'Finishing a novel requires so much more than the ability to compose a balanced sentence: plot demands an architect’s eye, and transcribed conversation requires strange inner music,' writes leafarbuthnot.
I wrote my novel in a hurry. It was summer, until I realised it wasn’t. It took me about four months to get the first draft down, then I had to go back and assess the damage. The book needed a lot of work. The story was wonky, slow to start, not funny enough, too mopey, meandering and sometimes amazingly, excruciatingly tone deaf.
The world into which the novel came out was beyond any I could have imagined. My dad’s a prepper, so he’s been ready for this kind of shitshow for ages, yet it still seemed unlikely to happen. The impacts of the plague on the novel’s publication were significant: I didn’t do the launch in some over-lit bookshop with crap white wine, but via Zoom. No one, sadly, got visibly drunk and guests could actually hear me and my publisher wang on about the book’s themes.
This self-reflexive anxiety doesn’t seem to affect male debut authors as much. Or perhaps it does and I’ve just not heard their weeping over my own. But plenty of female writers seem oppressed by the doubt that their voices will bring much texture to the chorus already in crescendo. There’s always someone who can write it better, write it crisper, deliver the truth with more truth.
Writing fiction is webbed in myth. It’s easy to be tangled in your own, and even easier to fall in love with your sentences: to polish chapter three until it gleams but all possibility of chapter four withers. I disparage many of the ideas we have of writers, as misty-eyed empaths that see things more vividly than the madding crowd. Yet there is a mystery to composing fiction that continues to seduce me: characters that you create but which soon become insubordinates.
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Why a Briton could win US PGA ChampionshipThere are signs we could be celebrating a first British US PGA Championship winner since it became a strokeplay event in 1958, writes Iain Carter.
Read more »
Opinion: Real-time data shows the economy is bouncing back – but for how long?The rest of the summer and the autumn may well be a two-steps-forward, one-step-back affair, writes Hamish McRae
Read more »
Sarah Pinborough on her new novel and Netflix seriesWith her bestseller ‘Behind Her Eyes’ about to become a Netflix series, author Sarah Pinborough has turned to the millionaire’s playground of Savannah, Georgia, for her next thriller. David Barnett finds out more
Read more »
High Fidelity series starring Zoë Kravitz cancelled by Hulu after just one seasonHigh Fidelity series starring Zoe Kravitz cancelled by Hulu after just one season
Read more »
Glencore shares slide as it scraps £2bn dividend and posts first-half lossMiner and commodities trader cuts value of coal and writes down £2.4bn of assets
Read more »
KFC reopens 170 restaurants for dine-ins so fans can get 50% off mealsKFC has rolled out the Eat Out to Help Out scheme to another 170 branches so diners can get 50 per cent off their meal. The branches were already open for takeaway and delivery orders but now foodi…
Read more »