In 2021, I thought a lot about the joy of writing terrible novels

Published on 3 December 2021

As an editor, I spend most of my working day doing the equivalent of a Marie Kondo cleanse on people’s work. Big words get swapped for smaller ones. Long sentences get sliced and reassembled into short, machine-translation friendly snippets. People who have mined the deepest seams of their vocabulary to write drafts with the verbosity of Brideshead Revisited are dismayed when I edit their copy so that, from a readability standpoint, it sits closer to Spot the Dog Goes to the Zoo.

What they don’t know is my shameful secret: out of hours, I am my own worst nightmare.

Creative writing has always been my passion. At times, the novel I’ve been working on has been a mental lighthouse, helping me to steer myself on even when other parts of life felt like they were slithering out of my control. However, it’s fair to say that the transaction between myself and the world of fiction writing is an imbalanced one: I’ve come to realise that I am a terrible novelist. Really, triumphantly bad. 

When the working day is done, like a fireman getting off their shift to indulge in a bit of arson, I go away and I overwrite things to hell and back. If my sentences were steaks, they would be served cremated, holding up a white surrender flag. All of the words that I gather up in my working day get stored up and vomited into my drafts. I might tell you that x-number of words is the absolute limit I’m willing to concede for a sentence length. Off the clock, you’ll be lucky to find a bit of punctuation I’ve not abused as I push the reader’s cognitive load to the limits and beyond.

I am very lazy. Once a dynamic is set up, I will plunge ahead and crash through the questionable plotlines it spawns, tearing ahead like a hiker who insists on ploughing through a thicket of brambles rather than stepping back and re-navigating the map. Killing your darlings is tiring and thinking up descriptions is hard. So, I tend to leave them in.

For professional writers, work is increasingly ripe for calibration. Documents can be scored by software for quality metrics. Algorithms can spit out scores for readability, engagingness can be rated, and machine translation tools can feed back on how well your text slots into a new language. Jump into any creative writing forum, and inevitably you’ll bump into a discussion on the latest tools available for digital editing.

For a while, I fell into the trap of languishing in these digital pools, slowing down my pace in the name of appeasing the number-crunching software. I was a newbie to fiction, and I wanted to do the best job I could. Time ticked on and months blurred into years. The plot threads I came up with in the beginning have stretched and cracked and reformed into double helices, and the novel is a hulking mutant compared to where it started.

The thing is, it’s never stopped being fun. As the distance between my starting ambition to one day be published and the point I’m at now has grown, I’ve come to realise that it was never really about holding that glossy hardback with my name etched on it. It was about the release; finding a space to let go and be reckless with zero consequences.

One of the best bits of advice I’ve found for novel writing is that you should approach it with the mentality of a TV talent show contestant. Perhaps you’re the most deluded pub singer in the West Midlands. Perhaps you’ll make the judges cry and narrowly miss the number one spot, thanks to the nation’s favourite sausage roll-themed tribute band. You’ll never know if you don’t try. And, even if it doesn’t pan out, nothing can take away the excitement you’ll feel getting up on stage and letting your voice rip.  

Reframing my approach to my writing as the equivalent of karaoke has been spectacular. While I used to be bound up in neuroses, I now sit down in coffee shops and attack my draft with the fervour that the recently dumped, many glasses of prosecco down, will tackle Let it go.

I wrote this essay in a coffee shop, just after I finished writing and submitting my latest chapter to my proofreading group. I met them on the novel-writing course that I took a couple of years ago. Our books are thematically diverse, but our determination to get to some sort of an end, one day, is uniform. Until then, we’ll be there to applaud each other’s efforts, with all of the enthusiasm we’d have if one of us was murdering the high bit in Bohemian Rhapsody.

My book ranges from the end of World War 2 to the Cold War, and features spies, dinosaurs, and in one bit that I probably won’t get round to editing out, a psychic donkey. You’ll never get to read it, it’s awful. But, it’s mine, and it’s brought me pleasure no software can quantify.