A Way with Words
Wellington author Pip Adam describes how her new novel was fashioned with the support of another writer.
Pip Adam
Laurence Fearnley is a good friend and a writer whose work I admire greatly. Possibly sick of my complaining about how there was no way I could balance my paid work and writing, she suggested we write our books together. We would send each other 10,000 new words on the first Friday of every month. We would read each other’s work and give no feedback beyond “This is great”. So in a year, we’d have the first draft of a novel.
Although it took me a lot longer than 12 months, I’m certain I wouldn’t have completed The New Animals without this arrangement. The first draft of the book was written in 15-minute grabs, often while I ate breakfast. It takes me 15 minutes to write 500 words – not good words but words that move the story on so I can find out what it’s about, words that start to reveal the language the story needs to tell itself. I wouldn’t go to sleep without writing my 500 words for the day, because Laurence was waiting.
Some people are stronger than me: they can motivate themselves, they have faith in what they’re doing. But in the transition time from student writer to writer in real life, I needed to know that someone else was writing 500 words a day too. That someone was waiting for the next instalment in the same way I was waiting for the next instalment of her work.
As well as the external motivation of the deadline, working with someone was incredibly helpful. I learnt so much from reading Laurence’s work in progress. I’ve always used a process of reverse engineering, but to watch something grow taught me so much about how to let a book reveal itself in the writing. We would talk every few days about the corners we had written ourselves into. These conversations were also incredibly helpful.
To read another writer’s working mind as it’s creating is such a gift. Likewise, to challenge and clarify my story to another person was most rewarding.
The experience with Laurence also showed me how the noise of other commitments can help rather than shackle my work. I’ve always known this in an abstract sense. That I need to be in my communities, participating, to write about living. I gravitate towards being alone, so am grateful for the fullness of my life.
My first two books were written while I was studying, and work didn’t intrude as much as it did on this book. I thought the demands of full-time work would mean the end of my career as a writer; instead, what I discovered was that work was a way to bump me into things I wouldn’t otherwise seek out.
Of course, my work at the moment revolves around writing, but it isn’t always discussions of craft that answer or inspire. The New Animals is a novel set against the backdrop of New Zealand’s fashion industry.
Some of the women I teach wear uniforms and I felt an oddness in my “individualised” clothes whenever I was working with them. I read a lot of theory about what clothes mean, but feeling the strangeness of the clothes I put on every day helped the book greatly.
Pip Adam’s The New Animals (Victoria University Press, $30) is out now.
To watch something grow taught me so much about how to let a book reveal itself in the writing.