I did something pretty momentous yesterday.
I finished the first draft of my novel.
I’m just going to let that sit there for a minute.
I originally had the idea for this story at around age thirteen, which means that I have, in some form or another, been working on this thing for twenty years.
It’s a story that has grown up with me and gone through as many transformations as I have in that time.
It started as a story about secret agents, a Romeo and Juliet retelling with a very slight supernatural twist, loosely inspired by some characters from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
When I was around twenty-two, I decided to combine it with a second story that I had been working on since the age of around sixteen, which was much grittier, with no supernatural element, about a girl whose guardian had abandoned her to leave her to deal with the gangsters that were looking for her.
I had at times changed my mind completely about how to best tell this story. Should it be a graphic novel? A novel? A screenplay? At one point, I had resolved to do a three-act story where act one was a novel, act two was a graphic novel and act three was a screenplay.
At various points, I thought I had been close to finishing it. I had almost won NaNoWriMo back in something like 2014, when I lost 44,000 words of the book in a computer failure. I had known how the plot would unfold (or so I thought) for some years. I would drift in and out of writing: I’d write for two weeks, and then leave it alone for six months. I’d write more in the winter, but barely in the summer, and it was getting me nowhere fast.
I had thousands of words and still had not told the story that I had created.
Last year, I remember sitting curled up tight into the corner of the sofa, thinking about who I was beyond my work (hello, burnout). I’m not ashamed to tell you that I cried a little when I thought about the seven-year-old me who used to write short ghost stories for fun on the computer. I felt like I had wasted so much time, I had let her down by not finishing this story so all her other stories could come out. I’d let the wrong things take priority, for so many years, and I was still doing it.
After burnout recovery kicked in and I was feeling better, I realised that bad habits had snuck back in. If at the end of the working day I wasn’t too tired, I’d continue. I had a little energy to do a little more, so I would. And I asked myself the question: why aren’t you spending this energy on you?
So I changed my habits. If I still had energy, I would write. I would read. These things fed one another and I began to write most weeks, then every week, and eventually every day.
Less than a year after I had resolved to finish the book: I’m looking at a finished first draft.
I still feel pretty weird about that. The idea that I can officially call myself a novelist now, not just a writer, is wild to me, but it is the truth and one that I intend to bask in.
This is it for me, for that little girl: we’re unstoppable now and our time is spent on telling stories.
Comentários