How I Wrote A Novella

Rising from bed in the frosty blackness of 5:30 a.m. Working in my little chamber while the world slept. Seeing the sunrise as an end to work, not the start of it. Long walks after that with my best friend (also a writer). Discussions of the minutiae and where ideas might have stemmed from. Discussions of what I was attempting to capture; discussions of tone, environment, and backstories. Discussions upon discussions throughout the entire first draft and beyond. 

 

Above all, a feeling that sustained the entire enterprise. A feeling that I had something to say, or more importantly something to capture that was distinctly my own. That was distinctly made up of all my experience,    my readings and all I found deep or mysterious. That’s how I wrote my first Novella.      

 

It started in 2018 when I was an Erasmus student I Madrid. One day I got an email from my home university in Ireland. It contained a link to a national media competition in which the category of Short Story Of The Year was open for submissions. Having always been a lover of writing I decided I’d write as true a short story as I possibly could. 

 

What did that mean?

I guess it meant I would hold nothing back and be as honest on the page as I could be. 

 

School had been hard for me, but not hard in the traditional sense. 

I wasn’t bullied, or failing subjects, or socially shunned, or friendless, or any of the typical coming-of-age tropes. I suppose looking back, I went through a crisis of identity. For much of my adolescence, I was a football player. It was a clear identity; obvious, and in a sense true to my younger self. Football was a game I loved (and still love). I was good at it, with the potential to be really good at it. But around the age of 16, I discovered the arts (literature, music, cinema, paintings) and it opened up another side of myself. It opened up a side that yearned for solitude, contemplation and creative expression. 

 

It caused a major dislocation in my life and I began to turn in on myself. I started to have problems relating to peers and developed intense anxiety about letting other people know this new side of me. At that time I was starting to see the world in a new way, emotions were intense and the mundane became infused with meaning. 

 

This all came to the surface in the short story which I wrote for that faithful competition. Writing it was like reliving that time in my life. Every line, in every paragraph was deliberate. Between drafts, I went on long runs and devised the entire structure. My short story, Lucy’s Spiral, is about a girl who is doing her final exams in a huge anonymous exam hall when her mind starts to drift. We get flashbacks of her life and her perceptions of her peers as she tries to make sense of who she is. A portrait was delicately painted of a girl who thinks deeply and notices things most people simply look over. The story ended up being nominated for the top prize and went on to win the entire competition for Short Story Of The Year in 2018. Even though I was proud of what I had written, it was still a huge shock to take the top prize (which my parents accepted on my behalf at the ceremony in Ireland).

 

I knew even back then that there was more to the story.  For some time life moved on. I got a new job and changed my degree (to English, History and Philosophy). In my second year, COVID came around and provided me with ample time to get writing again. I worked on other stories, about friendship, a revenge tale, and a story about a boy who can hold his breath underwater for inordinate amounts of time. Eventually, I came back to the world of Lucy’s Spiral and committed to take the feeling of the short story and expand it into a Novella. 

 

And so over a year (with all the stops and starts) that’s what I did. 

 

The writing itself was a magical experience for me. Although there were difficult sessions of pushing through, much of the writing and narrative simply flowed out. In a sense, I was following the story as it came to fruition. Many days, I was surprised by the turns it had taken and mesmerized at the blending of life and fiction which happens in our imaginations.

 

The novella Lucy’s Spiral became a story about the world of Lucy Feyer in her final year of school. While she is central, there is a conscious attempt to tell her story through the community she finds herself in; through her father, sister, peers, teachers, and through stories she reads, and things she sees. This blend of stories within stories made it unique and exciting to write. 

 

With subsequent drafts and structure changes the novella evened itself out at 100 pages clean. 

 

And then there it was, after all of the early mornings, long walks and late nights: a novella. Without the need for external validation or immediate praise, I was glad I had written it. And thereafter except for some close friends getting a copy, it rested safely inside the cloud. Now that it’s been 3 years since completing Lucy’s Spiral it’s as good a time as any to write about the process and share it with a wider audience (if there is one).

 

 I believe it’s important, given the nature of instantaneous social media postings and short-form content, to share that writing a novella is worth doing in its own right. 

 

Why?

Because you will learn things about yourself and the world you can only access with deep work. Writing a novella is an opportunity to see things in a new light and inspect the minutia of a new vision. I wrote a novella by staying true to the vision which started it. To quote Nietzsche: "He who has a why... can bear almost any how."

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