Novel pursuits

Maggie O’Farrell imparts her hard-won wisdom on how to write your first book

What I wish someone had told me when I was starting out is this: you don’t have to begin at the beginning. Openings are hard. The blizzard-white emptiness of the page, the empty document with the patiently waiting cursor, the idea that you are about to inscribe the first of many thousands of words, the knowledge that you are embarking on a project that will take two or three years. All this can conspire to give you such awful vertigo that it’s hard to put down anything, let alone a defining initial sentence.

I have found, again and again, that it’s rarely always immediately apparent where in its timeline your narrative should start. It took me a while to work out that a writer doesn’t have to begin at the beginning. You can start wherever you like in the story. The most important thing is to plunge in – it doesn’t matter where. You can write the end, or the middle, or a few chapters in. Just put down words: get sentences on paper, form a scene, create a dialogue, set some of your imaginary friends arguing or singing or dog-walking.

What you write at this early stage will not, in all likelihood, make it to the final draft but there is great solace in word count, in having something to work with. You can’t redraft and rewrite and recraft an empty page, so pick up a pen or open a document and don’t look back. Don’t reread, don’t pick over what you did the day before, keep going until you have a morale-boosting number of pages. Put down what you need to say and worry about fixing it later.

Trust your material, have faith in your story: your aim, your structure, your resolution, and your beginning will make themselves known as you write. With three of four of my novels, I’ve stumbled across my opening line, lurking somewhere in the middle of a scene, several chapters in, just sitting there, waiting to be discovered.

The only other advice I can think of is to read and read and read some more. Read widely and omnivorously. Read books you love and those you don’t, and think carefully about what produces those reactions in you. If you come across a book that transports you or changes the way you think or shakes the foundations of your world, put it on a special shelf. Go back to this shelf when you hit a wall with your own work (because you will), and reread these books as a writer, not a reader. Analyse them, with pen and paper to hand. If there is something particular about a book you admire, work out why and how the writer did it. Take it apart as an engineer might an engine: examine and admire its workings. Then read it again, just because.

Enjoy yourself; learn to love the labour of writing, because it will show. I cannot overstate this. Your reader will feel the joy coming off the page, will sense it in the white spaces around your words.

Maggie O’Farrell was the 2020 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (www. womensprizeforfiction.co.uk) and is a supporter of Discoveries, the organisation’s talentdevelopment programme, which encourages and sponsors aspiring female writers at the beginning of their careers. Her latest book ‘Hamnet’ (£8.99, Tinder Press) is out in paperback now.