Novel Day -148 (9,670 words)

Because I went away from everything and everyone else to the other side of city to write, I produced 1,270 words today. In the past twenty days I have been writing in parks, pubs, cafés, libraries, bookshops, on trams, the street and who remembers where else. In the past I wouldn't have believed that writing could become top priority to me as it is now. I can hardly believe it even as I'm doing it.

But word count doesn't even begin to get to the meat of the story. The extremely low hit-to-miss ratio as you plough away with the pen in longhand, the little pleasure it derives when you do come across something remotely valuable, the ranges of emotional endpoints you have to reach and the prospect of myriad facts to get right in later drafts - all stack up to form a colossal task that's seemingly insurmountable. All the while you're hardly allowed any break, even as you're under constant suspicion that you're drawing from a very dry well. Because a man doesn't know how little he knows or is able to put into words until he starts writing a book. It asks a lot of you and doesn't shy away from asking more each day.

Then you realize that while all this is true, the only reason why you can't stop is that you're addicted.

Today I wrote a scene that for the first time rush powerful emotions to the surface. It was so strong I had to break from the writing to look about me to make sure no one caught me tripping. And strangely it's not a scene where I would expect such an outcome. The scene eluded my arbitration as the characters started interacting with each other, and as a result "came alive" and surprised me... More! More! More of the same!