#6 - A Novel in a Year

Weeks 21-24: two scenes, word counts, and insecurities

Me - when faced with my insecurities about writing. Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to the TBOI,

This is post six for ANIAY and I am within touching distance of being halfway through this project.

For new subscribers, this post is a little different to the other things that I share. Here, I break down the exercises that Louise Doughty sets in her book A Novel in a Year, and this post helps keep my accountable and acts as a place to log my progress.

Below is a link to last month’s digest, but if you have no interest whatsoever in following me with this exercises, I will not be offended! Also, these ANIAY posts come out on a Monday, so there will be an additional post on Wednesday about something completely different 😀

#5 - A Novel in a Year

The exercises for weeks 21 and 23 are located in a PDF at end of the post.

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Week 21

The chapter begins with a summary of some of the CV’s submitted to Doughty when she first set up the accompanying website for ANIAY. She notes how this task produced diverse results with some people sharing detailed biographies, or rather like me, a bullet-pointed list of key details. Doughty states that there was no right or wrong way to complete this task.

Writing was right. Not writing was wrong. I set the exercises with a certain methodology in mind that I believed in because it worked for me.

Doughty then sets an unusual request for you to write a paragraph about when your main character breaks their thumb.

Huh?

By doing this, she argues that you will discover things about your character you didn’t know, their vulnerabilities, their tolerance of pain and misfortune. Interesting…

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Week 22

This was one of my favourite chapters to read as Doughty addresses something that all writers live with – insecurity about their own work.

A lot of the doubts I experience are the voices that live in my head that say things like: This is rubbish! Why are you even bothering? This will never be published! And perhaps one of the weirder voices says: You don’t know about enough fancy words to be a writer.

And so on.

Doughty reminds us that all writers whether they are published or not live with these voices. It’s normal. And it’s so normal that the only way to counter the impact of those voices is to just on with the task of writing. Don’t let them put you off.

Doughty also uses an interesting analogy too where she thinks about writing as a bit like dieting:

A novel is written in increments, just as a weight-loss plan happens pound by pound. Every paragraph you write is a paragraph nearer to the end of your first draft. And, just like dieting, it is important to realise that there will always be times when it’s one step forward two steps back.

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Week 23

Doughty says that the aim of the thumb-breaking exercise was to reveal something about the character, whether this is how your character stubbornly refuses help, or details about the first person they turn to in their hour of need.

At the end of this chapter, Doughty asks you to write about another incident for your main character. In this one, they wake up in the middle of night. It could be from a nightmare, or something else:

What do they do? Stagger to the bathroom, check the time, or go straight to back to sleep? […] What I am thinking about is the sense of the ‘otherness’ of night-time, the way in which thoughts or truths that we don’t normally have during daylight hours can sometimes surface.

Strangely, for both week 21 and 23, I found myself drawn to writing scenes that took place in the kitchen. To me, kitchens play such an important role in a home and are active in our imaginations. Plus, they naturally lend themselves to the opportunities of obvious props for use in a scene e.g., a kettle, cooking, or even just a table.

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Week 24

I don’t feel that I have written a huge amount for the novel that swims around in my head. However, Doughty reassures you that “half of the battle is having something to write about”. Plus, she reminds us that nothing is wasted when it comes to the tasks already completed in the idea-generation stages, and sometimes you can reuse discarded material in a different piece of work.

Don’t be disheartened by a lack of coherence at this stage. You have to write a certain amount before you can step back and see the whole picture of the jigsaw. The main point at this stage is to build up a body of material to given shape to later on.

This makes a lot of sense to me. And the idea of nothing being wasted is a helpful reminder about writing generally. Certainly, when I think about what I publish here on Substack, much of the work takes place behind closed doors both in my head and in drafts - only a fraction of the writing that I put down on the page is actually published (or even publishable). Hundreds, if not thousands of words will never see the light of day. Thank goodness! But by pouring initially everything onto the page, it helps the brain sort through the ideas and make the necessary connections.

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And speaking about making connections, I have loved following

Maria Hanley

and her posts about writing a novel and writing more generally. Maria has inspired me to start logging my word count too for my book, so at the time of writing my novel has 4405 words.

Plus, I need a blackboard like Maria’s!

Halfway There

Take care,

Sarah

Here is a PDF with the exercises for week 21 and 23:

Weeks 21 And 23

33KB ∙ PDF file

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