My year in writing (2021)

This was staged! My desk is never that tidy :)

2021 has been a strangely shaped year. It was our second pandemic year, the year when living through all of this became somewhat normal. When I look back on the life I had in December 2020, I’m struck by how much has changed. It hasn’t been an easy year, but I am very grateful for the fresh joy that has arrived in my life over the last 12 months. Before the calendar flips over to another year, I wanted to take some time to reflect on my writing year.

My novel

When the year began, I was deeply immersed in my novel. My work on it began, like the pandemic, in March 2020. Back then, I was trying to give some shape to the kind of writing I wanted to do. Looking at all my false starts and incomplete drafts, I began to see an outline of some potential scenes. I transferred those ideas to a string of post it notes which I hung in a rough timeline on my wall. When I stepped back, I could see a sketch of the story I wanted to tell. During the dark lonely days of lockdown, I got up early every morning with a goal of writing 2000 words by hand on a cheap A4 pad. When I got tired creating, I transcribed those reams of loose leaf sheets into a Scrivener* document. By late November 2020, I finished my first draft. 

I was thrilled. I am still thrilled. Finishing my first book was a momentous achievement. But more than that, writing that book changed me. By the time it was done, I had become the person who’d written a novel. A messy, imperfect, often incoherent novel, but a novel. I’m sure that some of my metamorphosis is rooted in the book’s subject matter. Though it is fictional, the book draws heavily on my life in my 20s. Embodying the protagonist’s life and writing her through the horrific experiences that shaped her identity changed how I carry my own pain and trauma. 
I am a different person having written that book than I was before it. Even if the book is never published, that is a tremendous gift. 

I began the year with a very messy first draft. By the end of January 2021, I finished my second draft. It is still a deeply flawed manuscript that no-one but me has read, but it exists. Soon after draft 2 was done, I had surgery. What I was told would be a 2 week recovery period swelled into months. I journalled everyday, but I didn't have the strength to do the work of writing - crafting sentences, transcribing drafts and studying other people's work. By the time I felt strong enough to immerse myself in work again, summer was close to arriving. 

Writing classes

This year, I have been seeking out opportunities for community and to learn from writers I admire. I’ve tried a bunch of different classes and groups throughout the year. Some have been great, others less so.

For one class, I wrote an essay I thought was good. It’s about faith, Catholicism, trauma and how Ireland still hasn’t managed to shake off its religious baggage. I wrote many drafts, asked for feedback from fellow writers (some of whom were generous enough to offer their comments more than once!) and got it ready to pitch. Then, it got rejected. Several times. The first time, it stung a little. But it did get easier.  I still haven’t found a home for that essay, but I haven’t given up. I know that many publications get 10 times the number of submissions as they have space to publish. When I looked at the writers who were selected for publication, many had already published books and won awards. They are more established as writers than I am. But still, it was hard to pour so much work into a piece that hasn’t yet found its audience. I’ll try again in the new year.  

In June, I signed up for Jami Attenberg’s 1000 words a day challenge. I joined a group of writers based in GMT and every day, we checked in with each other to cheer and commiserate as we worked on our individual projects. For me, I rarely have trouble getting words on the page but I do often find myself lonely in my work. It is such a solitary profession (which I mostly love) but I have made a point of trying to find writing communities and pals to make the road a little less lonely. A work in progress!

Book 2

I wanted to give the novel some time to ‘rest’ before I revised it again. I wanted it to feel ‘familiar but not mine’ by the time I returned to it. So, I started work on Book 2. I know most people would probably say that you should finish one book before starting another, which makes sense, but I wanted to start another book..so I did! 

On a stuffy January morning, I sketched an outline of a nonfiction book about sexual violence. I didn’t plan to; it grew out of my morning pages as so many good ideas do. There were things I wanted to say, things I thought it was important people knew, things which, for many reasons, I couldn’t share. But keeping quiet also didn’t feel right. So, I asked myself, what if I wrote within the confines of what I could legally say right now? From that hand drawn sketch, I built another Scrivener file (titled Book 2). I began the laborious task of sorting through many, many years of writing and tidying it into the new structure I’d created.  This ‘sorting’ phase necessitated reading several years worth of writing on difficult topics which was both clarifying and gruelling. 

At some point, I realised that staring at my computer screen was really hurting my eyes and making the whole thing even more exhausting. I looked for a tech solution. I bought one of these, which felt very extravagant during a lean year but has been a game changer for all of my work. (Hat tip to Tressie who spoke about the importance of upgrading your tools on instagram. I 100% used that to justify my purchase.) 

(An aside: someday I might write about my elaborate filing system for managing the thousands of words I write every month. It is convoluted and maybe boring, but figuring out a system that fit the shape of my brain was essential for my work.)

Somewhere along the way, my mental health stumbled. I had been looking forward to summer 2021 for so long and when it finally arrived, I found it very hard to navigate. I didn’t so much as pause my writing as I found myself unable to do it anymore. It took me a long time to realise I was having a hard time and when I did, I struggled to give myself a real break. But eventually I did. I had worked at a dogged pace without a break for more than 12 months. At some point, my body was going to need to rest. 

While I love the work, much of it deals with very heavy themes (grief, trauma, sexual violence). One of the things I’m proudest of this year is that I have learned a lot about how to manage my writing about trauma. I’m planning to write an essay about it at some stage. 

Autumn

By late Autumn, I was feeling a little better. I launched this website, a small step into sharing work with readers after several years of dormancy. For the last year, I’ve been writing (but not publishing) newsletters as a regular writing practice. I wanted the exercise of writing while thinking about readers who inhabit the outside world. It was a useful exercise which balances what sometimes feels like circling my own internal space. And I don’t like having to rely on someone else saying ‘yes’ to my work before I get to share it.  My readership is small, but you’re all very precious to me. (As those of you who’ve written to me privately know, I send gushing responses back!)

The best thing I did for my writing this year was to schedule ‘free writes’. I give myself a theme or a topic and a chunk of time and just write. From there, I find what I think and what I want to say. I still think back on a few of those ‘free writes’ as the purest experiences of joy I experienced this year. 

The second best thing I did for my writing this year was to prioritise being a good boss to myself. When I manage people, I always try to be kind and fair. It has been much harder to try to be kind and fair to myself but I am working on it. One thing that surprised me was that even during a shitty month, I could still look back and find a few good writing days. Knowing that has (sometimes) helped me give myself a break!

Looking back, I’m as happy with the things I didn’t do as I am with what I did. Mostly, that relates to giving myself more time to develop work before sharing it. It’s easy to look back and see all the deadlines I missed and the potential opportunities that passed me by, but it’s tricker to hold on to the fact that I did about as much as I was able to do this year. 

What I love is the deep, solitary work of meeting yourself and your characters on the page and shaping the world you create. Most years of a writer's life are spent in relative isolation, away from the attention of publishing. I would love to publish these books. I would love for my work to find an audience and to be able to do it full-time. But more than that, I love the creative space I have carved in my life to do work that matters to me. Even if no-one ever reads it, that has been deeply worthwhile for me. 

Thank you for reading.