Category: The Sin Eaters Draft

Excerpts from my latest novel manuscript

Things that writers do to write better

1. Accuracy and realism

So, I am trying to learn the guitar. Not because I want to learn the guitar that badly, but one of my characters plays the guitar. What does rock n roll sound like in prose?

Honestly, I don’t like playing the guitar, the strings hurt my fingers and I keep trying to hold the guitar neck like a violin fingerboard. The frets are meant to make things easier, but it makes the fingerboard look like a complicated chessboard.

I prefer the violin, which I’ve been learning for 4 months. None of my characters play the violin. Maybe they should?

My neck hurts.

2. Read widely.

Virginia Woolf said that if you read a book a day, the words will flow out of you. I’m juggling four novels for inspiration.

A publisher told me that I should also read genre fiction to learn how to keep the plot moving.

I’m reading Dickens’ Little Dorritt, Grenville’s The Secret River, Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Steven King’s The Institute.

The words are flowing from me all right.

So now I have a child with telekinetic abilities, living in 19th century colonial Australia speaking Harlem slang. None of my sentences are shorter than 8 lines and I have too many semi-colons.

Nobody wants to read that shit.

My head hurts.

3. Focus.

I need to finish this draft soon. I also have a day job and I need to get another day job that pays for my cats, and for more books. And for a new bookshelf to store the new books.

But there’s Netflix, Stan, Disney Plus, ABC iview, SBS On Demand… We live in a golden age of streamed television.

Plus, there’s the baby beanie for my friend’s son. My friend has been waiting on it for eight years. I really should finish it soon.

I really am learning the violin. There’s so many ways to sound crap on the violin. I should practice.

Everything hurts.

On friends and creative symbiosis

So I have finally finished a full draft of my second novel. This has been a ten year process, and the concept has evolved quite a lot since its inception. Also, a lot has happened over the ten years, and as I have matured, so has my writing.

Writing, more than other creative pursuits, tends to be a solitary endeavour. It is more common for visual artists and musicians to collaborate as a matter of practice, than it is for writers. This sort of isolation for writers is both blessing and curse. We need to be alone with our thoughts, and venture out only to eavesdrop on the world to gather more material.

Writers are like rag and bone men, but we collect our detritus in the form of ideas, observation of our fellow human mammals and conversations overheard in public. Alone we sift through the rubble of stolen and recycled thought. Alone when I am writing, I like to pretend that I sit with the ghosts of Toni Morrison, Dickens and Steinbeck (a weird combination, but it works for me). This solitary part of the process is essential.

But it is not the whole process. I wish that it were. Factor in crippling self-doubt, self-loathing and shame. Add in the nasty gnomish voices in your head which form a chorus to eviscerate everything you write. Sometimes I wonder how many half written novels, memoirs or books of any genre there are in the world.

I wouldn’t have been able to get this current manuscript to this stage, were it not for a group of friends encouraging me along the way. In my experience, creative support is essential to the writing process, in order to move through the crippling self doubt. A word of caution- it is important to choose people who support you in your vision, even if they do not understand it.

I still have more steps to undertake before this becomes a reader’s draft. But I wanted to share this on my blog. This time last year, I didn’t think I’d ever get here. So here’s to friendship and creative symbiosis! I would like to share an amazing TED Talk. For anyone wanting to achieve any goal, creative or otherwise, this is a must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2rG4Dg6xyI