Writing a first draft with me

This week in Cornwall I added 5k words to my third novel. I am about 25k words into my first draft, and this is absolutely my favourite part of the process. I feel alive, my head is filled with the characters, and I find I have ideas and sentences popping up all over the place and often have to stop what I am doing to voicenote or write it down.

I think one of the reasons this is my fave bit is because at this stage I am not planning to show it to anyone else. Although I am under contract for this book, I learned from the terror I experienced writing my second book The Barbecue at No.9. I play a game with myself that this is just for me, and that seems to free my creative brain up, so that I just get to enjoy it. And I do really enjoy it. I’m pretty much the opposite of a tortured artist at this stage (in case that’s really annoying, you should see me during copy-editing, not so serene then, let me tell you!). I find this part of the process utterly magical. It’s not easy but it is absorbing, creative and completely fulfilling (which is why I will never understand why anyone would use AI in this process, but that’s a post for another day).

Therefore, the prospect of a week in Cornwall with nothing on the agenda except writing (bar one event in Truro) meant I started this week in the best possible mood. As I said on a Substack note, I felt like weeping with sheer joy.

I am pretty structured in how I approach this stage. I find a completely blank page too daunting and have to find a way to contain the story I want to tell in order, in order to then be free to tell it (which sounds like a contradiction, but makes perfect sense to me), so once I settled on an idea, I will usually do 3 things.