My writing process
Most journalists mean to write a novel some day. Deadline-driven journalism supposedly taught me to write concisely, and fast; yet tackling fiction proved a very different story for me. With no deadline pressures, far more space to play with and the luxury of inventing my tale, the task felt – well, boundless. I took so long that my creative process and researches became (fittingly, perhaps) almost as archaeological as some of my characters’ connections. I’ve speeded up now.
I was still doing the busy day job when I started what became Felix Unbound. Although allowing myself long pauses between bouts of creativity, the novel was always there – like an old friend that I often thought of, and loved visiting from time-to-time. Meanwhile I even completed whole non-fiction books, which, being commissioned had those useful if demanding deadlines.
Writing those books proved good practice for someone more used to delivering anything from a brief 50 words, or 500, to perhaps a 5,000 word article at most. Luckily the first one was co-authored – with prolific writer and journalist, former colleague Mihir Bose – so I only had to write half of it: about 30,000 words-worth. To a rookie book-writer, that felt manageable. The next book I wrote solo, which meant graduating to 60,000-plus words.
Unwisely my first non-fiction editor let slip that our publisher had just taken delivery of a book 20 years after its original deadline. Maybe this info nurtured the slowcoach in my approach to fiction-writing…or maybe I was just enjoying work on my first novel too much, albeit in bursts, to let it go. Even two children grew and flew before Felix bounded free.
Life just kept intervening – once so dramatically that my just-finished first draft had to rest in fresh limbo for a couple more years, before being dusted off and sent for some feedback. Revisions and rewritings followed, then more feedback, more revisions. I enjoyed those, and even did short courses in novel-writing, and the art of rewriting. And a couple of Master’s degrees – more research, more writing, more deadlines. The threads I was quietly drawing on to weave my narrative, came from many places.
My first books had been about real events, when ‘all’ I’d had to do was research, interpret and write them with my ‘take’ on events. The novel came from somewhere else, deep in my imagination and its themes needed their own process, and research.
In the end it was Covid that provided my deadline. I’d done so much work on the book by then, benefitted from others’ generous feedback and was re-polishing my text – yet again – when the pandemic’s shutdowns began. I couldn’t bear the book to be stuck in my laptop for eternity if Covid ‘got’ me first. Felix needed to escape. It was time to dot the final i’s, cross the latest t’s, and publish. I think around 600 other writers in the UK brought out lockdown-finished books at the same moment, in an outpouring of urgent creativity.
I’ve started writing another book. This new story is definitely less patient than Felix, and it really, really wants to be a novella. It’s also insisting upon a deadline; and I’ll be giving in to that.