On 'breaking everything and beginning again'

I thought I had forgotten how to write.

I think it’s been really hard simply because I have been so engaged in big writing things for so many years. In my 40s, I did a Bachelor’s Degree with Honours, then went straight into a PhD, in which I wrote my book, Vessel. These things took up 7 whole years, and the next manuscript I wrote, hovering in the wings now, presented itself as an idea while my PhD was still being assessed. I finished that book at the end of January, and ever since then, I have struggled with the idea of not having a project I can sit down and work on every day. I don’t struggle, on the other hand, with writing practice. I do sit down and write something every day, and I have a healthy reading practice too.

A little while ago, I returned to something (what we call a bottom drawer novel) I started writing in 2015. It is, or was, a full-length manuscript with a great premise, but unfortunately, I just didn’t have the skills then to really see it through well. I’ve returned to it repeatedly over the years (maybe all writers have one of these first novels that they know has no legs or not ones strong enough to bear the weight of the words), and ripped the guts out of it (too many storylines that didn’t really join up properly)) and changed the tenses, and dropped characters. I thought I would go back and work on that old fallback, but I quickly realised that trying to fix the manuscript as it was would neither work nor maintain my interest sufficiently to sustain my interest.

My PhD was all about the lyric essay, fragmentation, and the white space, surrounding fragments, as well as how we mediate presence into absence via the act of writing. The manuscript I’d written over ten years ago is a novel written in a traditional form, so, because I love the premise, and its premise fits entirely into my scholarly areas of interest, I decided to rewrite the novel as a fragmented narrative. I did what I do best, and began researching, which is to say that I looked at a lot of fragmented novels, but also returned to research on what we are doing with form when we write fragments. Other research regarding the content of the novel. Then I started trying to transform the existing text into a fragmented form. I quickly saw that this was not going to work, and that I would have to ‘break everything and begin again’ also known as start again from scratch, throwing the original MS in the figurative bin, and truly rewrite the thing in a fragmented form. And I changed the title. I retained my main characters, though I also sat down and took the time to start another document in which I wrote down their stats and some other things about them, thereby getting to know them properly for the first time, a process that naturally worked out some problems I’d had with them. Doing this made the characters properly make sense.

Because I’m used to writing lyric essay and creative nonfiction, I’m accustomed to using the work of association, and mosaicking prose, research, and archival objects, world and scene building is a very different process. And it’s easy to forget that first drafts are not my favourite part of writing, at all. I have to keep pressing myself to keep writing fragments and scenes, and to allow them to be messy and imperfect, to not go back and try to perfect them as I go, or I will never get anywhere.

What I do love about writing fiction, in this historical moment, where reading the news each day risks your peace of mind and sense of natural justice, is the sense of escape into a world of your own making, to spend time with characters you come to grow fond of. Which is to say that I feel as though I have my writing mojo back, and I think this book might have legs, and I’m back into the swing of the daily practice of a big project. I know some bottom drawer novels need to stay there, but this story really wants to be out there, and now it calls to me every day. Have you got a big project on the go? Do you feel unmoored between such projects? Thanks xxx so much for reading.

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I have a thing I do when I start a new project, where I send excerpts from the beginning to callouts or fellowships, to see if the work has any literary promise (my first book was completed as part of a PhD and I got feedback all throughout the writing of it. What a gift!). I sent the first 5K words of this new one out in first draft form to the Varuna online Regional and Remote Fellowship, and it got shortlisted/Highly commended, which has given me another little boost to *keep going*. Does anyone else do this?