Nothing’s ever perfect, you just have to get on with it the best you can. That’s the best way I can sum up what I feel about my writing, sketching and I suppose my life as well. When I look back at my past writing and sketches, I don’t exactly cringe (well I do at some of my watercolours), but I think I would do it differently now, given what I know now.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I learn by doing, as perhaps we all do, and in that spirit I wrote an essay How to write a novel on a shoestring for the Writing Cooperative, not because I have mastered the act of writing a novel, but because I wanted to document what I know at this moment. If you have an interest in writing your own novel, or want to know how I went about writing my last one, Year of the Talking Dog, please check it out. It’s not embarrassing to me yet.
My first Hana Walker novel, Half Life, was an attempt to prove I could write a novel. Year of the Talking Dog was to test whether I could write a well-structured one, and the challenge for my next Hana Walker novel is whether I can weave in a convincing romantic sub-plot. I’ve finished planning the novel, and have written 5,000 words of the first draft this week. Will it be a perfect book? Of course not. But as long as it’s an improvement on what I could do before, it will be a success.
Patrick Sherriff 