writing a novel isn't a linear thing

it's an 'iterative process'

About a million years ago, I studied social research, and then for a while worked as a social researcher. I specialised in qualitative methods - in-depth interviews and focus groups - and one of the things you learn when studying this is that the long, complex task of analysing qualitative data (interview scripts typed verbatim) is that it’s an ‘iterative process’. What that meant in a very lazy nutshell was that you’d form a kind of tentative conclusion about one theme in the data, move a little further in your analysis, and then return to the first theme and refine it. Maybe even change it altogether. On and on you’d thus go till you’d something finally to say about it all.

I once read an interview with Haruki Murakami in which the interviewer asked him why he worked out so much. Murakami’s answer was that the reason he spent so much time in the gym was because when he sat down at his desk to write fiction, in order to begin his work he’d have to first open a door. This door, he explained, is really, really heavy. He literally needed the muscles on his body to be able to manage it.

Haruki Murakami

I know all about that door. I think everyone who tries their hand at writing fiction does (or at least they ought to!) Sometimes what happens to me when I’m writing, particularly when it involves a particularly difficult and usually important, as in Everything Hinges On Me Scene, is that I can’t open the door. It’s too heavy. When this happens, I don’t say to myself, oh damn, here’s this heavy door again. It’s only on reflection that I can see this is what’s happening. As I writer, I am unfortunately very good at persuading myself that what I’ve down in front of me is the right thing, that I’ve opened the door. In fact, in these situations I haven’t even attempted to open it. All these wrong paragraphs amount are basically me doing a weird little dance in front of said door. Usually, these are scenes when something bad happens to someone. It’s hard to go into that - to open the heavy door that leads to a place of emotional pain. Or someone hurting someone else. So I do my weird little shuffly dance, convince myself it’s the real thing and on I go.

a super heavy looking door

And then I write on and I may even get a couple of chapters done before it all fizzles out and I have to face the ugly truth - that I didn’t go through the damn door at all - and I have to go back. At least, this is what’s been happening with the very slow affair of a novel I’m working on now. I just have to go back. And so then I do another sad little shuffly dance. And another and another. And - what is the thing that happens then, as I circle the thing over and over (sorry for mixing my metaphors here) that suddenly something gives, only a little bit? I don’t know, I think it’s part of the mystery of fiction. I’m just writing and rewriting, and pitching my tent here and then pitching it there and using all the cliched language you can think of - and then somehow the thing gets a little bit closer. Close enough for me to understand something I didn’t before, because I’ve been there now. I’ve witnessed it. Then I can go through it and on another few chapters and then back I come, because suddenly I understand that bit better again. An iterative process.

Maybe I should just actually go and get a gym membership for once in my life and it wouldn’t be so messy and slow. But anyway, those are my musings of this lovely day in June. Sorry for the long absence.