How I finished the first draft of my novel

Yup, I finally finished the first draft. Here it is, emerging from the printer yesterday.

Note that you can't actually see the pages, and that's no accident - they're not ready for anyone to read yet. Not even me: I'm finding it hard to resist, but I've sworn to myself to put the script aside until after Christmas. By January I hope I'll come to it with less love and understanding, and can be as brutal as I need to be for the second draft.

It feels like I started this book a long, long time ago - possibly because I started thinking about it years before I wrote a word.

Then, over a year or two, I wrote a whole load of words that I deleted straight away. I couldn't work out where my story was going or who would tell it.

So in September 2015, I booted myself into action on the 12-week online course at the Unthank School. This was intense - especially as I was working pretty flat out at the time - but I committed to writing something every day for those twelve weeks, and I did. Sometimes I only managed 20 minutes while the potatoes boiled for dinner, but I always wrote. I mapped out my plot, got to know my main characters, wrote 5,000 words, rewrote them completely, in a new voice and from a new point of view, and by the end of December I had over 15,000 words.

Maybe I'm a wimp, but after Christmas, I collapsed a little bit. I confess I didn't have the steam to keep on writing every day.

And I was beginning to find it hard to dive into the novel and clamber straight out again before my hair was even wet. (I promise I use better metaphors than that in the novel.)

But I did keep on writing in the nooks and crannies of my life and by the early summer I had almost 55,000 words. The end was in sight, but I really, really wanted to write the rest in one go, not in little bits and pieces.

I booked August off (I'm self-employed so that meant telling precious clients I wouldn't be around, and earning nothing for four weeks - no small deal). But I spent most of it sorting out care for a beloved aunt. To make myself feel a tiny bit better I skidaddled off to Hastings on my own for four days of nothing but writing, and was briefly very happy. Then I returned to my desk and wrote almost nothing of the novel for a couple of months.

I was deeply frustrated, and felt that my novel and I were in danger of falling out of love. I knew I had to immerse myself in it, but daily life (mine at least) just doesn't allow for immersion.

So I booked myself onto a writers' retreat - ten days in Spain, at Casa Ana - and told myself that I'd write and write while I was there, and that if it was humanly possible, I'd finish before I came home.

And I did. Casa Ana turned out to be perfect for me: high in the mountains of the Alpujarra, remote, silent, almost empty. My fellow writers were warm and generous, we were mollycoddled from dawn till dusk, and everyone was there to work: it was easy to write all day, from before breakfast till dinner in the evening. (And the food was wonderful!)

I'd been afraid I wouldn't be able to write for more than a couple of hours a day, because at home that's all I seem to have the stamina for. But Casa Ana proved that if I have no responsibility other than to writing, I can focus completely on it without feeling the need to run away. I didn't stick to my desk all that time - I walked every day, and I lay on my bed and thought about my characters and what was happening to them. But I didn't think about anything else. It was heaven. And I finished the first draft at five o'clock on my last day. The ending's a bit shonky but that's ok, it's a first draft and I know I can make it better.

So I'm happy. But I'm also feeling a bit flat - I'm missing being inside my story, and I'm sort of hesitating about celebrating because I know I haven't finished really. But I'll be back with the novel soon enough, and I'm pretty sure I've done the hard part. (Could be beginner's naivety, but I'm feeling positive so don't pop my balloon, please.)

And in the meantime, I'm celebrating a little bit. Here's the piece of jewellery by Kara that I bought this time last year. I promised myself I'd only wear it when I'd completed the first draft. It's heavy on my arm, and I love it. Now it's reminding me of the work I still have to do, and I can't wait.

Do creative writing courses work?

There's been a lot of bad press about creative writing courses recently, and I have to say that I sometimes agree: doing a course is no substitute for getting down to work and putting words on the page.

You don't need a course to be a great writer, obviously. Equally, just doing a creative writing course doesn't make you a decent writer.

But, but, but ... twenty years ago or so, I signed up for a creative writing BA at my local university, taught by Susan Wicks. I was a book editor and had never written more than teenage drivel before, and it was a transformative experience: among much else I wrote poems that weren't awful, comedy dialogue that was, and discovered that I wasn't at all bad at writing copy. I'd assumed everyone could do it if they tried, but it turns out they can't.

I dropped out of the course because I was about to have my second child and was working more or less full time, and simply couldn't pack in a weekly writing assignment.

