I’ve worked as a writer and editor, across a range of industries and in different capacities, since leaving school. Before that, I filled exercise books with fictional worlds, cringe-worthy poetry and rudimentary journalism. Writing is in my DNA. Like so many others who do creative things, it’s how I express my experience of living, and the places my mind goes.
At the beginning of 2019, I decided to do something I’d toyed with for several years but never got seriously started on—writing a book-length work. It’s been an interesting year. I’ve learned from giants—first award-winning memoirist and teacher extraordinaire Patti Miller at the Faber Writing Academy; then, New York Times best-selling novelist Karen Joy Fowler, and award-winning novelist and academic Nike Sulway, at Springfield Farm Writing Retreat. I’ve connected with inspiring and supportive groups of fellow writers. I’ve enjoyed unexpected successes (including a very unexpected writing prize) and weathered periods of not-writing (from which I later learned that even when I’m not writing, I’m writing). Summing up the year, I would say that I’ve tussled with writing, in a way I hadn’t before.
So, how much of a book-length work have I written?
Unsure of which genre would work best for me, I started work on both a memoir and a novel. As of the end of the end of October, I’m 50,000 words into a projected 90,000-word memoir, In Two Minds, that tells the story of how, in 2017, I came to lose the mind I’d known all my life and acquire a completely different one. Combining personal account with philosophy of self and mind, and neuroscience, it explores the surprising diversity of human minds and the reality they create. It’s a big ask, but, ultimately, my aim is that In Two Minds sheds light on one of the most profound questions of human experience—What makes me who I am? I’m on track to complete it in 2020.
I’m also 15,000 into a magical realist novel that’s turning out to have a very complicated life of its own. My relationship to this book is very different from the memoir. Whereas I feel I’m definitely writing the memoir, my work on the novel seems more like that of a cat herder—I’m working up a sweat trying to bring my characters and locations and symbolism and cultural references into some sort of order that works. It’s a lot.
Why have I started this blog?
It’s a good question. There are a lot of writing blogs out there, and I have nothing to teach and, as yet, no writing or publishing secrets to share. I suppose it’s this … At the beginning of the year I joined the world-wide community of people who’ve taken on the challenge of tussling with writing as a major part of their life. This blog is the story of my tussle—with writing and, eventually, with publishing. I hope to gain some insight by writing about writing, and I hope it offers something of interest, perhaps of comfort—and, ideally, a few laughs—to those reading it.