Twenty-thirteen. Spring. It was gloomy and dark, I remember, the day I went into my office and wrote the opening pages of my first novel, Death Wish. And I was under a heavy cloud of morning sickness (which for me never began in the morning, but ramped up mid-afternoon and lasted until bedtime).
I never intended to write five books. It was a shock to me that even one was flowing. I’d dreamed of writing a novel but had held myself back with a whole heap of ‘buts’ – top of the heap: But I probably can’t. Non-fiction? No problem. Fiction? That felt hard. Never mind that I was constantly editing and developing (and even ghostwriting) other people’s fiction. Writing my own fiction… that felt pretty scary.
Hazarding myself
The novelist EL Doctorow wrote:
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
Writing a novel meant hazarding myself; I felt that keenly.
But then, I was pregnant, which meant I was already hazarding myself. Pregnancy, for me, required courage (because my mother died after having me).
The ticking clock
Despite the morning sickness, the fog of tiredness, and all the complicated emotions of pregnancy, there was an energy in me to create, to write – and now, right now.
It felt like there was a huge clock hanging over my head, ticking loudly.
(That clock was so vivid for me, it found its way into Forget Me Not, where it haunts the heroine – the ticking clock echoing in your every heartbeat.)
Growing
Once Death Wish started flowing, I told myself: you need to finish the first draft before the baby is born. But the book kept growing as I wrote, and I quickly realised the story would have a sequel. Then it became a three-book series. Then, five.
As my baby grew, my writing grew.
Looking back now, more than a decade later, I don’t know how I did it: parent my son, do my day job and pour out these books. I remember I wrote fast, words flying out of me. I remember I lived with one foot in the here-and-now and one in the fictional world.
I still took my son to the park and painted with him and read to him and watched Scooby-Doo with him, and I still wrote and developed and edited for my clients, and I still washed up and cleaned and did laundry and bought food and cooked food. And swam. And read. And went on holiday. But in the moments in between, I wrote.
Furiously.
Frightened that this crazy, magical, precious thing that was happening would stop – stop too soon.
The finish line
I wrote all the way to the end of the first draft of Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully. I rested for a few weeks (my daughter was fashionably late). Then I had her, my beautiful girl, and finally, I could breathe. She was okay. I was okay.
And somewhere amidst it all, somehow, I’d written five novels.
Of course, I wasn’t at the finish line with them, not by a long shot. The editing stage came next, and that was arduous, especially now I was parenting a newborn and a five-year-old. And working. And cooking, cleaning etc.
But somehow I edited them. And published them. And then, eventually, began another novel – which, to my great surprise, did not pour out of me.
The NEXT BOOK
Swan Song was so much harder to write. Much, much slower. Because it touched the grief inside me over losing my mother. Because by now I was trying to write while juggling work and parenting a seven-year-old and a headstrong toddler.
And, I think, because I wasn’t pregnant. My body wasn’t growing, creating, and the urgency and driving need weren’t there. It was quieter inside.
Initially, I found the more sedate pace intensely frustrating. Why couldn’t I just get this book down on paper? But over time, I came to accept that actually, it was okay to write like this. In small slices of time. Without that big ticking clock driving me.
This is how I’ve written since. Without the intensity and urgency.
It’s different. So much slower. But calmer, more peaceful. No heady rush from words flying onto the page, but time to reflect and breathe.
Would I like to write five more books, ten, fifteen? Yes. But if I only write one more, and I write it this way, I’m okay with that.
