Slowing the Pace, or Making a Virtue out of a Necessity (Cecilia Peartree)

 For as long as I can recall, I've been someone who likes to rush at things, trying to fit too much into the time and only getting it all done by a ruthless system of prioritisation, so that eating biscuits (for instance) always gets done and sweeping up the crumbs never does!

 My mother was the same, only worse, and often quoted her own mother's motto, 'Better to wear out than rust out.' I suspect I am wearing out physically at a somewhat faster rate than she did, but that's beside the point.

Inside view of a props cupboard where some things do rust out over the years, while others seem to be destined to appear in almost every show.

The point is that I've recently had to modify my approach to writing in order to get anything finished, and I'm currently reflecting on whether this might actually be a good thing.

Ever since I first took part in NaNoWriMo in 2006, I seem to have been operating according to its rules every time I sit down to write. This is a good thing for someone like me in many ways. To begin with, it forced me to concentrate on getting something finished within a relatively short timescale. Until then I had just written odd chapters here and there without much focus, and it was just pure luck if I ever produced a complete story. But there was a downside…

Particularly during the worst of the pandemic and immediately after I retired from my day job, I found myself compelled to write at a NaNoWriMo speed (1667 words a day) every day of the year. If I wasn’t working on anything new, I invented something to work on, and it wasn’t until earlier this year, when I landed in hospital for 2 weeks and with quite restricted mobility for quite a bit longer, that I realised the folly of my ways. That happened partly because I had actually been working on three things at once on the day I was taken to hospital. One was a novel I’d been trying to get finished for about a year at that point, the other was something I had very nearly finished and was about to start editing, and the third thing was a new draft of the 26^th in my mystery series that I planned to write for Camp NaNoWriMo, a sort of extra NaNoWriMo event that happens mostly in April and July – you can set your own goals for this one so I had modestly settled for 25,000 words across the month instead of the 50,000 that is the standard for the main November event.

A tasteful selection of notebooks

I realised quite quickly that I wouldn’t be able to keep to my ‘normal’ writing pattern. For a start, April would have been a complete write-off, so to speak, except that I asked my son to bring a notebook and some pens to me in hospital so that I could start on my planned first draft by hand. Writing by hand is always a strategy of despair for me as there is a good chance it will turn out illegible. In the end I think I wrote about four or five chapters in the notebook, which was quite useful as I had trouble using a computer for very long during my recovery, so when I at last had my laptop set up I prioritised the edits for my completed novel, which I had been longing to get on with. I later transcribed the handwritten chapters into a Word document. I was actually quite worried that people would see the join between the notebook part and the rest, but when I read the whole thing through before starting the edit, I found that part seemed to be in my usual voice.

My preferred writing station - when it was tidier.

It took me quite a bit longer to complete this novel than it usually does with novels in the series, because I made myself stop writing when I was tired and before all my muscles started to complain at once, but I feel it might be better as a result of this. I told myself just to write something every day, with no word target or anything, though after a while I began to aim at 1,000 words a day anyway. Amazing how much less strenuous it is to write 1,000 words than 1667! Once I’d completed the draft I used a smaller laptop in a different room of the house to do the edits, which meant I could spend a bit of time now and then working on the other unfinished novel on my main laptop. Editing on a different machine in a different room worked well as it immediately gave me a bit of distance from the text.

Is there a lesson in all of this? Well, for me I suppose the lesson is to be more careful not to fall off a wall when you are working on three novels at the same time! Though I am trying to tell myself not to work on three novels at the same time anyway. One should be more than enough for anyone – and accidents will happen when you least want or expect them.