So I wrote a book.

I imagine that this phrase is rarely used sincerely. I mean, lots of people write ‘books’ and there’s a fair chance that most people would consider what I have written to be a book of the inverted commas kind. When I say that I wrote a book, what I mean is that I spent a whole lot of time planning and writing and editing and deleting and rewriting and replanning and giving up and trying again and deleting and deleting and writing. That is definitely the short form of how it happened. And then there was the whole publishing thing, but I’ll save that for another post sometime.

Writing a book is something that I’ve always wanted to do. It’s been a dream of mine since I was about fifteen – maybe even younger, but about fifteen is the time when I feel like I could probably intellectualise what ‘writing a book’ actually meant. I think it’s very easy to be mislead about this idea. I know that I certainly mislead myself about it for a very long time. I thought that writing a book was just a process of sitting down, pumping out a whole lot of words, coming up with some kind of plot twist, and then giving it an ending of sorts.

Not the case.

You can certainly start that way. But if you’re anything like me you’ll quickly discover that sitting down and writing a whole lot without some idea of where it’s all going or what it’s all about is like building a pyramid with the intention of carving out the inner tunnels ‘later’ – you know, when it feels right. I’m sure that the pharaohs realised pretty early on that no one was changing the pyramid’s design once construction was underway.

Writing requires a plan. A goal. Or a scrap of paper with a poorly constructed drawing of what you hope to describe.

I started drafting Light’s Shadow at the end of 2012. I decided to give myself a kick by doing NaNoWriMo (except in my case it was NaDeWriMo and I didn’t tell anyone about it). 50000 words in 30 days. Screw planning. I had skills. I had motivation. I had the bare-bones of an idea.

By January 11, 2013 I had produced a 75000 word ‘first draft’ – I put that in inverted commas because it turned out that the story was still 85000 words from being complete, I just didn’t know it at the time. My wife read it. She thought it was ‘okay’ but her voice was filled with reservation and I realised that my ‘skills’ were probably not as good as I’d thought they were.

I spent the next year rewriting it. It was a slow and difficult process. What students know really well, but adults forget really quickly, is that reading your own work and redrafting/editing it is not only tricky but it’s also quite often tedious and frustrating because you’d much rather move on to something new instead of revisiting characters you’re not sure you even like anymore. I discovered plot holes and character defects. I reconstructed entire conversations that altered the trajectories of some major events. I deleted thousands of words and replaced them with more concise hundreds.

After two or three rounds of that, I had about ten people read it. Friends, and family mostly. I needed to know if it ‘worked’. I’d reached the point where I could no longer look at it with even the slightest degree of objectivity. It was a nerve-wracking experience. But it made the book better. I was a glutton for their feedback. Their criticisms gave me something to build from. Their comments gave me a sense of which parts of my story stood out and which bits were easily forgotten. They also told me which parts of my characters I’d actually written down and which bits were still just in my head, automatically filling in the blanks and making it impossible for me to know who they were on paper.

It was enlightening and exciting and terrifying.

Ultimately, I learnt a lot. I learnt that I was absolutely right to be intimidated by anyone who has produced any kind of novel that I’ve appreciated, because now I have some sense of the time and effort that went into them. I learnt a lot about the joy of being creative again. Constructing characters and giving them motivations and attitudes and histories is really fun, especially when I put them into situations that they could make mistakes in. I learnt that sometimes the story will write itself and that other times I’d have to force myself to give the same kind of love and attention to parts that weren’t as immediately enjoyable because they mattered just as much to the world I was creating.

Most importantly, I learnt that I could do it, and that it was fun.

So, I wrote a book. I’d love you to read it.