Remember, people, each novel starts with the first page!
[image error]A colleague at work recently asked me: “What’s it like to write a novel?” In response, I expected myself to come up with some pithy, erudite yet seemingly off-the-cuff witticism. Instead, several seconds passed with my mouth opening and closing in silence like a goldfish that knows food is about to plop into the water. “Well,” I began with an author’s naturally superior command of English vocabulary, “It’s like, er… Erm… Well… You know, it’s, erm, like, er…”
The whole cycle of novel writing for me—planning, execution, editing, publishing—repeats every 12 to 24 months, so it never really ends. The elation of finishing a novel does not last long; neither does the anticipation of starting the next one, and neither does the thrill of my readers reading my work. All of these feelings are of course very nice indeed, but they have a limited duration. Like a drug, I need to push on, create something, and get to the next hit, the next rush, the next high. Locked into this cycle of addiction, it is therefore quite difficult for me to remember a time when I didn’t write, or, more accurately, to remember what it felt like not to be a writer.
Here are a couple of screenshots to show you what I’m driving at. At the end of 2018, I finished writing The Repulse Chronicles, Book Two: Invasion, a novel I began less than a year ago. While that goes through the multiple stages of editing and proofreading before publication on 16 March, I am now planning The Repulse Chronicles, Book Three: The Battle for Europe. The first image shows the current word-count for Invasion; below that is the same image for The Battle for Europe.
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Eleven months ago, the lower image was the same for Invasion. And, in less than a year, The Battle for Europe should have a similar word-count as in the first image above. Getting from the beginning word-count to the final-bar-the-editing word-count is what the job is all about. It’s what matters. It’s what it is to write a novel.
It is extremely difficult to say what it is like to write a novel. After writing seven of them, all I know is that it starts at the first page. It goes on through many stages, perhaps taking several months or even years, with drafts extending to multiple versions. These stages can and often do involve feelings of despair, confusion, frustration, desire, revelation, and elation. But, like climbing a mountain, it is most important to keep putting one foot in front of the other, taking it one step at a time, and not to be put off or downcast by the ‘false summits’ many mountains appear to have when you look up at them as you climb from below. So, writing a novel is like climbing a mountain. Possibly.
On a simpler level, perhaps it’s easier to imagine you’re Dory from Finding Nemo and instead of swimming, keep mumbling to yourself: “Just keep writing, just keep writing, writing, writing…” Hey, it works for me 
