(#7) Before I Begin Part 1: Feeling sick about writing - is it anxiety? Nerves? Or, excitement?
Introducing a special 3-part summer/winter series, on prepping to begin writing a new novel
Dear reader, hello. Welcome to The Joy Rise.
As we go into our strongest seasons in each hemisphere - summer and winter - I thought to write and share a special three-part series with you over the coming months in my This Writer’s Life segment, on three of the main ways I’m prepping to start the writing phase of my new novel in the new year.
While this little series is about novel-writing, my hope is it might resonate with your creative process too, for whatever you love to make. As ever, please take what sparks and leave what doesn’t.
This issue - Before I Begin: Part One - starts with NERVES, EXCITEMENT, ANXIETY.
Part Two explores RITUALS.
Part Three explores BELONGING.
I hope that each essay can accompany your imagination like a friend with whatever you need through the season and stoke the ideas simmering / boiling in your creative heart.
In this issue, you’ll also find The Joy Rise DOG OF THE MONTH - she’s so glorious!
And ON MY CORKBOARD, where I’m finding sustenance for a (s)weary heart.
There is so much asking for our attention - thanks for sharing your time with my words here and supporting my work.
Before I Begin: Part One
NERVES, EXCITEMENT or ANXIETY?
I was thinking on my run beneath the leafless winter trees today, if someone asked me how I write a book, my hand on heart honest answer is, I don’t know.
I don’t have a set process, or a neat map that I’ve followed in the past. I’ve written and published three books - the process of writing each one has not been the same. Except for fear. And joy. They have been my constants. Along with the foundations: dreaming, persisting, and glue-on-bum-in-seat writing.
I wrote my first novel - a story I was too scared to ever tell - awash in a sea of adrenaline, self-doubt, grit, terror, magic, trauma, love and steely, bloody-mindedness. I wrote my second novel in the distress and fear that gripped all of our lives in 2020, through until 2022 - it became my personal love letter to the forces that courage, hope, love and grief have to transform our lives and offer us a deep, hard-won capacity for joy and connection. I wrote my third book - non-fiction - in 2023 in 9 weeks to deadline, running on fumes of the question, BUT WHAT IF I CAN? Now, for the first time in my career as an author, I am on the verge of writing my fourth book - my third novel - and I’ve noticed the opportunity that it’s offering me to do things a bit differently this time.
Not because life is any calmer than it has been in the last decade. (With full acknowledgement of my privilege and gratitude, life remains turbulent: after a four-month return to the UK to come to grips with our lives that we were displaced from here for five years by the pandemic, we’re soon going to fly home to Australia again.) It’s more that I’ve realised that the sapling that I was eight years ago - a writer on the cusp of becoming an author - has now grown into a tree, strong and tall. Deeply rooted. Able to flower. Able to offer fruit and seed to my future stories and writing self.
This clarity has come slowly, over the last couple of months, while I’ve been brainstorming and developing ideas / routines / processes for my new novel (more on that in the next RITUALS issue).
But, while I’ve been researching and plotting, I’ve noticed something strange and unsettling happening. Especially on days when my work has been going well, when ideas have connecting and I’ve been having more ‘Eureka!’ moments than I could hope for.