A little while later, though, emboldened by what I'd learned, I gave up editing and became a copywriter.

I didn't write any more poems because I was rather busy, and not always very well and the copywriting took up all my creative juices. But another few years later, Sue asked if I'd like to join a small writing group that she was tutoring.

I wrote my first short story for that group. I'd written lots of opening lines before, but always lost my nerve before finishing them. Now I had a group demanding to know what happened, so I just had to plough on to that final line.

Now I might have written that story without the group - the bones of it had been inside me for ages, and I read widely and reasonably critically so I had an idea of how a story might go. But I would never have sent it out. It wouldn't have occurred to me that it might be good.

Sue told me to send it out, so I did because I trusted her judgement. It was rejected and she told me to try again, and The Warwick Review accepted it, and then Nick Royle asked to include it in that years' Best British Short Stories. I was stunned.

I stayed in the writing group for quite a while because it was a great place to try out new ideas on a supportive group of people, and the writing exercises taught me all sorts of skills and approaches it might have taken me years to unwrap on my own.

In the end, though, I decided to go it alone: I found I was writing for the group - neat little nuggets of fiction that would fit into the time allotted - and not for me.

I wrote more stories, a handful of poems, and a play. I learned to use my own judgement, to try new approaches, to take risks.

And I began to gather notes for a novel. I did research, I sketched characters, I wrote a trillion opening lines. And I never went further. Each time I started, I got scared and put it all back in the box and did something else. I wanted to get it right so much that I couldn't bear to get it wrong, and I needed to get it wrong to find out what was right.

So in September this year I signed up for the How to Write a Novel course with Stephen Carver at the Unthank School. It's an online course, just 12 weeks long, and it was exactly what I needed.

It's structured and demanding: we looked at openings, endings, character, voice, plot, themes,  perspective, pace, dialogue, descriptive writing, and more. We dived straight in: look at these openings, which work for you? Why? Choose a couple of books you like and examine their openings in detail. Now write five possible opening lines for your novel. What do the rest of the students reckon? Pick one and take it further ...

There was no time to draw breath, to allow doubt to creep in. I wrote lines, scenes, monologues, dialogues. I sketched out a plot, finally, and then drew it in more detail. I worked out why I wanted to write this story so much and threw a whole load of unnecessary stuff out.

And every single day I wrote a bit more of my novel. Up at the top of this entry is the current word count. As you can see, I'm a slow writer, but I've discovered that if I write about 500 words a day I make tangible progress. I can even write this many words on a day when I have no spare time - I can write them while the potatoes boil if it comes to it. I can always rewrite them. In fact I've already rewritten the whole thing, changing it from a third to a first person narrative. I've learned to play, make mistakes, not to worry. I've had huge fun.

I chose the Unthank School course for pragmatic reasons: it focussed on the novel, was online, flexible and short. It was amazingly good value. I didn't know Stephen but I learned long ago that having a big name tutor doesn't guarantee that a course will be good: how many famous writers can be bothered to create really great materials, week after week, and deliver them ego-free?

So thanks to all the tutors and fellow students I've worked with! I'm off to finish my novel now.

Writing a novel: I need new shoes

I'm about to write my first novel. And my shoes are in a sad state.

These two things are connected.

My shoes are wrecked after two years of walking in them almost every day. I walk because it keeps me sane, and because it's often the only way I can think of the next line I'm going to write. Most of the time the next line is copy for a client. Sometimes, though, I'm trying out a storyline, or some dialogue.

On the day I took this photo - just last week - we'd just scrambled down Pillar, an especially steep mountain in the Lake District. We'd reached the top in a 40 mile-an-hour wind and hail and ate our lunch huddled behind a stone wall. Then we scraped our way down to the valley, a rock fell on me, and we squelched through miles of bog when the path vanished. We carried on, because what else can you do? You have to get to the end of the path somehow.

This week I've begun to write a novel, and I suspect it's going to feel like that walk on Pillar - exhilarating when the clouds lift for a moment, revealing the glorious views and the rush of being up so high, but for the most part simply gruelling.

This novel has been waiting in my mind for years. It's time to quit fussing, admit I don't need new shoes, just a whole load of determination, and get writing.

(I've signed up for the Unthank School online novel writing course - if I ever come up for air, I'll let you know how it's going, but don't hold your breath. Or is it me who's holding her breath? I'm dazed and confused already.)