How Not To Write A Novel

... A Step By Step Guide To Failure, som jag såg här:

1. Give up your day job thus inducing a sense of drowning in a mass of unstructured time.

2. Don't write from the heart. Write from your little toe. Or from your elbow. Or from your bum.

3. Write 50, 000 words calling your protaganist "Marla". What a goddamn awful name! Go through the draft and change her name to "Roshni". Done it? Idiot - the first name was so much better. Change it back again!

4. Attempt to live in London on an income of £8,000-a-year in a nasty dive on Holloway Road, where you cannot sleep for the terrible traffic roaring through your brain.

5. Develop anxiety, insomnia, depression and crippling neurosis which impede you from doing pretty much anything at all.

6. Write about your traumatised childhood and become trapped in a prison of self-indulgent wallowing. Locate childhood diaries and type them up.

7. Check the word count every second or so and feel chuffed to bits when the word count reads 70, 000 even though you know deep down inside it's just your vomit-filled diary on the screen.

8. Finally, give half-baked draft to agent:

"Have you thought about doing this as autobiography instead?"

Damn you, agent! I am going to win the Booker Prize for Fiction. I just do not understand what's so autobiographical about it.

9. Dream about winning the Booker Prize for Fiction.

10. Bemoan the terrible injustice at being cheated out of the prize that was rightfully yours when John Banville wins the Booker - even though you weren't shortlisted. Or longlisted. Even though you have not written a novel.

11. Go to the Booker Prize party in the Groucho club and have the following conversation with Andrew Kidd, Picador publisher and Banville's editor:

Andrew Kidd asks the Dreaded Question: "So, how's your book coming along?"

You: "Oh the protagonist is now called 'Tania' as it's an anagram of 'Anita' and she's me... yet not me."

Pause in conversation.

Me: "Is that a little cheesy?"

Kidd nods vigorously and smiles sadly.

Interpret this as a prelude to an imminent offer of a ten figure advance.

12. Feel crippled with embarrassment to have submitted your vomit-filled diaries as a novel. Be unable to look at manuscript for a few months.

13. Install broadband on your computer and become addicted to your emails.

14. Watch some music videos, nay, watch every single music video in Yahoo!'s online music library (approximately 5000).

15. You've been working so hard! You know what they say about all work and no play. Better go and play for a while to restore your worn-out genius.

16. Resume work on "novel". Remember that Andrew Kidd said your protagonist's name was cheesy. Spend a week changing her name from Tania to Roshni.

17. This also means changing the names of the subsidiary characters too, as the names have a complex web of interrelated meanings and if one cog of the machine moves, why, they all have to...

18. Go for a little walk to clear your head. Keep walking...

19. Eat. Eat some more.

20. Make a cup of tea

21. And another one.

22. And another one.

23. Tear back the covers of your bed. Lie down. How very soft these pillows are! Stay in bed just a little bit longer.

24. Decide that you do not much care a damn what people think of you. Even if they are John Banville's editor. Change the name from Roshni to Tania.

25. Start things. Lots of things. Do not complete anything. Let alone a chapter.

26. Ensure that at least 30% of your novel is about, erm, Take That.

27. A thought sneaks into your brain that you might perhaps be more inclined towards non-fiction...?

28. Bury the thought deep within your psyche and continue to live a life of self-delusion... of fiction.

29. Ignore the exigencies of real life until they slap you in the face. Check your bank balance and feel sick at the red light flashing in front of your eyes.

30. Change the protagonist's name from Roshni to Tania to Anita to Tania to Roshni.

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