Writing A Novel - Day Whatever
So these blogs died off quickly, didn’t they? The reason for that - which I think is likely quite obvious - is that progress on the novel stalled.
Partly that was because I missed a couple of days, and ADHD and habit-forming are the worst of enemies. The further it gets from the last time you did something, the harder it becomes to pick it back up. And that’s a shame, because I think this could be a good novel.
But just because I haven’t been writing the novel doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing fiction, and I’m looking at this as a silver lining and as something of a win. In the past month I’ve written about 30k words of new fiction. None of it was on the novel, of course, but I think a lot of it is good. I’ve written a Mork Borg short story, and two “dark academia” shorts, as well as a bunch of other stories that I’ve got out on submission at various places. And that feels good. It feels like winning.
Novels are still what I want to do, but I think I’m going to have to continue figuring out how to work on an extended piece of writing like that with the brain that I’ve got. Mentally I’m very much an “all or nothing” person. I often want to be able to sit down and work on something at the exclusion of everything else. My brain wants to start something, work at it, and finish it. Multi-tasking and jumping between projects is very difficult for me. And that makes writing a novel alongside all of my other writing and creative work a difficult prospect.
I’ve just had a relatively successful crowdfunder that’s going to give me a couple of months of breathing room where I don’t have to be nose to the grindstone all the time because I’m worried about paying my bills, and I’m wondering if I can carve out two or three weeks in that time to make the novel my sole focus. I’ll need to assess my situation financially when the money lands in my account, because I have to balance paying off debts with making the money cover my bills. If I pay off a full credit card I might only have a month of expenses left over, at which point I’m back to the grind again. But also I’ll have one less credit card to worry about, which will be a relief.
We’ll see what happens, I suppose. In an ideal world I’d have the money to go away somewhere for a weekend or even a full week, with the sole purpose of getting “off grid” and just writing every day. I’d love to do an Arvon Foundation retreat or go and do a residency at Gladstone’s Library or something similar. I could obviously just book myself into an AirBnB somewhere remote and spend the week writing, too, which might cost about the same as either of those things. Hell, I could just get a tent and go and camp in a field somewhere in Wales for a week, though that’s less exciting. These are all possibilities, though.
This is a lot of words to say that my goal of getting back into a good writing habit has been successful but my goal of writing a novel has not, but that’s fine. The worst thing I can do is beat myself up over it. What I need to focus on is creating some conditions (mainly financial) in which I’m able to actually prioritise that specific kind of creative work over the sort of creative work that pays the bills, for a good enough chunk of time that my brain can look at the project and say, “yes, I am going to finish this”.
I’ll report back in a couple of weeks when I know what my financial situation is looking like.