Writers, Don’t Hide the Bad Bits

Writing the book was awful, and that’s okay

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

The book was entirely accidental. I’d had a passing thought, so passing that it wasn’t even yet the sort of thing I would have bothered to scribble on a napkin or the back of an envelope.

But I voiced this embryonic idea out loud, in the presence of my literary agent, while we were idling in an office waiting for someone. That someone arrived, and I forgot what I’d said, but my agent didn’t. We emerged onto a busy London street afterwards, and she clutched my arm and said oh my god!! I looked around for the car crash, or the hot air balloon, or whatever else she might be talking about, but she was talking about my next project.

I didn’t want it to be my next project. I’d already decided to enrol in a six-month-novel programme and realise my childhood dream of being a fiction writer.

Actually, scratch that. As I child I fully claimed the current title of novelist, without considering it to be a ‘when I grow up’ situation. Let’s say instead that I wanted to fulfil my early promise, return to my original purpose, or at the very least get out into the world what I thought was a killer premise for a book and that I might be able to sell to Netflix afterwards.

My agent asked me to do the nonfiction proposal instead or at least also, to consolidate…