It wouldn’t be New
Year without some new project to kick-start the year. I have been
half-heartedly blogging about gardening on and off for a couple of years, until
really this spring I realised that gardening was just something I wanted to do,
not necessarily something I wanted to write about. I have lots of pretty
pictures to show for my gardening efforts and no doubt I’ll post lots more here
throughout the year, for no other reason than they look nice.
So I shied away from
the idea of starting up my garden blog again as I knew I’d be doing it just for
the sake of something to write, to keep my pen moving and the ink flowing - avoiding
clots. But without enthusiasm behind it, the whole process would be doomed to
failure.
Better to start
something completely afresh, something else to chip away at for the next
decade.
I’m going to write a
novel. I have written one before. Three, actually. Only two of them were
completely awful. One is okay, in fact. But all three of them were written kind
of like experiments – could I force myself to sit down and just write a novel? Could
I just make it happen?
It turned out I could,
but without the painstaking thought and attention to detail and planning and
revision that you associate with the craft of novel writing. Really, those
three novels were an exercise in discipline. And it was a surprise to me that I
could muster the discipline from somewhere to get the job done. My next novel
then, I want to be about more than discipline. It needs to be more than just an
endurance test.
So I’m committing most
of this year to exploring what it is I really want to write and how I want to
write it. It may be an naïve, English-teacherish approach, but I’m going to do
this by re-reading my favourite ten books of all time. I’ll re-read one each
month for the next ten months and then see where I’m at. I’m hoping I’ll
discover, and blog about here, what it is I really admire in writing, what
themes and ideas really grab me. By the end of the year, I hope to be ready
with a novel idea of my own that I can spend 2011 writing.
Now, even though it’s
January 1st and a few hours ago I said I was done with drinking, I’m
hankering after a glass of wine.
