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\nSend in the fat lady<\/em><\/p>\n
\nExperimental Heart<\/a> took about three months to write and about three years to revise over a series of about twelve major drafts. I didn’t know very much about writing fiction when I started that novel, and I learned an awful lot on the way. As a result, the second one (whose title is currently under discussion) took only two months to write, but what came out was much closer to a finished product, meaning that I needed only about six months to revise it over three major drafts. During that process, in my waning months in the Netherlands, I started a third one with as much fire and inspiration as the previous two. By the time I reached England to kick off my new career in publishing, I was on page 122.<\/p>\n \nBut then something happened. Of course I was very distracted, not only by changing countries and careers but also by a major upheaval in my personal life. To make matters worse, my then agent decided she would stop trying to sell Experimental Heart<\/em> after (what I assumed was a mere) nine rejections, preferring to abandon it and focus on the second one. My opinion differed, so we parted ways soon afterwards. But the thought of producing novel after novel into the void, with no pipeline, was just too depressing to contemplate. So after tidying up the second novel, my activity more or less dribbled off.<\/p>\n \nOver the next four years, I eked out about 125 pages of Novel 3, all of it painfully. Most of my work was in fits and starts: when I was on sabbatical at the EMBL, for example, or over a few weekends when guilt drove me to at least try. But no sooner had refreshed my memory about what I had already written that the window of free time would be over. I no longer felt like a real novelist, and there were times when I seriously doubted I’d ever finish another book again.<\/p>\n \nEverything changed when I got a book deal. It was a wake-up call: I was a novelist, so I’d better start acting like one. The inertia, however, was still killing me. It wasn’t until I went on my writing holiday<\/a> that something finally re-clicked for me. Slowly at first, and then with increasing fluidity, I began to produce \u2013 by the end of it, at page 347, I was writing as prolifically as any of those dreamlike times in Amsterdam, when twelve hours would pass like twelve minutes. In short, I had got my mojo back.<\/p>\n \nSo what now? Lots of revisions on Novel 3, and the germ of an idea for a fourth. I am toying with the notion of writing about scientists from the point of view of a non-scientist character, which will offer an intriguing perspective on this singular profession that I so love poking and prodding from every possible angle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Sunday evening I typed the words ‘The End’ after 129,488 preceding ones, thereby completing my third lab lit novel \u2013 the tale of a new group leader whose collaboration with a pair of strange epidemiologists soon leads to more … Continue reading