Monk Quixote

Sit­ting here in Star­bucks feel­ing… numb, mostly. At around 11:18 I fin­ished the very first ten­ta­tive draft of the novel. And there’s now the anx­ious wait for my sanity-check read­ers to get back to me and tell me whether they like it or not. Whether it makes sense or not.

It’s not ‘fin­ished’ fin­ished. And I don’t mean ‘not fin­ished’ in the artis­tic sense, either. But the story is told. What remains is detail, pol­ish and refine­ment.  I’m call­ing it the alpha draft. Because once one sups with a geek, one learns to carry a nap­kin. Or some­thing. It’s a use­ful metaphor. It has all the func­tions of the fin­ished prod­uct. And more bugs. And swearing.

And fin­ish­ing it feels…odd. Scary. Dis­turb­ing. Almost a panicky-type feeling.

I’ve been try­ing to write this story — and it is more or less the same story — for eigh­teen years. I have a Word­Per­fect draft of the open­ing chap­ter some­where that dates back to 1996. There were ear­lier attempts on a BBC Micro. But sadly, they are lost for ever. Or maybe, hur­rah! They’re lost forever!

I’ve writ­ten and re-written and edited and debated and torn up and destroyed count­less first chap­ters. It never worked. I was never happy with it. The char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion was too trans­par­ently based on peo­ple I was hav­ing rela­tion­ships with. It was too cutesy. It was try­ing to be too clever. It was in the wrong tense. It was in the wrong per­son. It was in the wrong lan­guage… you get the picture.

It’s been tor­ture. Men­tal, emo­tional, tor­ture. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write. Well, to tell sto­ries — I enjoy the odd shaggy dog moment in the pub or idle dreams of direct­ing as much as the next slacker. But I sim­ply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t turn the page. I couldn’t write the next chap­ter. I tried to per­suade myself that I didn’t even want it to be pub­lished, that I just wanted to write for its own sake.

When I meet that per­son, I want to shake their hand, pilgrim.

And any­way, two things hap­pened:
First, I went on an Arvon Foun­da­tion cre­ative writ­ing course. Now, I have an entire shelf of books that are sup­posed to teach you cre­ative writ­ing. Some of them I’ve even opened. A very select few, I have read. But cre­ative writ­ing books, for the most part, tell you things that you already know. The course didn’t teach me any­thing fun­da­men­tally new, or par­tic­u­larly life-changing. But, and it’s the biggest but in the world, it did so in an envi­ron­ment that was designed to get me to write.
And so I did. A bit. Well, for me, quite a lot. I got excited.

Those that know me, know I don’t ‘do’ excited.

Sec­ond, my wife erm, hap­pened. Now I’m afraid she’s mine and you’re not hav­ing her, so you’ll just have to try and find a suit­able sub­sti­tute in the hus­bands, wives, civil part­ners and you-know-its-complicated shop.  Check for best before dates. It’s a kicker. Any­way, my wife gave me the time, space and encour­age­ment to write. And I will always be pathet­i­cally grate­fully to her for that.

Because I did it. I slayed the dragon. Ok, it’s still bleed­ing. And the script is not in agent-ready state, by any means. But I wrote the story down. I sat and I typed and I typed and I typed. And some of the key­strokes even came out in the right order.

As some­one once said to me — time, tenac­ity, tal­ent. I’ve dealt with the first two, now it’s time to sharpen the third.

I’ve lis­tened to the same six Mog­wai and Sigur Ros albums until my ears are pretty much obliv­i­ous to white noise and alien har­monies. I sit in Star­bucks, more or less swim­ming in scream­ing babies, tod­dlers and extra-hot extra-shot extra-wet vanil­lagin­ger­bread­latte and tune out the rest of the world. Well, except for the old man with bryclreemed hair who sits behind me and reads his spread­sheets out loud. Or the amer­i­can media buyer this morn­ing who had an impres­sive syl­la­ble per sec­ond ratio. Oh, and the odd young man who spent an hour cry­ing while talk­ing to his female com­pan­ion. I don’ think they were break­ing up. Maybe he’d heard a really sad spreadsheet.

And now, it’s a few hours later and I sim­ply don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t start the re-writes and amends yet. I’m too tired for any nor­mal kind of behav­iour. (Trans­lated: really don’t want to do the house­work right now).

I don’t feel like cel­e­brat­ing — there’s noth­ing to cel­e­brate yet. I know I keep bang­ing on about it. But it just. Feels. Weird.

Let’s hope it feels even more weird when I print off the bas­tard child and seal it in a brown paper prison. And with any luck, I’ll reach agents’ desks just in time for a new year’s res­o­lu­tion to pub­lish more nonsense-masquerading-as-prose.

To ellip­sis and beyond my friends….