How to write a book

Lessons I need to remember for next time

I have exactly two weeks to finish book four, and I am slightly manic with it all. Last week I wrote twelve thousand words, completing six thousand of those in just one day. My husband told me I was being meaner than usual, before exclaiming triumphantly, “It’s the book! The people you’re writing about are making you mean!” I denied this of course, but he’s not necessarily wrong. I write about horrible people, and inevitably, they get inside my head. Or rather, they are from my head. I create them, they are a part of me, even if that means I’m perhaps not as nice as I proclaim to be. I just read a Steven Soderbergh interview where he says “We all indulge, I think, in presenting a version of ourselves to the world that we want to align with our idea of ourselves.” I think that’s partly why I write about horrible people, because there’s a part of me which is cruel, selfish and uncharitable. It’s a part I fight against, and do my best to tamp down at all times, but it’s there nonetheless and the idea of exploring it through fiction appeals (allowing me let it out in a more healthy way).

This far into the process, I have jotted down the main lessons I have learned from writing books (that I need to remember next time I write a book):

I spend at least half of my life thinking about the people I’m writing about. They come with me wherever I go, invited or not. This morning I was walking down Chapel Market in Islington, fully channeling David Farrand. David is a psychiatrist, a historian, a great man (in his own opinion). He was thinking about all the ways Islington has changed, bemoaning the new shopping centre and wondering if the old junk shop on the corner (which he never actually went into) is ever open now. How much of that is me, and how much of that is him? I am never sure. Are they, as my husband observed, impacting me negatively? I spend my time with characters that are not real, but have somehow come to life. This near the finish line, they are so alive to me that I have to accept I am no longer entirely in charge of them anymore. It’s a sign of success, because it means I’ve fleshed them out enough that they’re believable, but boy is it loud in my brain until the book is done and they all get evicted.