A WORK IN PROGRESS - OR THE NEVERENDING STORY

Today, whilst tidying my study, I came across a file containing some of my notes for my book The Sum of all Parts. I say some because, unfortunately, last year in a fit of rare spring-cleaning, I made the rash decision to throw out the bulk of my notes – ideas that never made the cut, first drafts. A foolish move that I have regretted ever since. It was fun to leaf through what remained though, to remind me of the process I went through in order to achieve a publishable book.

The idea for The Sum of all Parts was knocking around inside my head in various shapes and forms for some time before I found the version I liked and decided to commit it to paper. I jotted down various ideas in notepads and on scraps of paper, with inspiration and ideas coming at the most inopportune moments – in the queue at supermarkets, the middle of the night for example. Only last week you would have found me sitting in the dark so as not to wake anyone, writing down what I perceived as a genius idea for my work in progress. On waking, the notes were all but indecipherable and I had scrawled them on my youngest daughter’s cytology notes for university. Whoops. Often my ideas for the book came whilst I was at work, teaching pre school, then I would have to bury the idea and hope that it would resurface later. I would often be found on my break in the staff room scribbling away before the elusive thought disappeared. Once, inspiration hit whilst walking home from town, then I jotted down the idea on the backs of receipts whilst sitting on someone’s garden wall. The ideas rarely come whilst seated at my desk! Take this blog – I ‘wrote’ it this morning whilst participating in my weekly combat (namely putting the duvet in a fresh cover – torture) and had to wait over six hours before getting a chance to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard. Like I said, the ideas never come at the right time.
When I wrote The Sum of all Parts I did so mainly by hand. I researched of course – books, life, the internet – and on a side note you would not have wanted to see my search history at this time. Who knew that there are so many appalling sites encouraging and goading people into acts of self harm and suicide? I surely didn’t. So I wrote, by hand, five or six drafts in various note books before transferring it to the computer for its final polishing. When ‘polishing’ I always read the text out loud, it makes me focus more and it allows me to feel the flow of the book. Sore-throat aside, the process works for me although it does peeve certain family members! The polishing took a while, but I finally was almost completely happy and I sent The Sum of all Parts off into the big wide world.
Fast forward to today and I am working on a new book. The idea for my work in progress came some ten years ago but it took until last year to really know in what direction I wanted to take it. I’m working on it in much the same way as I did The Sum of all Parts: research, background reading, note taking. With the note taking I’m trying to be more organised, I have separate notebooks for different aspects and ideas for example. It hasn’t worked. I am still disorganised, I have muddled up the notebooks – putting the wrong notes in the wrong books. Sometimes I can’t even find the notebooks. I am still making notes on scraps of paper, most of which I misplace and so I decided to utilise technology – when inspiration hits at inconvenient moments, make a voice note on my phone! Genius. I did this once and never again. Why? Because I made the recording (in a car park in Dingle in case you’re interested) in earshot of my teenage daughter, who laughed so much I have decided to stick to pen and paper. So notes are made the traditional way but this time, only the first draft has been handwritten – didn’t seem fair on the trees or my hand to do it any other way. So my work in progress is only partially scattered amidst notepads and scraps of paper, the bulk of it is captured on a USB stick.
I still have a lot of work to do on my latest book, a lot of rewriting and polishing. With The Sum of all Parts, it is done. Finished. No more to write about those six female narrators. Not at present anyway. But I still think about what I wrote in The Sum of all Parts, still wish I’d have explored a particular aspect more thoroughly, omitted this, added that. I wrote the book, but I’m not sure what happens to the main character, I shall leave her future up to each individual reader, but I do know this: there is no such thing as an ending, either in fiction or reality. Endings are just the start of a new beginning. You can read a book to its conclusion, but that isn’t the end. The book may be closed but the story always continues.

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