It's a tall order - a blank page stares at you, and 80,000+ words need to be done before you can claim to have written a novel. And those darn words don't write themselves either!
Patience is the key, I find. It's not like you can bash off a book in a couple of wet weekends. Writing is a slow process; progress is steady as opposed to swift. Finding a regular writing slot is useful in that regard. It can be before or after work; even during your lunch slot (which is how JK Rowling started out). Coffee is a useful ally as well! For me, my job is far too busy and exhausting to allow much writing on work days. As an assistant headteacher, I find myself arriving at my desk by about 7.30am, then working at breakneck pace until about 5.30pm. Outside of teaching lessons and having scheduled meetings, most of those ten hours are devoted to firefighting whatever has kicked off during the day. Then, when I go home, my 'real' work begins: that is to say, getting ahead with the various things I've been tasked with. Sometimes that can be a couple of hours in the evening (so a 12 hour working day in total); other times it can be as much as 8 hours in the evening. It's absolutely draining, and hardly conducive to the creative writing process As you can probably tell, writing during the working week just isn't an option for me. This reduces me to weekends and school holidays. I mention this to underscore my point about the regularity of writing. The start-stop nature of weekends-only not only slows things down, but also makes for a poorer process. Your mind fizzes with ideas when you write, but when next weekend comes around you've forgotten them all, and have to kick-start things all over. Progress on the manuscript can feel like it's stagnating. Holidays are a different beast entirely. I can use my mornings (say 8am to 11am) to make some real headway, and it's amazing how much progress one can make in a week. I try to write about 1000 words day when working on a fresh chapter. Sometimes things don't go too well (this morning was especially arduous!), but other times you can surprise yourself with two or even three thousand words in a single sitting. I write one chapter at a time, and then go back to refine things before moving on. By 'refine', I do not mean 'polish'. Polishing comes much later, once the first draft has been completed. At this early stage, it's more about making sure things hang together and that what you've written reads back relatively well. As soon as it does (and it might take a good few days to ensure a three-thousand-word chapter earns a pass), I move onto the next one. So that's my process, and I continue in that vein until I have a book. Or a first draft of a book, at least. And that's when the fun really begins, as I shall explain in another blog post. Being a full time writer would make things so much faster! So now it's your turn - how you go about your writing process? Please feel free to comment :)
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So how did Dreams come about? A germ of an idea came to me when I was about 23. Don't ask me how; the 'whys' and 'wherefores' are lost in the mists of time. I remember using my summer holiday at the end of my first year of teaching to begin the writing process. The outcome was terrible. Embarrassingly terrible!
When I was about 27 or 28, I returned to the concept and made a much more serious attempt to write the novel that still lurked inside me. I got about 40,000 words in before abandoning the project in favour of doing a Masters degree. On graduating, I never retuned to the book. Until lockdown, that is. When Covid came, I knew it was 'now or never.' With a protracted period of time on my hands, I returned to the manuscript, knowing I could do a few hours' work each day for several months on end. In March 2020, I began with a re-read of the 40,000 words I had in the bank. Only about 5,000 were salvageable. And thus began the long process of constructing a novel almost from scratch. Seasons came and went, but by September, I had a first draft I was happy with. Two friends read the draft and offered their feedback, and I enlisted a professional editor for her advice too. She tore it to shreds, and was right to do so. But her pointed advice was exactly what I needed, and prompted a near-total re-write of the first draft into what was eventually to become the final version - about nine months after the first draft had been finished! Polishing a manuscript is a long old process!! But finally, it was finished, and there I was in June 2021 with a completed manuscript - but no way of publishing it. I sent it off to various agents and publishers, hoping (but never expecting) to be picked off the slush pile. Then, one day, came a reply from Arrow Gate Books. After the initial salutations and courtesies came the line I'd long been waiting for: 'we are interested in publishing it...' It wasn't in the bag at that stage, but many weeks later, and after numerous email exchanges, I was officially on their list. I signed my author contract in March 2022, and Dreams is currently in production with the publisher. Release is scheduled for summer 2022, and I can't wait to share my book with the world. :):) |
AuthorC. D. Fox is a novelist and educator from Oxford. You can keep on top of his latest announcements and thoughts here. Archives
May 2023
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