Thoughts While Starting My Novel During The Pandemic
I started writing my novel on April 3, and have now written 15,044 words. Not exactly the type of milestone you celebrate over, but I haven’t written something this long since 2 years ago for my Creative Writing dissertation. Friends would give me potential short story competitions to submit to, and I would hype myself up over them, because I felt that it was important to improve my publishing record, that it would be good to have credentials. But I struggled with time and ideas — I was busy with work, and the commute tired me out. At one point I was juggling my full-time job with a part-time teaching one, as well as applying for another postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge and scholarships.
The writing didn’t start, but I had an idea that kept prodding me, which came about during a workshop session during my Master’s degree in 2016. When I told a good friend of mine about the idea — at the the time I thought about turning into a novella — she asked me if it was really something I cared about. At the time, it wasn’t, but I couldn’t let go of the story. I knew I had to figure out how to make myself care — because if I don’t, my readers wouldn’t either.
I also hesitated on starting a novel because committing to one is scary and requires a lot of time — which I don’t really have. Writing a novel requires extensive planning and research — so much of it. I had written a novella for my dissertation, and even that had taken a lot of physical and emotional energy. And so I daydreamed while being stuck in traffic about characters I still have yet to write; I watched friends write and get published; I read good books and wished I wrote them; I passed by shelves in bookshops trying to imagine where my book would be (a tip I got from Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel). I stopped feeling bad about not writing anything after I read Medium’s Day Job series, an interview with writers who’ve had to juggle full time work to write.
My last day at my previous work was end of March, just as Malaysia was going on a nationwide Control Movement Order because of COVID-19. I had a three-week ‘break’ before I started my new job. After spending so much time on academic applications last year, I knew I wanted to focus on writing a novel this time around. I told myself not to be afraid of research and to bite the bullet: I downloaded and read all the resources I needed to figure out my story. I put my note-taking apps to good use to organise all my information.
During this time, I re-discovered outlining, a process I never really enjoyed before, mostly because my previous works were short stories. Outlining saves me a lot of time as I’m drafting, and keeps me grounded in my ideas (while also allowing me to be flexible). Thinking about it, maybe I enjoyed outlining because it gave me control over what I could do, versus everything else going on in the world that I’m not able to.
Of course, there were moments when I hated what I wrote — everything sounded clunky, and even after I sent the story to my beta readers, I still feel dissatisfied. Maybe all writing are just drafts forever? (I hope not)
The thing with writing, though, is that there’s no short cuts (I wish there was!). You can’t know if something works or not if you don’t put it on paper and step back to read it. That’s the cold, hard fact about writing a story: in your head, you’re probably thinking it’s great, but you’ll only know the truth once you write it out yourself. Another thing I realised was that I needed a story that I wanted to write and a protagonist I cared about. I’m still considered on draft 1 and I’ve switched up my protagonist multiple times, even changing her name because it didn’t gel with the rest of the storyline. Even now, I’m still thinking about removing another character of mine.
Writing while a pandemic is ravaging and the world basically a hellscape isn’t easy. In fact, I don’t think anyone needs to do it. I’ve kept track of my progress and there were times when I would just not write anymore — I was starting a new job, I couldn’t focus while fasting, I was just tired of the world. If you expected this little reflection to be about how I overcame it, I have no solution. But on day 15 of not writing, I switched off Animal Crossing (where I’ve redone my island multiple times — there’s an analogy here for sure) and returned to my WIP. The draft was going to be shit, but I was going to write anyway. This story matters. The characters are a part of me and saying no to them would be denying what I want — when I haven’t even started yet.
(That, and I happen to have friends who nag. I mean this in the best way possible!)
In the midst of uncertainties, as plans fall apart and you slowly feel like you’re losing yourself, saying yes to a story, and telling it because it is important to you— it’s a way to preserve myself. And maybe one day, when I’m ready to let these words out into an unpredictable world, I’ll get to share it.
What will become of the story? We’ll find out, because I’ll start writing again, and with a better chair this time for my back.
