The hard yards of creation
I watched ‘Emily’ the other night.
It’s the Frances O’Connor movie about the Bronte sister. Emily. Author of Wuthering Heights. I still remember the experience of reading that novel, Emily’s only book, for the first time. I won’t try to describe that experience, though. It was beyond words.
Life, too, is beyond words. All of which is why attempting to write about life through poetry or fiction is so … quixotic. The experience of building a beautiful object made of words is impossible to convey visually. Perhaps that’s why most films about writers are so underwhelming.
Emily was no exception in the underwhelming stakes. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the flick. It looked good and, as a Bronte fan, I’ll watch or hear or read anything about that family in general and that writer in particular. By the way, am I the only reader who thought of the Brontes as the Beatles and Austin as the Rolling Stones and therefore refused to read Austin for too long? (The 2019 federal election helped me overcome that prejudice when, as a means of recovery from the 2019 result, I read every Patrick O’Brian and every Jane Austin novel. Conclusion: Austin is a giant.)
Back to the Brontes. The part of the film where Emily sits down and starts to write Wuthering Heights was interesting. It’s presented as the culmination of and the reaction to a set of heightened experiences: a Romantic endeavour, in other words. Fair enough. That makes sense. But the writing sequence fails to convey the sheer hard work that has to go into the production of a work of that magnitude. After all, it’s hard work just to write a crap book.
The reason I mention all of this is not to compare myself to Emily Bronte or Jane Austin. I’m not that foolish. It’s more that I’m dwelling on the hard yards of writing because I am emerging from the salt mine that was the writing and editing of what will be my third novel.
That novel is called Judas Boys. It will be published on 1 August 2023.
Every book is different, but this one has been very different.
It didn’t emerge from an idea or an image. It evolved from a feeling. From emotion.
On July 30, 2019, I posted on Facebook that I though that the first draft of the novel was ‘nearly done’. That thought was wrong – as has almost every other thought about this wildebeest of a creation. This was what I thought back then:
‘I was … feeling very anxious. Very wound up. And, so, I did something strange (for me). I wrote a short story. This short story was contemporary. It was set in Melbourne. And it involved middle aged people living with the accumulation of sins. That triggered something. Without planning to or even thinking about it much, I started writing another story. And I kept writing. And now that story is the almost-completed first draft of a novel. Is it any good, you ask? It’s a first draft, so the answer is yes and no: I like it, but it makes me cringe. I’ll be finishing the first draft in the next month or so. Then I’ll spend some time making it sing. Then, in a year or so, it should be out in the world.’
The short story I mentioned became ‘Passcode’, which was published by The Saturday Paper in 2022. Looking back, what’s interesting to me is that I knew I was heading down a path unlike the other novels I’ve written. To explain, usually I know where I’m going when I start a novel but never know when I’m going when I write a poem. The primary purpose of writing a poem, for me, is to work out what’s unsettled me. Then, if the poem is any good, I publish it. The impetuous of Judas Boys, therefore, was more like a poem than a novel.
That approach presented a problem. Poems, for me, are unruly creations. They take as long as they take to write. Weeks, months, years; whatever. And along the way, they go through countless revolutions as the emotions that were their genesis swell and shift, rise and fall. Writing Judas Boys followed a similar line – changing radically in form and length – and kept confounding me.
By January 10, 2020, I was telling Facebook: ‘The first draft of the new novel is in the can. Now the real work begins.’ That was wrong. I was still years away from the real work of editing.
On February 3, 2020, I reported to Facebook that the third draft was completed and that ‘the publication date is shaping as early 2021’. Wrong again.
On July 29, 2020, I told Facebook draft nine of ‘the incredible shrinking novel’ was done. On December 19, 2020, I emerged from the salt mine to say I was up to draft thirteen and the manuscript was ‘readable’. Then, on February 8, 2021, I claimed that, after twenty drafts, ‘the novel is done’.
That last post is more than two years ago. I stopped posting after that because I knew I was wrong. The novel was not done. Not by a longshot.
But it is now. How long has it taken? Five years. How many hours? Enough to build a pyramid. And is it any good? It’s not for me to say.
All I can say is that it’s the best that I could do.