On January 29th, 2015, I jetted off to India for the seventh time in as many years.  My husband and I had left our rented apartment, packed our things into storage and were heading away for over five months.  I used those five months wisely.  I used them to write this book that has been floating around my head like a lost little fairy for the past seven years.  Something I thought I could never do, started to become something that I was in fact doing!  Day after day, a few more pages got done, the notebook began to fill up and suddenly one day it was full and I had to find a new one because hey, that story still had a long way to go.

People back home used to tell me I should write a book on the big adventure of heading off to India for the very first time and meeting my husband.  To which I used to grin and reply, “well funny you should say that…” because it had been the plan all along.  Right from leaving Ireland, before I ever knew of a joking, talkative Indian nicknamed Alex, I had already packed a diary to log in the whole experience of this thrilling, daunting expedition.

Writing is not easy.  It took a long time for me to find the necessary strength and resilience and pure determination to get started.  That and the freedom (inside and out) to allow my creative spark to ignite.  It took the funny combination of discipline and relaxed spaciousness to sit down every single day, take my pencil and notebook out and work.  And on those days when ideas and inspiration were absent, still I kept the pencil moving.

Now, two thirds of the way through the novel (a major achievement in this journey of mine) I see that there were three, hugely important factors that were necessary for me to get the book going:

1)  Hand-write the first draft.

By hand-writing the first draft I not only gave my eyes a break from staring constantly at a harsh computer screen, I also removed any possibility of allowing my perfectionist to get caught up in editing and redoing what I’d done, never making it past the first chapter.  Unlike the computer, the pencil and paper allowed for only minimal changes; however good or bad the material seemed to me, I just had to keep on going.

2)  No criticism/judgement/nit-picking of the work allowed!

Allowing the work to be as good or as bad as it was, was perhaps the most crucial part of the process for me.  My highly critical perfectionist recoils from anything that’s short of “utterly perfect” and given my first attempts never are, it can be very hard to create anything.  With the book, I had to reach a point in me where I decided it was more important to simply get the thing written – get some kind of story out there – than for it to be a brilliantly told piece of literature.  Allowing it to be completely shit, took away all the stifling pressure of the perfectionist!  He may not have been too happy some days (ok, most days), but that was his problem, not mine.  My job was simply to write the story.  Once there was a substantial body of work created, I then began to type it up and edit/delete/redo/polish/fiddle with what was there and these days the roughly scribbled first draft is looking sleek and shiny and good… real good!

3)  Make writing part of the daily routine.

Writing is like a muscle and if you don’t go to “writer’s gym” (i.e. your desk) it won’t develop.  You need to practice consistently, regularly, as often as possible – journalling, writing essays, making up poems, working on that book – every single day just write something – anything –  just do it!  It is THE KEY to the development and evolution of your art.  In order to get my book done, I made it my job to get to my “desk” practically every single day (my desk being a nice spot in my favourite coffee shop!) and spend at least an hour getting the work done, often though I spent a lot longer.  Of course, not everyone can afford to take a five month vacation to do this!  But most people can manage to find a slot in their day that they could devote to it; even just a half-hour of writing every day… Add that up over several months and that’s a well-defined, strong and powerful writer’s muscle you got right there.  Not to mention a ton of material to show for it.

This has been my journey so far with writing my book.  Writing a book is a colossal undertaking as the fruits of your labours are virtually non-existent for the first few months of hard slog, there is no team effort to buoy you up and motivate you in your efforts as you struggle on alone, some days filling the blank page in front of you is as daunting and overwhelming as the first five minutes of a 100km marathon and after all that, should you actually succeed in your valiant striving to complete the work, financial reward is never guaranteed.  

But I’m still going to write!  It’s too good a story to leave it untold, it may be read by millions or it may only be read by a handful of people, but if even just one person is entertained or touched in some way by my tale, then I can smile to myself and know that I’ve done my job well.  Because my job is simply to write and share my story with the world….