Finishing The First Draft

It's not the beginning of the end, but it might be the end of the beginning...

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

Tomorrow, I’m going to start working on the next draft of my new novel. I delivered the first draft just over a week ago. Man, that was a nice day. It was the first springy day of the year. I wanted to kick my heels up, pirouette around the lampposts, embrace strangers, and sing to every song on the radio. I could feel the sun’s warmth on my face, figuratively and literally. The war was over. The dark days were no more. I’d handed in all the homework in the world, on time, neatly typed and double spaced.

I wrote this draft in a hurry. I wrote it on my Notes app, on trains to Sheffield, London, Brighton and Manchester. I wrote it on my way to my little sister’s hen do, and in bed, on the morning of her wedding. I wrote it on New Year’s Eve – an emotional scene, and when I met my friends in a bar later, I was a little puffy-eyed. I wrote it on freezing Saturday afternoons in January, stopping every so often to put on more jumpers and wrap myself in blankets.

And then, I didn’t write it. I didn’t write at Christmas, because I’d briefly taken up another urgent and distracting hobby – coughing! I didn’t write it when I was writing a long piece for the Telegraph, or having my photo taken, and begging a photographer to be a little less hostile to my house plants and trying to convince them that the load-bearing walls in my house wouldn’t come down, no matter how much it would improve the natural light. I didn’t write it when someone I love was in despair, and I was fielding phone calls and messages and fretting about how to fix the unfixable. I didn’t write it when I was googling ‘Claudia Winkleman + hair + shiny + HOW + deep conditioning masque’. I didn’t write it when I was recording podcasts, or on training runs for the jeffing marathon, or at meetings about a different book, or trying to look at every single dress listed on Vinted.

But I thought about it all the time. And when the thinking made me unbearably anxious, I’d try to sit down and do a bit. An hour here. A thousand words there. And this is how I met the deadline – a deadline that happened to fall at the end of an intense period of absolutely everything else, all at once.

Different writers approach deadlines in different ways. Nearly all my smart, sensible writing friends take the old-timey US high school janitor approach. ‘You can do it fast, or you can do it right!’ Publishers and editors are not teachers. Schedules aren’t solid or immovable. If we need more time, we should be able to ask for it, like adults. No point rushing when taking it slow means making the work as good as it can possibly be.

But I like to do it fast.

I don’t know whether this is the result of a lifetime of living with anxiety, or that I spent the best part of a decade building a career and a profile as a journalist who can do you 1200 words by lunchtime, or that I’m a total dopamine addict (same thing) – but if you give me a deadline, I’ll behave as though we have sworn a blood oath. My work-in-progress will be my fifth novel (touching wood, it’s a long way from being a novel yet) and this is what I learned about myself while working on novels one through four.