During 2024, I decided that I was finally going to complete the novel I’ve been writing since the late 1990’s. This has proceeded in fits and starts, great bursts of creativity interspersed with long periods of inactivity as I struggled to flesh out the bones of the somewhat rigid structure I always envisaged for it. The gaps were well-known, but I’d lacked an incentive to sit down and make the effort to fill them. The disciplines I’d been taught during my time at Nottingham Trent didn’t sit well with my own pre-existing process, so I felt uncertain about how best to proceed. Some sections of the manuscript had been extensively revised, so the idea of producing a ‘vomit draft’ (as advocated by Allison K Williams in her book ‘Seven Drafts: Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book’) seemed to be a non-starter. I’ve always struggled to revise my drafts – the very act of committing words to paper somehow exhausts my creativity, and the compulsion to edit as I write is so ingrained that the very idea of just writing what comes to mind so as to get the story down in a form where it can be improved at some future date is (was) anathema to me.

I’ve never attempted NaNoWriMo – it always seemed to me an attempt to force something not yet ready to be revealed – but I’ve read too many articles by writers I admire which assert that the only way to get anything finished is to write every day, if only for a short time. One of my cohort at NTU, Jenny Roman (who posts on twitter / x as @slightlytquoise, and has a blog here: https://jennyroman.wordpress.com), has been writing #200wordsaday for quite some time, and posting her daily word count for her followers to track. I struggle to write just 200 words at a time, but I resolved to match Jenny’s disciplined approach during February 2024. I already had a Kanban board which listed all of the missing sections from the novel; all I needed to do was to complete as many of these as possible during February, and hopefully build up sufficient momentum to carry me across the finish line before my self-inflicted deadline in May.

I’d finally found a deadline to work towards. In the past, this has been the spur I’ve needed to complete a project – whether the final few scenes of ‘Tam Lin’ (because we already had performance dates pencilled in and a rehearsal schedule to meet),or my Master’s dissertation at NTU. This new deadline was just as immovable: I wanted to present the finished (draft) novel to my wife on her sixtieth birthday. My wife had previously read the opening chapters and expressed a desire to find out how the story ends; I knew how it ends, I just didn’t know how to join up the chapters she’d already seen with the ones I’d written to finalise the tale. In the intervening years it’s become something of a standing joke between us – I’d receive beautiful hard-bound notebooks for Valentine’s Day, urging me to use them to ‘get on with it’, whilst I’d dedicate the books I purchased her for Christmas in lieu of ‘The Price of Fire’ – but after twenty-five years together, the joke was starting to wear thin. I knew I wouldn’t be able to give her a bound, printed edition, but I’d found an e-reader which I could pre-load with the novel in ePub format; all I had to do was finish it.

I wrote every evening/early morning during February, and continued into early March. Like Jenny, I started posting my word count on twitter. I didn’t quite complete the full draft, but I did log just over 26,000 words (not all of them for the novel) during that 30-day stint. In the rest of March, I wrote a further 10,000 words, and the draft was completed by mid-April. During the first four months of 2024 I added 36,000 words to the novel, twice the size of my MA dissertation. I was able to add the dedication to my wife, and complete the formatting of the text (including full-colour chapter-header photos) in time to wrap the e-reader and present it to her on the birthday.

So I’ve (finally) written something for someone I love. What’s next?