Finding an old friend

Last week I pressed ‘send’ on a manuscript I’ve been working on for about eighteen months. It went through two versions, basically the same story but with completely different protagonists, and I think – finally – it’s the best book I’ve written. (Mind you I always do think that.) I’m not going to lie: progress was lame and halt at times as I moved house, got married and became a stepmother in the course of its writing.  

My life has changed in so many ways that for the first day or so after I sent it to its fate I liked the feeling of having nothing to work on. I’d concentrate on living, fulfil all my workshop obligations, but forget about writing until after Christmas. Read more, especially memoir and personal essays as I’ve ambitions to write in that genre. Catch up with some of the new fiction that’s passed me by as life’s been so busy I’ve been reaching more for the kind of old friends I’ve often written about in these posts. Let writing go for now. I don’t know what I want to write and there’s no point in forcing it. Sometimes the best thing a writer can do is not write. 

 

And then. I was clearing out old files on my laptop when I found something I’d written years ago. About 12,000 words of a middle grade historical novel, a family/animal/mystery story. I must have written this about five years ago, I thought, until I saw the date – November 2014, and I remembered more clearly the circumstances in which I’d written it. I’d been pitching some ideas to a publisher who wanted to see the book partially written. In the end, like so many of these things, it didn’t go anywhere. I wasn’t, at the time, known for historical fiction, and the publisher didn’t feel they could make the book sell. 

 

So it has languished for seven years, and now, with three published and award-winning historical novels behind me, I settled down to read prepared to be critical. It would probably be crap, and then I could consign it to the bin quite happily. What did 2014 Sheena know about writing historical fiction?

 

Well, quite a lot, I think. I read the fragment in a sitting. I’d genuinely forgotten what happened and I read it as if it were written by someone else, someone who told a cracking tale and knew how to tick all my boxes – upland landscapes, dogs and ponies, difficult heroines and a good dose of post-war malaise. This old friend isn’t going into the bin. I’m going to finish it – I’ve lost the synopsis but I know what needs to happen.

 

Who was I kidding myself about not writing? My life has changed so much – and I love that it has – but that would be a change too far. I’ve opened a new notebook for jotting down ideas, I’ve printed out a new timetable for word count, etc and I’m writing again. And it’s exactly what I need to be doing. Sometimes the best thing a writer can do is write.