Let me nail the ‘Long-Distance’ bit of the title as I don’t imagine that the ‘Loneliness’ part needs any explanation. It’s purely a function of time, not miles.
In the time-honoured cliché, I’d always felt a book lay within me, albeit invisibly deeply. Being made redundant and deciding to go freelance created the space and time in which to contemplate the possibility. I didn’t set out to write something that might be published. It was much more that I needed to know that I could do it; ‘it’ being create something from thin air that worked. ‘Worked’ meaning that it had integrity, a sense of purpose and being.
If you’d told me then it would take eighteen years from first contemplation to final realisation, I may well have taken up some other life challenge, perhaps crocheting or self-waxing.
But then again ...
Who, once they’ve written, would ever really want to be without the joy of sculpting a phrase that captures all you wanted – or relish that moment when a character leaps from the page in all its three-dimensional glory? I think it was Paul Auster who said that there is only one thing worse than writing, and that is ... not writing.
Of course, each of our books will differ dramatically: one of the reasons this is not a ‘How to write’ blog but an experience-sharing outreach project! It will over the coming weeks declaim as loudly as the written word can: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
So, when I sat down in front of the dreaded blank screen, what did I have before me? Just the skimpiest outline of a core idea.
I had a long-held ambition to share my passion for classical music generally, and the late string quartets of Beethoven specifically. There was my main character - a great violinist. And I had been wrestling with a Very Big Question: how to find meaning in the teeth of catastrophe? That gave me the stirrings of a philosophical purpose and narrative line.
Now all I had to do is write the thing ... oh, and earn a living at the same time.
Ian Phillips is a freelance writer for businesses whose first novel, Grosse Fugue, will be published by Alliance Publishing Press on April 3rd. He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.
Hi Ian.
The story for my first novel has manifested from my childhood. It has never left me, and subsequently inspired me to write. If I have learned one important thing about attempting to write a novel, it is planning. I believe I am on the right track now, because I have researched the best authors. I used authors writing tips from the past and present. I could have saved myself a lot of time and enthusiastic effort, if I had adopted this approach much earlier. However, it was a good learning experience. I made so many mistakes, but in the process learnt so much. It may seem a strange analogy to make, but I believe my writing has benefited from making them.
Ian, how many hours of writing do you do in a week? Do you write proportionately more when you are not working?
When I am working I write for about thirty hours a week. Three hours each evening and for sixteen hours at weekends. I write every day when I am not working. However, I have noticed that I write better at weekends when I am not tired.
Yes, you summed up that "need to write...." brilliantly, only I've been writing pretty much all my life (well, from age eleven anyway...) but never had the nerve to be published. Now I've recently celebrated my 60th birthday (with a poem, of course) and am still writing and feel it's time to "see if my stuff is worth anything"........and I don't mean just for financial reasons...........