That’s it, I’ve written my first novel. It’s about one hundred thousand words long and it’s a tale of everyday people, their thoughts, their dreams and their foibles. It has some common themes but it doesn’t really have a plot and it has some characters but I couldn’t describe any of them as heroes or even villains. I’ve enjoyed writing it and some of it I might be persuaded to describe as good but there is a lot of it that should be reworked or even discarded to put it politely. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended if you feel the same way.
The only trouble with my first novel (not the only trouble but perhaps the biggest) is that it comes in two hundred separate pieces, each a blog entry written independently from its other one hundred and ninety nine sisters and brothers, each written since the start of January this year. So it is not really a book at all, not even a single oeuvre but just a collection of short tales, snippets of prose and rants, mostly rants as most blogs seem to be. Yet there is a definite feel to it (or them), a style, a way of putting words onto the screen, some inbuilt character and some recognisable writing devices which have somehow emanated from deep within my mind and have been interpreted though the tips of my fingers.
OK, so it’s not yet a novel but I have a plan, I’m going to do a ‘Mamma Mia’. I’m going to print out all of my blog entries and lay them out on the floor of my living room and move them about until they make some sense of order, until they appear as if they were, or at least that they could have been written with the intention of them being parts of a single narrative, just like Benny and Bjorn have done with their ABBA classics. I have no intention of setting them to music however, that would be just too far-fetched but perhaps I could persuade Pierce Brosnan to read them out for the audio book. Since James Bond I can only assume he has some time on his hands. Do you think he would be up for it?
To be fair, I never set out at this point to create a novel, only to start to do something which I have wanted to do for a long time and that it is to write. As Julian Barnes put it so succinctly in his satirical novel ‘England, England’, sometimes you can only do something by doing it and so here I am and here it is, my first novel sized piece of writing.
To get this far has been enjoyable and at times it has been difficult, especially trying to start a piece or to finish a piece and I thank the few people who have offered me help along the way. I do have a couple of ideas for some longer stories in my head and writing my blog has at least given me the confidence that I should not fear the prospect of getting stuck in and giving my real first novel a good go.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 