The After Novel Feeling - Nuala Ni Chonchuir

I bought a gorgeous little book at the LA Times Festival of Books called You Know You’re a Writer When... by Adair Lara. It’s blue – and I’m a bit of a bowerbird around blue things – it is beautifully designed and conveniently handbag sized. There are lots of pithy and amusing quotes in the book, but this one fits with what I want to talk about today: ‘You know you’re a writer when writing is the only thing you do that doesn’t make you feel as if you should be doing something else.’

For me, when the writing is going well, it makes me crazily happy; I get swallowed up in it and time flitters away like it never does when I am on kid duty. Having finished writing another novel this summer, I now realise that the long haul of novel writing suits me perfectly. I get to immerse myself in the world of the story and let the thing consume me; even when I am not sitting at my desk, I am mulling over the work. So happiness and lack of distraction and, even, giddiness get sustained over the course of about a year. Twelve months of feeling content – how could you beat it?

I’m a pretty organised and neat person. I love clutter but my clutter tends to be arranged: vases in threes, books on their shelves, pictures aligned. I am prompt with bill paying and I am always on time. But, in one place in my life, I can let loose, relax and go with the flow and that is in writing. This fact, when it dawned on me, surprised and delighted me. Look, I’m not a control freak! I can live happily in a land where plot is loose; where characters go off on tangents that turn out to be the right (or wrong) way to go; I can live where chaos reigns and love it too.

Of course after all this joy and unhinged flow comes the inevitable crash. The novel has to end sometime and with that comes the blues. I finished my novel in the beautiful surroundings of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan. I went there specifically to finish it and was pleased that I did. But, when I came home, I sank: I felt grumpy, crabby, empty and ill at ease. I was missing my characters and their lives; I was missing the glued-to-the-deskness that writing a novel involves. I started to wonder if the novel was any good or had I been fooling myself for a year? After all, I had done that before...two bottom-of-the-drawer books attest to that.

I searched for comfort and found it in the words of writers I admire. In an Irish Times article on what it is like to finish a novel, Roddy Doyle talked about the doubt: ‘When a book is finished it’s finished, complete – reared. There’s an exhilarating couple of seconds, followed by the terror: other people – professionals – are now going to read it. They’re going to laugh where they shouldn’t, and yawn where they should laugh.’ Yes, yes, I’ve felt it too, Roddy.

Anne Enright, one of my literary heroines, spoke about apprehension: ‘You have to write through a great sense of loss, or impending loss, towards the end of a book, but there is also a gathering inevitability that makes ending it inescapable. I am never happy with a finished book, but I know that it is finished more or less...When you have changed all the semi-colons to dashes and back again, the thing is done. But it is never right.’

And, finally John Banville: ‘At the end of a novel I stand up from my desk with the sensation, queasy, fearful, giddy, that I have just leapt from a high place. The knowledge that one has failed, yet again, is inescapable, and all I can think of are the weak spots, the soggy bits, where invention ran out or my nerve failed or I just got fed up and said, “Oh, hell, leave it”. And what shall I do tomorrow? Start again, of course.’

So thank you, dear vastly experienced writers, for making me feel less ‘out there’ because I am a little bereft. I am writing stories now for my next collection, but I am also fanning the spark for a new novel. I just have to be sure that I want to write it and that the book will send me happily hurtling into the year-long chaos that I crave.

(c) Nuala Ní Chonchúir, August 2011

Nuala has contributed some excellent articles for writing.ie with more to come in the future. 

Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleve 
Beautiful Words