Days when I look out the window…wistfully

I don’t work on weekends. Though I work fulltime as a novelist, by Friday afternoon I’m ready to knock off, have a beer and look forward to a weekend doing anything but writing. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, but I like having written much more than the actual writing part. Like many things, there’s tremendous satisfaction to be had at the end of the process and a lot of pain along the way.

Once I’ve started on a project, the story never completely leaves my head. I’m working on plot turns, character details and other ideas all the time. It’s what I think of when I wake up, when I go to sleep, when I shower (often for a long time) and sometimes (rudely) when I’m talking to people. Nevertheless, weekends are for other things. I like to do physical activities as a change from sitting in front of a computer screen all week. I fish and dive, both occasionally, play tennis a fair bit, and look after the fifteen acres we live on here in the Bay of Islands, in New Zealand. We have a few sheep to keep the grass down, a dozen chickens for eggs, a huge vegetable garden that I don’t go anywhere (that is my wife’s domain) and a hundred and fifty olive trees that I planted about four years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I really liked the idea of having an olive grove. It smacked of creating a bit of the Mediterranean here, and since we use a lot of olive oil and I love olives with everything, how could it not be a good idea? Maybe if I had done some research first and understood how much work is involved in looking after the trees, I might have had second thoughts. The actual planting, I hired somebody to do, I’ll admit, but as it turned out they didn’t do it properly, so I still ended up doing the hard work myself. Putting a twig in the ground is easy. A spade load of dirt, handful of fertiliser, in with the plant and you’re done. Digging two, much deeper holes to take decent sized tree stakes, then hammering them in, is much harder. I know. That’s two stakes per tree. Three hundred holes. Even that was only the start of it. I imagined putting the sheep in amongst the trees to keep the grass down, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that until the trees were big enough to survive being rubbed against or simply eaten. Four years on and I’m still mowing the acre and a half or whatever it is where the olives are. Plus I have to spray for weeds around the trees and prune them. It’s pruning time about now.

I’ve made a start. This is the first year I’ve pruned, mainly because I have no idea what I’m doing, so the trees are a bit of a tangled mess. You’re supposed to prune so a bird could fly through, I think. Right now, any bird that attempted to do that would hit a thicket of branches as dense as a brick wall. In other words it’s a bit of a mission. The ones I’ve done have taken fifteen minutes each. So I can manage four an hour, forty in ten hours and so on. It’s going to take about a week, except that I’m trying to write a novel and I can only spare an hour a day, so it’s going to take about forty days unless I put in some solid time at the weekend. Truth is though, I can only do a couple of hours at a time because it’s not a job I enjoy. I don’t know why. It’s not very demanding physically or anything. I suppose it’s just boring. I can’t spend a whole weekend pruning anyway, because I have a lot more stuff to do around here that can’t wait. lawns to mow, weeds to pull, chop and spray. Trees to chainsaw. Sheep to chase, and so it goes.

So my point is, that by Monday I’m usually pretty happy to be back in front of my novel in progress. Unless, that is, I’m having issues. I’m having issues now. The planning process has hit a road bump. A big one. I’ve discovered plot problems that I hadn’t envisaged. I kind of knew they were there, but I thought by the time I got around to confronting them a solution would occur to me. It hasn’t though, so for the past two days I’ve been attacking the issue from various angles and getting nowhere. It’s very, very maddening. I feel as if I’ve wasted entire days and achieved nothing. Even worse, I’m starting to suspect that fixing the problem is going to mean going back to the drawing board with my entire novel plan. So weeks of wasted work. So that’s why I was looking out of the window wistfully earlier. I was thinking about going out to prune some olives. I didn’t though because I have to stay on track. This is my job and I haven’t made much money lately. Not to put too fine a point on it, I need to sell some books so I can’t afford to stop writing, even for a day.

Actually though, it isn’t all bad. I could’ve actually written a draft instead of planning as I am, and since the issues I’m talking about occur towards the end, I would’ve ended up with huge amount of wasted effort. Either that or I would have tried to patch up what I had with endless rewrites and ended up with a confused, and probably bad book. The thing is, when you can’t make the end of a novel work, it’s generally a major problem. It may well mean that all the stuff leading up to that point (the entire book) is fatally flawed, and was from the start.

So that is why novels should be planned, and also why some people start at the end, and then go back to the beginning. I think I might try that. Right now I think I’m going to go and prune an olive tree. Did I mention, by the way, that my olives have not produced any fruit yet? Despite the hundreds of hours I’ve spent caring for them? I have a very bad feeling I did something wrong at the beginning, though I don’t know what. Maybe I put the wrong trees in, or the soil is deficient or something. Sounds like a case of bad planning.