On the seventh day of Na-No… I have no swans-a-swimming (or French hens, turtle doves, or gold rings for that matter), but I do have 12,659 words. And, better still, I have fallen through the hole in the paper, as once described by Stephen King. There’s a feeling, a rather nice feeling, that the story is happening all by itself and I’m just an observer. 

I know better, though, than to trust this feeling. Your relationship with your work is like any other relationship: it changes from day to day. If you never get too cocky, and never get too despondent, it all evens out in the end.

When I first did NaNo, two years ago, it was like throwing paint at a canvas to see what would stick. Not a lot, as it turned out. In lieu of a story, I wrote random scenes – in no particular order, as Dermot says, tediously, every week on the X-Factor – interspersed with quotes: ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea’ – Iris Murdoch, and comments on my progress, e.g. ‘Utter shit I’m writing! I have no idea where to begin.’ (I did, of course, include these asides in my final word count.) If you’d asked me five minutes ago, I’d have said that I’d jettisoned everything in that 2012 NaNo, that all of it turned out to be useless (although not a waste of time: I’m a great believer that nothing you write is ever really wasted). But, as if to prove doubly my point about waste, I’ve just come across this in the 2012 file:

What had become of their caps, she wondered? She thought of their hundreds and hundreds of caps,

And their aprons, their dresses, all starched, and smart. Their shoes. She could picture them. She could smell the starch of their dresses. The [what did they use to clean with?] She could hear a broom sweeping.

Partly gibberish, of course, but not a million miles, I’ll sure you’ll agree, from this passage in the latest draft:

In the old days, she thought, it would have been different: a snowstorm of white caps and aprons, an army of boots on the backstairs, the slashing of starched black skirts. She imagined them lugging tin buckets to fill bathtubs, red-faced and steamy, their hands squelching wet. All the linen would have to be lathered by hand, or by mangle – whatever that was; she had seen the word once in a history book – and there weren’t such things as telephones back then: when they wanted to summon you, there were old-fashioned bells with brass tongues; the same bells she’d seen in the passage downstairs that were turning to rust.

You’d never put on a play without rehearsals; our first drafts (and second, and third, and so on) give us writers an opportunity to rehearse. Whereas NaNo 2012 (for me) was pure improvisation, this year’s NaNo (so far) feels more scripted. The sets have been built, the lights rigged up. There were lots of extraneous people just hanging around: they’ve gone home now (‘home’ to the Character Graveyard in the sky). In 2012 I felt a bit like an actor playing a novelist. I don’t quite feel like a novelist yet (because that would be cocky, and cocky is wrong), but I think, this time round, the giant blob of words in my nano file is beginning to resemble an actual novel…