When you’re in the thick of a novel, when you’re close to finishing, the world makes sense. Your life makes sense. Suddenly everything relates to your internal, fictional world: songs on the radio were written for your characters, world events, random comments by passers-by – everything has so much meaning. You dream about your characters, you catch sight of them in the Arrivals hall at the airport, and it demands the most enormous restraint not to run up to them and throw your arms around them. Your internal world, the world of your book, is as real as the world around you. In fact, it’s brighter, it’s more interesting, and of course, it is entirely controlled by you.
Then you’re finished, and you know you’re finished because there is nothing left to say. And because you’re finished your characters slowly start to fade. At first you hardly notice it, but soon enough the world of your book has receded into nothing more than a memory and in its place is nothing. A vast, hollow, vacuous nothing. So that pushing your trolley up and down the supermarket isles is not an opportunity to escape back into your world, it has reverted to the tedious task of pushing your trolley. And after a while the boredom gets replaced by a growing fear: what if that was it? What if I never get another idea for a story?
And then the panic sets in, and you think, ‘Goddamit, I will write! If its the last thing I do, I will find another story!’ And suddenly every one you speaks to is a budding writer with a great story lined up. And you start grabbing at ideas (‘Man walks down the street’ – hmm, great start, works for me!), but each idea fragments into dust before you’ve even managed to form a word around it.
Because the trouble is that you forget – you forget that the last book only really came alive in the third year of writing, you forget about the pile of a dozen notebooks jammed with writing that never even made it to the first draft.
You forget that characters and plot need space and time to settle in – they are willful creatures, they won’t be rushed. Novel Two is in many ways so much easier than your first, you’re at least 90,000 words wiser and more determined. You know how not write to it, you know to pace yourself.
But waiting for Novel Two, when you feel you’re being shut out of a world you once knew so well, when all you want, all you dream of, is the germ of a story with which you can start building another world, that’s one of the hardest things of all.
Rosie Rowell 