Monday 16th January

I am full of trepidation, nerves and qualms.  I have been invited to join a writing group by Rosie Furber, who I met at a party over Christmas.  She is an established writer, well, I presume she makes some sort of a living from it, and has published books for children as well as an adult novel and several books of poetry.  I have actually met her a few times now, and she has read my book, and said some kind things about it.  She gave me a book of her poetry where each poem consists of just seventeen words, quite clever and I have dipped in and read a few.  More snippets of wisdom and reflection then actual poems, but the discipline of having to write concisely is a good one.  One of my constant self-criticisms is the amount of verbiage I write; I seem to pad things out unnecessarily.

I have actually started the new venture, and very different it is too from Catherines Story.  I have decided to approach this a bit differently from my earlier writing, and not edit as I go along.  I am going to take Haruki Mirukami’s advice; well the way he describes the writing of one of his characters Tengo in !Q84.  Write a whole section, then go through and edit ruthlessly, paring back any and all unnecessary bits.  Then rewrite a third time, slowly looking at each sentence and maybe adding back here and there to make the story a bit more readable.

In other words, just write as it comes out the first time, and don’t worry about the mistakes.  But thoroughly edit at least once and then re-write again as a whole.

We’ll see, but my first problem is just getting over the threshold of this new group.  I really do not know what to expect, I just have to assume that there will be some there better than I, and some worse.  I am hoping to get a bit of encouragement; and maybe some advice on writing in general.  One part of me is looking forward to it, but the other Catherine is sh.. scared, I am afraid. I will take along my book, but keep it in my bag unless others start boasting about what they have written; at least I managed to get the thing published.  As Rosie says when she tells people she is a writer, a lot of them say that they have always wanted to write a novel, as if that qualifies them in some way.  Well, at least I have actually got the damn thing published, whereas they haven’t even written theirs down yet.