I recently stumbled across this — crime novelist Vanda Simon talking about the experience of writing of her first novel -
CS: When you were writing OVERKILL, you were a mother with two very young kids, living in Hawke’s Bay, trying to also write– what was your schedule like?
Symon:[...]When I first started out I was really anal about it, you know ‘I want to have quiet, have space, have a desk’. I gave that up real fast, you know you’re sitting at the dining room table, wiping, feeding a child here, wandering over and playing LEGO, all while writing a novel at the same time, having a discussion with your mother-in-law, making cups of tea for anyone who comes and visits, writing a novel at the same time. So, yeah…
This is the only most recent example of something I’ve read time and time again. Only a tiny proportion of published novelists are lucky enough to write full-time. And, assuredly, most as-yet-unpublished novelists must adjust their writing life to the necessities of the everyday.
There’s a pretty good chance the last book you enjoyed was put together by a working parent who got up an hour earlier than they’d have liked, in order to craft five hundred words before the kids woke up.
The last time I was in that situation, I was writing my third novel, Holloway Falls…except I wasn’t really in that situation, because I didn’t have what it took.
I was thirty years old and for the first time I had a decent, interesting day job that was beginning to pay pretty well. Plus, I was in head-over-heels in love and about to get married. Plus, my second novel, Christendom, had been a terrible failure. Plus…
But no excuses; I just didn’t have what it took. Truth is, for two or three years I pretty much gave up writing altogether. If you’d’ve asked me, I’d’ve said I “didn’t have time.” And I’d’ve been lying – to you, and to myself. What I didn’t have was the necessary courage and drive. I became one of those people who spend much more time talking about writing than actually writing.
It was unsustainable. One of them had to go — either the day job or my claim to be a writer.
In the end, it was the day job….but only because my wife, Nadya, had the kind of grit I didn’t. She insisted that becoming a full-time writer was the right thing, indeed the only thing, for me to do.
We lived in North London; we had a ridiculous mortgage, ridiculous debts, a new baby. But I left the day job anyway, full of anxiety and a kind of terrible freedom, and I didn’t earn a single penny for rather more than a year.
Nadya supported us — she paid the mortgage, the groceries, the bills, the daycare. She didn’t complain. She never questioned what, even in retrospect, looks like a terrifyingly reckless decision. Without her absolute lack of fear, I’d’ve have given up long before Holloway Falls got written.
Of course, I wouldn’t have given up for ever, because ultimately the urge to write is a compulsion. My elder son will be ten this year. By now, if I’d stayed in that day-job, I’d certainly be writing again…at the kitchen table, in front of the TV, maybe on a quiet Sunday morning like this one. But any dream of a “writing career” would have perished a decade ago. I’m sure I’d be happy enough, but when I think of the degree to which I’d be haunted by regret, I get the stone-cold chills.
I never take this for granted; indeed as the years pass and I gain perspective on how hazardous and insecure those early years really were, I grow more awed by my wife’s tenacity.
It could have gone so hideously wrong. Even after Holloway Falls was written and under contract, the debts continued to pile up…month on month and year on year.
(In a Pavlovian reaction to those times, I still can’t bring myself to open a letter from the bank. Even the sight of a sealed white envelope in the post-box is enough to induce in me something close to a panic attack. The moment I step into my local branch, I start to tremble and sweat.)
The thing is, though – we don’t change. Not really.
This blog is devoted to the composition of a novel, but some of you may know that I write for the screen too.
I used to think of that as an enjoyable sideline but over the last two or three years it’s consumed a bigger and bigger part of my working life. I’m not complaining — I’m very lucky, and I’m very busy, and I love every minute of it.
I do find it hard work, but ordinarily I don’t find it a struggle — especially if I’m revising one project while writing another. But for the last few weeks, I’ve found doing the two jobs at once unusually exhausting.
I’ve been doing the work, and to an extent I’ve been enjoying it — which is a coded way of saying, I think I’ve been writing pretty well. But the rest of my life has suffered; the time I spend with my kids, with my wife, with my friends; even things like reading for pleasure and finding a spare hour to write this blog.
Once again, Nadya hasn’t challenged any of it; not my constant distractedness, or my tiredness, not the hours and hours I spend on the phone to producers and agents, not the working until one in the morning…not the fact that my conversation for the last month has been almost entirely about myself and my work.
Yesterday, she came downstairs having watched the last two episodes of my new TV show, Luther. She had a smile on her face, a very particular smile. On it was written, yet again, her absolute faith in me.
Writers (including, demonstrably, myself) bang on and on and on about discipline, about dragging yourself to your desk, about writing a certain amount every day, about being able to write anywhere. Blah, blah, whatever. At heart, it’s just self-promotion…because it’s about ourselves, always about ourselves.
What we rarely talk about, except elliptically and often self-servingly, in the acknowledgment pages, are the people around us whose tolerance and fortitude make this kind of life possible.
For me, it’s Nadya. Whoever it is for you — if you’re lucky enough to have someone like that in your life; spouse, friend, parent, teacher — then give them a kiss. Let them know you know. Thank them.
