Writing a novel is perhaps one of the most painful things to do – excluding child birth, of course. It is supremely uncomfortable before you have started writing; you feel like you are going to explode. The story is bursting within your head, visibly expanding behind your temples. It disfigures you. You must write. 

 Only then, it is still supremely uncomfortable.

You open the Word document, and there it is: a white, indomitable challenge. You write the first few words and then backspace them all again. Once you have finally gotten out the first few pages, you wish you hadn’t. It is terrible. It isn’t what you imagined at all. It is like drawing: you see a masterpiece in your head, but when you try to transfer it to the paper, you get a stick figure.

(This is the point where most people give up. I normally force myself just to keep going, using the growing word count to encourage me.

“I wrote 2000 words today. At least two of them must be worth something.”)

I think writing a novel is like cycling uphill. Once you have expended two thirds of the story (and your effort), you’ve finally reached the summit of the hill that almost sent you careening backwards into oncoming cars. And all of a sudden, the balance tips, the momentum changes, and for better or for worse, you are hurtling forward at an unstoppable pace, either toward your destination or death and destruction.

That is the very best bit, both for readers and writers! You’re obsessed, and it’s like the beginning of an addiction: quite sublime. The real bump comes after the climax, when all the action spirals into nothingness. A good writer will bite the bullet and tie up all the loose ends wonderfully and economically, within two thousand words. A bad writer will let it get to them, and will keep writing for two weeks, trying to talk their way to a good ending.

Once you’ve succeeded, you format the book so that it looks like a book. (This is really all it takes to make a book. Just double space everything, indent everything, and change the size of the font for the chapter headings. After that, it looks like you got it off Kindle). You take out all the little editing and writing notes like: “I’M SICK OF THIS CHARACTER.” “I CAN’T STAND THIS.” “WHY IS THERE A HORSE ON A ROOF?” “HOW DID THE SHIP BLOW UP AGAIN?” “THIS BIT JUST SUCKS, DELETE IT ONCE IT FEELS LESS LIKE AMPUTATING YOUR ARM.” Then you start sending it around to admiring friends. You hand-pick these, because you can only cope with encouragement.

And then you make a coffee, recline on a sofa in a “semi-recumbent position” (to quote Wilde), and bask in the glow of an impossible achievement. You are far too happy to go through the gruelling process of sending it to literary agents and publishers just yet …

I knew exactly what the shadow in my window frame was; with a lithe jump, it landed on the floor and advanced toward my bed, growing in stature as it came. I froze beneath my bed covers. It was just an apparition that night sometimes brings; by blinking plenty, I could make it vanish. I blinked plenty. It didn’t vanish. It wasn’t my brain playing tricks on me -

Yellow eyes suddenly switched on near my bed and sailed in an arc through the air to settle somewhere above my head and begin a slow descent. My blood had frozen, and my limbs felt tied. I heard the unmistakable, sticky sound of lips parting, and a lighter patch in the shadow above became a pair of glittering fangs, just inches above my neck …

This was a dream I had after reading too much Dracula before bed. It was actually pretty scary at the time, and it went on a bit after this too – I got my blood sucked, and I became weaker, and was just lying around in bed missing days of work and study. And everyone thought I was so lazy, which goes to show that sometimes young people are genuinely misunderstood after all.

The reason I re-told the dream is that sometimes writing is a bit like this. It feels like a blood-sucking vampire. You come to the page, and you leave it drained of life and intelligence. Somebody asks you a question, and you reply:

“Duh … I dunno.”

And while you want to write something truly extraordinary, off-the-wall, and outrageously good, the only thing that is outrageous is that you are writing at all. What comes out feels like junk. I am normally 80,000 words into a novel before I feel like I have written something worthwhile.

(Incidentally, the reason I aim for something off-the-wall is that when you have no talent, the best thing you can do is write something scandalously unusual; then someone will still read it.)

However, there comes the day when after trying and trying, and drinking far too much coffee, and typing until your fingers are quite numb, and aggravating everyone who happens to live with you, you have followed the story through to the conclusion and penned the last sentence. And then the miracle happens: it feels whole. The reason for this is never quite clear – why should something feel complete only at such a given a time? Sometimes your plot is not complete when you feel you have finished. But instinct tells you that you have, just as you know once you have squeezed everything out of a pimple, that the pimple is – really, and rather unbelievably – empty.

You have written a novel. It is a busy novel, filled with the most crazy stuff, simply because you got terribly bored writing it. But you’ve actually done what you have set out to do.

I started with a dream I once had. The dream should have finished like this: you dash out of bed, almost knocking the nasty incubus over, and you flick on the light. And then you discover, hanging from the ceiling, the strings of the vampire that was about to eat you alive. It was a puppet all the while, and you were always in control. 

So get writing.

 © Yvette K. Willemse, all rights reserved.