First draft season

Locking in, tender gods

I woke up this morning dressed in pyjamas that were inside-out, though I’d gone to sleep naked. It didn’t seem strange at first, until I remembered that in the night I’d woken up with no idea where I was, failed to recognise the man next to me, and so – stealthily, attempting not to wake his slumbering form – I had covered my body with my crossed arms, scooted to the bottom of the bed and gotten dressed with whatever I could find in the dark. In doing so I felt shame rather than fear, the amazement that I had found myself in such a predicament. How would I explain it? Then I fell immediately back asleep and woke up back in myself. Familiar bedroom, familiar person. It’s been a long time since I’ve woken up with such amnesia, but I used to do it all the time. The funny thing is always how unpanicked I feel, even with the fogged realisation of I’m naked. I’m naked. And I don’t know who I am.

Last week I taught with my friend K, staying in a cottage that might have been haunted; either way, we woke up every morning at 4.30 am, unprovoked. They said that there were footsteps downstairs, but hadn’t wanted to tell me. We both slept badly and my dreams were upsetting, involving small animals and accidentally getting drunk. In between being haunted and teaching, we talked a lot about writing. I said at one point that I’m going to completely rewrite the first draft of the book I’m working on now, but I want to get to the end first. Maybe that sounds like a foolish way to do it. What I mean is that I want to get this basic version of the story down in order to hover above it and hopefully see with more clarity how it ought to be told. To find out whose story it really is, whether that of the mother wandering the unfamiliar streets of the alpine city, the daughter lost in the woods, or someone else who hasn’t entered the pages yet. All I know right now is that I’m narrating it from the viewpoint of what I described to someone else as a ‘tender god’, watching their dramas unfold.

Writing a first draft is dream and nightmare both. You’re naked and you don’t know who you are. Sometimes it’s the best feeling in the world. Sometimes you feel rudderless and unsure, wading through the sticky middle. I’m a rewriter, so I prefer second and third and fourth drafts to the first. I motivate myself to finish a first draft with the prospect of the relief of the second, the anxiety-relieving milestone of a book-length amount of words, which is only the first step to writing a book. In a notebook I write myself little word count goals. I have fallen behind already, of course. I meant to write in the cottage in the early cold morning with the fire lit, an ideal place to write, but in the event I was too tired and too haunted and ended up doing more phone-in-bed than I wanted to.

I try to remember how it felt to write the drafts of Permanence, which for ages I couldn’t eke out past 20,000 words. The second draft was sort of the first draft and was sort of the fifteenth draft. After years bouncing between drafts I spent several weeks of May and June 2024 in a blissful haze as it all came together. Like I said, the best feeling in the world. This draft I’m writing now is a true first draft and workmanlike, no-nonsense, already recognisable as a book, but I have to make sure that doesn’t lull me into a false sense of security. Surely I should be able to do this by now, though. Surely I should be more efficient than this. But inefficiency seems to be part of my process and I’ve even learned to enjoy it, sometimes, how to splash around in it. The novel’s world has to become bigger than my actual world.

Whenever I talk about this coming year I keep using the phrase locking in, like I’m doing some deranged kind of feat of endurance, rather than just attempting to be better at my life, which felt more difficult than it needed to be, secretly, my legs paddling in a frenzy under the surface. Outside of my life, terrifying clouds gather everywhere. My preoccupations become paltry and irrelevant. Writing books and then promoting these books in an era of quickly-unfolding full fascism feels very strange. The puny dramas of my life unfolding and resolving against such a backdrop.

But writing remains my biggest comfort. I’m circling around the idea of a family in retreat from the world. A family establishing new orders in a destabilised environment; questions of language, of language’s failure, of atonement. What it means to be new to a place and yourself, to live with a void inside you without immediately compulsively filling it. What if I can learn to love the void? Maybe the void is shrinking. Maybe the void is paltry and irrelevant too, because there’s a bigger void outside, coming for us.

Yesterday, speeding in the rain over pot-holes, I was damp and my hands very cold as I weaved in and out of cars but I was also quite happy on an immediate level, at the same time as being terrified at the news that I had read that morning, grief-stricken and frustrated. Feeling mercurial and skinless, prone to moments of wonder at sunsets, etc. My pleasure receptors recalibrating. A toddler showed me their newest bicycle trick. Snowdrops are coming out in patches of dark earth.

Amnesia or no amnesia, each early morning I wake up and write some words, and those words string onto other words, and some are better than others and some give me a jolt and reassure me for ten seconds that I haven’t forgotten how to write, reassure me in my decision to lock in. Even if I have other and more urgent things to do I ceremonially light the beeswax candle on my desk and write until it’s puttered down a bit, not for too long, writing without overthinking it in that blurred space between sleeping and waking, still dark outside, still cold outside, before the real world asserts itself too much.

Haunted cottage view!