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On Writing, by Niamh Hargan

May 22, 2022 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Remember back in March and April 2020, when we were all in our houses, and people were making banana bread? Maybe lunging along with Joe Wicks, or downloading Duo Lingo? I didn’t do anything of note during that time.

And, by July, I was full of regret. If only I’d started back in March, I lamented, I probably could have written a novel already (I know – lols). But I hadn’t, and now the pandemic was basically over (double lols).

What, I suddenly wondered, if I just started today? What if I removed the requirement that my future novel be fundamentally different than all the other novels already out there?

Because, in fact, this preoccupation with uniqueness had been paralysing me for some time. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to write a novel, to the point that the ambition seemed, to me, a very standard one – along the lines of, say, wanting to own a home, or see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Unfortunately, though, I just couldn’t seem to come up with anything very original. All of my ideas – which tended to be basically about people, and their feelings – had already been done in some form or other.

As a result, I’d decided to wait for something to come to me. Some day, I’d imagined, a concept would arrive, singular and perfectly formed. Thereafter, it would mostly just be a question of writing the thing up. Easy. Or at least, not so terribly difficult.

For whatever reason, it took until that summer of 2020 for me to realise that many of the stories I myself enjoyed reading were not necessarily reinventing the wheel. Many times, they involved similar themes; sometimes even their endings were fairly obvious to me from the outset. But it was the expression of the ideas – the journey, if you will – that differentiated one from another.

Consequently, I decided to readjust the goalposts for myself. I would write a story. It would have a beginning, middle and an end. And it would be something I could imagine a reader – perhaps a woman like me – picking up and enjoying.

I enrolled in a 3-month, online novel-writing course, justifying the cost on the basis of all the money I’d surely saved by not socialising or travelling during covid. Having never studied writing, and having no connections to the publishing industry, I wanted to try and learn what I could, and the course seemed a wise investment. Moreover, I thought that the financial outlay would, of itself, be galvanising. I knew that unless I eventually had a novel to show for it, (or, at the very least, a novel-length amount of words) I’d be plagued by regret over my own foolishness.

After that, I just… wrote.

We were still deep in the cycle of lockdowns at this stage, and I was walking five miles a day, for lack of much else to do. Though I had never heard of it then, I have since learned the term “plot walk.” I found that when I walked, my mind wandered. It wandered, more and more, to Lizzy and Ciaran, the main characters in my novel. Problems untangled themselves, dialogue presented itself. On the best days, I felt more like I was listening than creating.

Of course, by definition, not all days are the best days. And it can be very hard to keep going with something without any external imperative to do so. I had tried to create some structure for myself, via the online course, and it worked – but only to an extent. There was still the voice in my head, whispering that it really didn’t matter if I wrote that 500 words tonight, or tomorrow night, or next month, or never.

On those occasions, I developed a number of strategies and deployed them randomly, depending on what felt right.

Some days, I imagined how good it would feel to complete the novel, and have my dream agent or publisher want it. I imagined writing the acknowledgements, or who would be cast in the film adaptation.

Other days saw a different approach. I wouldn’t say I have any nemeses, exactly, but I could imagine being very very irked, if certain people – people who, by the way, had never so much as expressed to me a vague interest in writing – somehow managed to write and publish a novel before me.

I sought constantly to keep the task in perspective. Writing a novel is a huge challenge, but, as I reminded myself practically daily, lots and lots of people do it. You don’t have to start young, or start rich, or possess a degree of talent that is entirely without equal. Rather, writing a novel – in the moments when it is not a joy – is just a hard thing. And we can all do hard things. If we didn’t know that before 2020, I’d guess most of us know it now.

In the end, I signed with my agent at Curtis Brown in March 2021. After some editorial work, my novel was placed on submission to publishers and I received the offer that I ended up accepting – from HarperFiction – in June 2021. While I have no means of comparison, I’m told that the whole thing happened relatively quickly. I’d love it if that encourages other new writers, in the midst of the daily doubt and the slog, to feel that sometimes it can all just work out. It really can. I promise.

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Born and raised in Derry, Niamh Hargan is currently based in Edinburgh. By day, she is a film and tv lawyer. She has no husband, no children, no dogs, and no cats.

Twitter: @EveWithAnN
Instagram: niamh_hargan_author

TWELVE DAYS IN MAY

They haven’t spoken for 12 years.
Can they fall in love in 12 days?