WRITING A NOVEL. LIFE. WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

The novel I'm writing has taken over my entire life. I wake up thinking about it. Every day I change it just a bit. If I’ve had a good day working on it I go to bed happy. If I neglect it for more than a few days I feel bad.

Sometimes I think my novel is going to brilliant. I’m so proud and excited, I’m on fire, everything clicks into place, it just flows out of me! Fifty thousand, sixty thousand, seventy thousand words. Who would have thought I could do that?

But on other days I’m not so sure. I wake up in a fog. Who cares about my novel? It’s pointless. It’s not life, it’s fiction. What on earth am I doing? Shouldn’t I be making something useful, like enough money, or scrubs for the NHS?

The difference is my novel is not my life. I can go back and edit it, make changes, alter the chain of events. I’m at that stage now of revising, tweaking, revising, revising. I can’t go back and edit my own life. I can’t be kinder than I was, better than I was. Make more money. Save the world. Perhaps it’s just as well. They tell us when editing a novel to ‘murder our darlings’. Not something to do in life.

I found this quote on the wall of an exhibition at the V&A, attributed to CS Lewis. ‘You can’t go back and change the beginning. But you can start where you are and change the ending.’ In my novel I have gone back and changed the beginning. I haven’t quite got to the ending, but I will soon. I think I only have a few more chapters to write. Two, or maybe three. I’m so looking forward to THE END.

That is definitely true of my novel. Not of my life.