Today I finished the first draft of the first chapter of my first novel. At 10,000 words that’s quite some chapter but its length has been dictated by its contents, which I feel must be presented as a continuum. This first chapter recounts the events of a single crucial day in the life of its protagonist. The writing of it has left me tired and drained, because it’s very sad.
It’s a strange feeling, embarking on a project of this size. I’ve been preparing for it for months, but nothing aside from actually getting down there and doing it could have prepared me for the vertiginous sensation of unlimited possibility. None of the short stories I’ve written this year have been particularly short; each has had to be reined in to keep it from running out of control. Now there’s no need to do that. I can show everything.
The writer I keep thinking of at the moment is Nicola Barker. I keep wondering how she felt when she started to write Darkmans, which is one of my most admired novels of the past ten years and a modern masterpiece. That it should have won the Booker when it was shortlisted in 2007 is for me a given. In scale, ambition and achievement the book is vast. Did she know as she wrote the first word that it would be that huge? It’s proof to me that simply by sitting down and doing them such things can be done.
Now reading Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace:
All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word – musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.
God that’s good.
Quote of the day though has to come from one Rob Hull, who has just got into the 2012 Guinness Book of Records for having amassed the largest ever collection of Daleks. Asked what started him off, he recalled the moment when, as a child, he saw his first ever Dalek replica in a toy shop window and was forever smitten:
”My mum wouldn’t buy it for me, but I swore at that moment that I’d have my own one day.”
Didn’t we all, Rob, didn’t we all. 517 Daleks later, he is still collecting.