After a jaunt to see friends and family London, I’m back home in Glasgow and at my desk. ‘I have no real work for the rest of this week,’ I tell Jimmy (with a worried face).
He looks bemused. ‘But aren’t you coming up with an idea for a new book?’
‘Oh yes there’s that,’ I reply.
He points out - quite rightly - that this counts as ‘work’. I find it difficult though. Because to me, even though I absolutely love what I do, ‘work’ should equate no small degree of angst and pain - hunching over my laptop, muttering and rubbing at my face, drinking my 17th coffee of the day and shouting OH GOD!!! to no one in particular.
As a book deadline approaches, work invariably requires extremely late nights and even the occasional all-nighter at my desk. I realise this is the behaviour of a 19 year-old student on an essay deadline who’s been partying like crazy. Not a fully grown woman who’s been writing novels for twenty years.
Why do I never remember how long it takes to write a book?
Every single time I forget! It’s like when friends are coming for dinner and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, there’s hours to go’. And suddenly it’s 7.30 pm and the kitchen is strewn with vegetable peelings and I’m wearing disgusting leggings splattered in food and haven’t even cleaned my teeth.
Or I’m going on holiday - which I’ve known about for months. Yet the day before we leave, every single item of clothing I want to take is either dirty or wet.
Is it the fault of time, for rushing by too quickly? Can I actually blame time - i.e., Old Father Time, who I picture as an infuriatingly smug neighbour sniggering away behind his hedge? Or is it my fault, and my time-management skills are frankly pathetic?
Jimmy is - or was - the same (he’s super organised these days). When our twin sons were toddlers and daughter a baby, we lived in the small Lanarkshire town of Biggar which, by any stretch, is a fair distance from Newcastle Airport. Yet a friend had informed us, with utter confidence - cheers Gavin! - that it would take ‘about an hour’ to drive there.
Never mind that Gavin lived in London. As he comes from Newcastle we assumed he knew about anything ‘Newcastle related.’
So, in preparation for our holiday to Majorca, instead of setting off in good time, we faffed about at home, making mix tapes (it was that long ago) to play on the journey.
A journey we had to drive at a shamefully unlawful speed with Jimmy cursing the whole way and our sons mimicking him from their car seats in the back: ‘Ucking hell! Ucking hell!’
I’m not blaming Gavin. Actually, no - I AM! Because I still have flashbacks of us all careering into the airport, and in our panic leaving our traveller’s cheques at the check in desk and them holding the flight for us and the flight then missing its slot, and being horrible delayed, and every other passenger wanting us to die.
CHEERS FOR THAT, GAVIN!
Not that I hold a grudge. Still, I never enjoy hearing about ‘how this kind of thing never happens to other people.’
One of our kids once mentioned that, whenever they went on holiday with their friend’s family - which happened several times during their teens - this other family were ‘never late’ and there was ‘never any panic.’ They were very organised apparently.
I’m not saying I wanted a seagull to splat on the heads of this allegedly perfect family. But occasionally I had those thoughts.
I only mention these incidents because, with every single book I’ve ever written, it’s been panic stations towards the end. The person who understands this better than anyone is my old Just Seventeen friend, Sarra Manning - a fabulous author who shares my love of this diagram.
She’ll message me to ask: What stage are you at? #atwwc? Meaning - naturally - ‘all the work while crying.’ And the answer is always yes.
My God, it’s a rollercoaster. I know this sounds ridiculous because my books aren’t 1000-page epics necessitating 876 characters to be listed in order of appearance, as included in the 1918 translation at the front of the novel.
I’m not a dead Russian having a spiritual crisis. I am a living woman from Yorkshire who writes what I hope are warm, funny and entertaining novels about the messiness of families, friendships and everyday life. But still, there’s always drama, once the real writing starts.
This is why the ‘shaping the idea’ stage doesn’t feel like real work. Because there is no drama. In fact, life is eerily calm and relaxed.
I sit in cafes jotting down ideas in a new notebook.
And gaze out of the window at home, wondering whether that cobweb is inside or outside.
And fiddle about with names for characters, studying the most popular girls’ names from 1972 and thinking, ‘Hmm, Lorna. Does that sound right?’
I go for meandering walks, thinking, ‘Why did Lorna’s husband leave her? Is he an asshole? If there’s too much assholery will that be annoying, or could it be funny?’
Eventually I stop worrying that this isn’t ‘real work.’ Jimmy will wander into my workroom and find me gazing at posh spas and fancy holiday apartments - and okay, the Oliver Bonas website. It’s research, I tell him. And there’s absolutely no panic because I have forever to write this book.
The weeks slip by. I’m still wondering whether Lorna is the right name. Then I realise how much time I actually have left and WHAT THE HECK HAVE I BEEN DOING?!
‘You can do it,’ a friend says. ‘Enid Blyton wrote 10,000 words a day.’ But I’m not Enid Blyton! And all I’ve done for weeks is gaze at spiders’ webs and the Oliver Bonas website!
Look at George here. She’s realised it’s all very well, rowing boats out to islands and apprehending smugglers. But her book deadline is TODAY.
Better stop faffing and start writing…
The spider’s web was inside, by the way.
Love,
Fiona xx
PS Let me know in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to ask about my (clearly dysfunctional) writing habits and I’ll answer in a future newsletter. Because somehow, the books do get written. I guess this is just the way I do things. I’ve tried to change, but I can’t.
Fancy reading my latest? The Woman Who Ran Away From Everything has over 1000 Amazon reviews and you can order here!
As an artist who once did commissions I can totally relate to the diagram 😄. If clients said ‘no hurry!’ I had to remind them that they would never get their piece 🥴
Haha! A joy as always. That diagram of the creative process is so funny. And true.