Breakthrough No. 1

Finally, a story that stays with me all day! A character, I should say. Someone I keep turning over in my mind, looking for a way in. Beginnings rush to be jotted down. Phrases interrupt my train of thought at work, that capture my character at a perfect angle.

He is a he. I am a she. I've had difficulty with this before. I gravitate towards male characters, only to subconsciously give them a female perspective on the world. This one will be different though.

He is everything I want to be. A confident person who is fascinated with the people around him, who is completely comfortable on the outside looking in, and who sees success as something that is not worth losing sleep over.

I suppose the next step is to put him in a sticky situation. I need to move the storyline beyond the location and context. It's as though I have a photograph of him, a still shot of him in the pub at the end of a bad day.

What next?

Call it procrastination, call it rekindling the flame, but I have not read so avidly in a long time. Nothing exotic, but some real page turners that I have been meaning to catch up on. Perfume, The Three Musketeers, The Alchemist.

I tend to get restless with endings. Atwood is the worst for writing books that make me wish I'd put the book down a couple of chapters early, but Coelho and Suskind have left me asking only enough questions to keep their novels with me long after the pages have run out. Well crafted story twists that endow the main characters with a three dimensional glow. Even Grenouille's post-orgy suicide was detailed in such a way that I felt a fascinated sympathy for the sociopath.

Of course, this need for a good ending places enormous pressure on myself as a writer. I don't think I will attempt the clever plot twist for a while yet - I will have to work with the poignant observation, such as that of My Brilliant Career or Crime and Punishment.

I have been procrastinating from writing this my novel since I graduated from university more than twelve months ago. Enough is enough.

Somebody recently pointed out to me that I am as passionate about my friends - spending time with them, looking after them, sharing their stories - as I am about my writing, and that I need to be more disciplined about putting time aside for writing in the same way I do for my friends. And even though I had heard the same message many times before, phrased in many different ways, it finally sank in. I have found time. I am writing again.

I had written the first three chapters at university, so the first thing I did was dig those out from a cupboard at dad's house where I had shoved it during a frantic post-university house move. On the train on the way home from dad's place my sister pored over the chapters and started giggling. When I asked what was funny she started reading my opening page with an American accent and then imitated the Days of Our Lives intro. I snatched the pages from her and read them myself and realised she had a point. I had inadvertently written an ode to meledrama that was in every opposite to the achievements of all my favourite authors.

My university novel was crap. Even now, as I begin the re-writing process, I find that I can only use a sentence or a phrase from it at a time. Sometimes only the concept behind a piece.

So I am beginning at the beginning. Is this my second draft, or my new first draft?