptance. A rite of passage story for any individual must support them to discover who they truly are, their strengths and weaknesses and then society can embrace and celebrate their unique contribution. We need more writers to tell these rite of passage stories to help us walk in someone’s else’s shoes for a brief while.

A rite of passage is also reflected in our customs and traditions. Spanish boys are encouraged to run with the bulls at 14, and young people in the UK go to bars for their first alcoholic drink at 18, but both are viewed by adults as a rite of passage. Perhaps in the UK, we need to study the rites of passage on offer and develop ones which better model our ideal future citizen?

Europe may have lived through a period of relative peace and stability in my and my parent’s lifetime, so our rites of passage may no longer be about preparing for war. Instead they reflect new challenges to society. Climate change, mental health and political instability are big topics affecting us all on a global scale, as is the challenge of pandemics. Rite of passage tales now will reflect these global concerns. Where our tribe used to be only those around our firepit, now it is those of us on the same planet, including all living species and our interconnected environment.

Rites of passage now could be the journey we all take to delve a little deeper into who we are and who we want to be, embracing our physical and mental wellbeing, and preparing to contribute to the planet, the people and living things on it.

 

Happy Reading !

The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger, The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath, Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad, To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee, The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins, The Fitz and the Fool Robin Hobb, Curious Incident of the Dog in The Nighttime Mark Haddon, She Who Became The Sun Shelley Parker-Chan...

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/rite-of-passage

https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/genderfluid

https://booksandbao.com/non-binary-books-fiction-nonfiction/

 

In these times, don’t forget

to scrape the back near your tonsils

insert up your nostril as far as possible

rotate until your eyes water

deposit in the tube break the stick

press all the air from the bag unpeel silver foil close. Easy.

 

I haven’t just been tested – I was judged before this

when I wasn’t a groupie, I would suck lyrics for meaning

                              erecting my own greenhouse, thank you for asking

                              didn’t make them tea when I was the only girl in a hard hat

failed to drive around his kidney beans that meant

we’d end in a bath not a driving license

and aged 18, disgusted with Oxbridge

    dropped out of a class race                 

         I couldn’t win.

But hey, they could no longer refuse to serve me in a bar.

 

If I saw the abusive necklace marks, 

    the broken door, the intimidating porn;

               it’s true I opened his favourite biscuits to go stale and let my cat sleep on his shoes

 speaking before two hundred pairs of bald heads with colonial ears

                              as I lost a foetus and she gained 

                                    a tiny cancer in her feline body

                                             and I didn’t give back the Government 

                                                    Enterprise Allowance grant

when they asked if my poem had the word ‘vulva’ in it.