How to write a novel

Tim Dowling's tips on resisting the allure of banjos, toast and YouTube

Writing a novel must be one of the easiest things to avoid doing in the world - chances are no one has asked you to do it, and no one will care if you don't. As soon as you start, almost every other activity in the world seems preferable. Distractions come in every shape, but these are, to my mind, the top five.

 

Food
Try to arrange things so that there are several flights of stairs between you and anything remotely worth eating. My office is in the attic of our house and the kitchen is on the ground floor, so when I weigh up the choice between starting a new chapter and having some toast, I have to factor in the journey. This is, of course, exactly the wrong way round - walking down the stairs is no real bother, and once I am in the kitchen the prospect of going all the way back up again means that making several dozen profiteroles shaped like swans suddenly seems a better use of my time.

Family Life
In many novels you will find an Acknowledgments page in which friends are thanked for the use of cottages, beach houses or flats in exotic locations, where the author at last found the necessary isolation to complete his masterwork. Most of us, however, will not have such options: we have to write even while we continue parenting, walking the dog and executing urgent DIY projects in a distracted and half-assed manner. There are no easy answers to this dilemma. My solution was to write a novel which is at least in part about half-assed parenting, walking the dog and DIY.

The Internet
This is the biggest distraction faced by the modern novelist. The internet is an insistent, ever-present enticement which comes out of the very box you are writing on. In the old days if you wanted to play poker in order to escape the tyranny of the blank page you had to put on your coat and go out. Now you just have to move your index finger slightly. I could suggest you disconnect yourself from the Internet while writing, but it's actually an incredibly useful tool for digging out the sort of detail - a weather report from a specific date six years ago, what a radio transcript looks like, a few lines from an old jingle - you used to have to assemble over months and keep in a big folder. It's really a question of whether the time saved outweighs the time you spend watching a YouTube video of a monkey drinking its own pee.

Everything Within Reach of Your Desk
When you don't want to write, you will do anything to avoid it. If there is an old, broken cassette nearby, you will unscrew it, repair it with tape and wind it back up with a ball point pen. If there is a banjo to hand, you will teach yourself to play it, in both the three-fingered bluegrass and old-fashioned clawhammer styles. The only way to maintain focus is to clear the immediate area of anything which you could be considered mildly interesting, or, failing that, cover everything in several layers of yellowing newspaper.

The Terrifying Enormity Of What You Are Trying To Do
Writing a novel is, in my experience, a bit like swimming across a huge, dark lake. Starting off is easy and finishing is both a relief and a triumph, but there's a long stretch in the middle where you can't see either shore and you're not even sure you're heading the right way. This is the point where you may prefer banging your head against the desk all morning to writing a single sentence. The best way to keep swimming is to remind yourself that it's no good staying where you are because it's 200 feet down, although I'm not sure the lake analogy really extends that far. To be honest I'm finding it very difficult to concentrate and tune this banjo at the same time.

Tim Dowling is a writer for The Guardian. His first novel, The Giles Wareing Haters' Club, is published by Picador and is out now

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Comments

[Ivan Velasquez]

On Henry's comment:
If you only write the first chapter, you're right, nobody will want to read it. However, it's an entirely different proposition to read a novel, or a book.
I read somewhere that a famous author once said that the best novels were never written. He said this in the context of being told many plots wherever he went that people had access to him. As in: Mr. X, can I tell you about this plot I am thinking of for a novel?
99.9% of which were never committed to ink and paper.
Please keep going, or, maybe you'll be the first author of a book made out entirely of a collection of first chapters. Hey, that's not a bad idea!

[henry]

Great article, so very true, certainly about the food bit. i have tried to write several times, and there is always something in the way to stop me. My biggest problem is after writing the first chapter, I stop and think that no one will want to read what i have written, so i stop! does anyone else have this problem, is it normal? or should i just stop all together?

[Leah]

Great article. I especially find it true that rather than write, we will undertake tasks that are actually more tedious and grueling--similar to the phenomenon of desk workers putting more effort into avoiding work than would be required to simply do the work in the first place.

(And nice catch Jake, although I'd argue the nonstandard meaning of "enormousness" has been sufficiently established as the primary meaning of "enormity" through common use.)

[Jake]

Don't want to be a pedant but "enormity" means wicked or evil, not "enormous". The word you want is "enormousness".

[Andrew Jebedee]

Definitely Youtube can do your head in. It like a merri-go-round; you just get on and spin in circles for hours.