HOW I WRITE: PANIC & DESPAIR

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been involved in Melbourne's Emerging Writers' Festival - a fantastic week-long carnival of writerly events. My involvement ran to a reading at the Opening Night (of an extract from Out of the Picture, if you're interested) and taking part in a panel discussion last Sunday morning. My fellow panellists - tackling the issue of the writer's process - were Misha Merz, cartoonist Chris Downes and the astonishingly young and poised novelist Steph Bowe.

Here, for your edification, is the text of the speech I gave as part of Sunday's panel:

I got married 20 months and 9 days ago.

I don’t mention this to impress or surprise you, although perhaps it does. After all, who in their right mind would marry a writer?

No, I mention it because of the number of thank you cards I’ve written since then. One. And that was a month or so ago, just so I could give it in person to a friend visiting from overseas and pretend that was always my intention.

Nothing pains me more than writing in a birthday card. Except writing my weekly columns for The Weekly Review. Or writing those three features that are due on Tuesday and I’ve barely started. (I can only mention that as I know for a fact that my editor is currently on holiday in Shanghai, which seems a safe distance.)

I can only come to the inclusion that I hate writing. I loathe it. I detest it. I fear it. God, I fear it.

Maybe every addict feels the same. Because I am an addict. Ever since my Grade 2 English teacher told me I had too much imagination. (Thank you, Miss Doherty.) I write daily and always have. I get grumpy and restless when I can’t. I can’t tell you how many nights out I’ve spent in, writing things that nobody else would ever read. Whenever I’m supposed to be doing something else, I’m writing. When I was a teacher, attending meetings, I had a reputation for earnestness. No-one had ever seen such a prolific notetaker. Now, writing is something I do when my wife thinks I’m doing something else. Hanging up shirts. Tidying the study. Making dinner.

The thing about those thank you cards is, I still believe I’ll write the other twenty-five. They’re somewhere on my bedside table, probably. You might think 20 months, 9 days and, ooh, 18 hours might be leaving things a tad on the late side. I know I’ve missed the deadline. It’s just that nobody told me exactly when the deadline was. I would have been there, the night before, bleeding despair and ink to get them in.

One thing I learned early on was you never miss a deadline. Well, not by much. Long before I was ever paid to write anything, I (somewhat enviously) asked the editor of a local mag why he kept using some illiterate hack. (Ah the righteous snobbery of the untried writer!) His response has always stayed with me: the hack handed in his work. Great, I thought: hit a deadline and I’m in with half a chance, talent or no.

Now, of course, I can’t write without one. When I was told this talk had to be about process, about how I write, I instantly knew what I’d call it. Panic and despair. That’s the gift of the deadline. And that’s what I need to get anything done.

I have a weekly deadline now of Tuesday evenings. I always keep Monday and Tuesday clear to write two pages of reviews. It’s about as long as I need. But, of course, I never get anything done on Mondays. Nothing. Christ, those days dissolve in pints of bile and endless cups of sour tea. Come Monday evening, my wife returns home to find me weeping over my MacBook with a mangle of clumsy, useless phrases. Monday nights, I’m a miserable bastard. But Tuesdays? Tuesdays I’m an alchemist.  I can fly and the words sing.

I’ve written about a dozen novels. Don’t bother googling them, because you won’t find them. They’re all up here, apart from some really cracking first chapters. While the rest of the book is here, it’s pure and untouched. Once it hits the page, it starts going wrong. Each new word solidly rogers that perfect, promising start.

After 20 odd years of abandoning the Great Australian Novel, I was starting to despair that no publisher had come knocking, chasing the astounding first chapters I never sent them. The problem was, of course, I had no audience, and writing without one meant I only had myself to impress. Sadly, I was too easy to please.

In 2006, I found my solution. With two hours to fill each day on a train to and from Croydon, I began working on a new novel. How to Disappear Completely. Actually, it was the same novel I’d been working on since 1999, but this time I was determined to ignore the three dozen first chapters and write something new. And, more importantly, finish the damn thing.

I had tried to set myself deadlines in the past. Rock solid, unmissable deadlines. But my subconscious was not to be easily fooled. It knew I would forgive myself, so these deadlines passed fruitlessly as I returned to another first page.

What was different this time was that I approached a website called Podiobooks.com. They were about to launch and were looking for unpublished books, read by the author for distribution as podcasts. All they required to be considered was the first three chapters as mp3 files. Each subsequent chapter would be released on a weekly basis. I had three chapters. Only three chapters. The rest was a jumble of notes and ideas that I was confident I could assemble into a chapter each week.

The depths of my delusions, it seemed, knew no bounds. Ultimately, I settled into a fortnightly schedule of writing a chapter one week and recording it the next. After one week of writing, I had 30 listeners. Three months in, I had close to a thousand. If I ever missed this new deadline, and I often did, a barrage of angry emails would appear in my inbox, demanding I supply the next instalment. Finally, I had my audience. And they weren’t happy.

It took me 18 months to finish the book in 30 chapters. Quicker, at least, than Joseph Heller. But, crucially, I had a book, most of which had been written in a state of panic. And despair. There were days I hated it and myself for ever starting.

Of course, I don’t hate writing: I hate writing badly. But then sometimes I have to. And a deadline stops me constantly going back. My columns… maybe they don’t sing. Always think if I had more time, they’d be works of genius. But they wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t use that time.

Thing is, I also know that those wasted days aren’t wasted days. They’re the work I need to do to get me to the point where I can write. The deadline just tells me when it’s time to stop arsing about and write the damn thing. Having an audience from more or less the first page I typed of How to Disappear Completely provided the pressure I needed to drag myself to the final full stop. It also taught me a lot about how to appeal to an audience. How to write for people other than myself. I learned what was wanted, what worked, what didn’t.

I almost hate the fact that first draft is online now. It’s a shapeless, overwritten mess. Because that’s what first drafts are meant to be. It wouldn’t be anything if I hadn’t put it all on the line by putting it online. I’ve had a publishing offer, which I turned down and approaches from two agents. More than that, I ended up with something I could spend – and have spent – the last two years working to rewrite the book into something publishable. Almost all the lines people write to tell me are their favourites have long since been cut, generally inadvertently. I do feel the occasional twinge, but rarely put them back.

Four years after I started, the book is getting there. But in the meantime, I’ve learned there are people waiting for it with ever-diminishing patience.

Of course, there are plenty of people out there still waiting impatiently for their thank you cards, but they can wait a while longer.