Writing a novel is letting go of...

Bloody hell what a week.

Arrived home from holiday on Tuesday, went to the Women’s Prize Live on Wednesday, the Capital Crime Fingerprint awards on Thursday (we won two! Best Debut Novel and Best Publisher Campaign for TLOST), then back home on Friday with the small matter of announcing my second novel The Barbecue at Number 9 (which will be published next year) in the middle of it. You can read about The Barbecue at Number 9 here, but the response to the news has absolutely blown my mind in a way I might have to write about when I’ve landed back on this planet.

If you’ve followed me for a while (and I’ve got quite a few new subscribers, hello and thank you so much!) you will know what a labour of love the writing of this novel has been. I even started this very Substack last April as a way of unblocking (or unfreezing) myself creatively when I truly believed I might never write another book.

Reflecting on what it took to write my ‘difficult second novel’ this week I realised that it was simply (and I make a distinction here between ‘simple’ and ‘easy’) a process of letting go of a lot of thoughts and beliefs I was holding onto about writing. Here are some of the most important ones for me.

Letting go of the rules/rigidity around conditions.

This has been one of the busiest years of my life. I’ve travelled the length and breadth of the UK, promoting The List of Suspicious Things, doing festivals and meeting readers. All joyful work but tiring. This was not the vision I had (and thought necessary) of sitting quietly in my rural home and having a calm, regular writing practice (I wrote more about this here). There were many times I was writing during snatched hours here and there, sometimes on my phone, sometimes at my desk. I was waking up in the early hours or staying up late and writing then.

I imagined that this would result in a messy hodge-podge of words and story and was (and still am!) shocked when my editor this week commented on how ‘clean’ my first draft was. I realised then that something about the ‘busyness’ of my life around writing meant that I just didn’t get the chance to overthink it. I was interested to hear Bernadine Everisto speak about this exact same thing at her Women’s Prize Live interview with Kate Mosse this week, where she talked about having to keep her diary full of other projects, which she writes around, because if there is too much blank space she is more likely to procrastinate (I am paraphrasing here).

There is something very liberating about letting go of my ideas about the conditions for good writing. It means it can happen at any time, and via any route. Liberating and exciting.

Letting go of it being perfect (in fact letting go of it being ‘good’ even).

This is my ongoing ‘letting go’ and it’s the one I have had to remind myself of most frequently during the writing of this novel. After the initial success of The List of Suspicious Things I froze. I started to think I had to produce perfection, or something close to it. I could barely write a sentence as a consequence and even began to overthink writing emails. But the truth is, of course, that your first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be good. The first draft of The List of Suspicious Things could at best be described as a ‘sketch.’ It took many more drafts to colour in the lines, and that’s totally OK. I’ve since realised that this is just how I work, and it suits me just fine.

Letting go of other people’s perspectives.

This was a tough one. I wrote The List of Suspicious Things for me. Now, I have an agent and publisher, both of whom are powerhouse women with strong opinions. There are also lots of brilliant readers who bought my first novel, loved it, and wrote to tell me about that. But in order to write the first draft of this second novel, I had to let go of any thoughts of anyone else. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t taken into account those perspectives in the editing process, in fact that has been my main focus in redrafting (if it’s helpful I wrote about how I tackle editing here) but in that first draft I had to return to writing for me.

Letting go of the illusion of control around how it is received (including letting go of it ‘doing better’ than my first novel).

To be honest, I’ve just had to park this one. I’ve had to tell myself it’s a worry for future Jennie. Even though worrying about it will make not a jot of difference. The truth is that there is a huge part of a books success that is out of anyone’s control. Of course, your publisher/you can do a whole heap of things to influence it, but even that doesn’t lead to a guaranteed bestseller.

I can remember my publisher telling me this when I first signed my book deal, and at the time I thought it was a cop out, but I’ve since seen how true it is. There is so much luck, timing and alchemy involved in how a book does out in the world. I am choosing to put my energy on the things I can control, but I know this will become more and more challenging as people read and react to this second novel. What I know for sure is that the experience of being published second time around will be different, and I am choosing to lean into that.

Letting go of how the publishing industry works.

It is really important for me to understand how the industry works (that doesn’t work for all authors but it’s how I am made) but at the same time if I allowed myself to spend all my time on social media absorbing all the ways in which the industry is awful, I would never write a word. The truth is that the publishing industry is like every other industry (because capitalism). It is unfair and imperfect. When it comes to the actual writing, I have to let go of that entirely.

Letting go of it having to be ‘hard.’

I will end this on a positive note. Writing this novel has ended up (mostly) being a joyful experience for me. Once I’d unfrozen, let go, and allowed myself to just write the bloody thing it’s been great (I am conscious that I’m saying that when I am out the other side of it). The process of writing The List of Suspicious Things was much the same.

It turns out that I LOVE writing. In fact, I *whispers* look forward to it. This doesn’t quite correspond with the image of the tortured artist, and I sometimes wonder if I should be more serious and filled with angst about the process. But to be honest, I am filled with angst 90% of the time anyway so it’s lovely to have a break.

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P.S. While at the Women’s Prize Live I was lucky enough to attend a workshop on Substack run by

Emma Gannon

and

Jess Pan

. Thank you so much to both of them. It was packed full of wisdom and re-invigorated my thinking about the way I use Substack and what I write on here. In the coming weeks I am going to move over to alternating weeks for free and paid posts. I really want to carry on providing free stuff, while also honouring the investment of those people who have chosen to pay.

Thank you so much to everyone who subscribes.