‘Rebecca Lawrence reached a count of sixty in her head and slid her finger into the back pages of her mother’s diary. Mistaking the diary for a book granted her innocence the first time she’d opened it. She had no argument for innocence now.’
I admit, I’ve done it. In the early days,
that is: the searching for novelists’ daily word counts. I felt dirty doing it,
ashamed even, ashamed that I was comparing myself to others and matching my own
average to that of the masters. And then I stopped, not through sudden
disinterest, but because it was futile. My environment for writing The Silent
Land was different to others’.
At times, it was ideal in that it was quiet, I
had an antique desk and there was a kettle close by. At other times, not so, in
that my office was the laundry room at the back of the house where the noise
from the building site was not as violent as at the front, and my desk was an
ironing board, and there was no kettle, just an iron. And then there was the
method.
The Silent Land is set in the early 20th century and so I
was to write as if I was in the early 20th century myself - with
paper and pen. A good pen, mind you, not a Biro or one of those in the
stationery aisle of the supermarket, a proper pen, one that had a nib with a
crest, a sleek barrel and required cartridges (I prefer long, not short) that
when changing deposits ink on your fingertip and gives you a little buzz as you
push it down and you feel the subtle click. Me and my fountain pen. Best of
friends, workmates, allies, and my means to an end: a handwritten first draft
of my debut novel, all written on the finest of paper.
In my head, I pompously
called it parchment for a while. Champagne in colour with a linen finish and summoning
images of dripping candles and quills, it was the finest paper in all town and
I live in a big town. It is also expensive and would have left me penniless had
I not snapped out of my Dickensian romance. To the regular A4 pad I charged and
released my fountain pen upon it.
There were moments when I watched that nib
stroking letters onto the lines (I’m a thin lines kinda guy and the pad has to
be punched and 64 pages or more) and wondered who was doing the work: me or the
pen. The word count was low. Very low. Ostensibly because of my method. I would
write one sentence and then another, and possibly a third, and then stare at
them, cross them out, huff and puff, and write them again. And I would do this
for page after page until eventually a chapter would be finished and the moment
arrived that I had dreaded since breakfast: the removal of the computer from
the cupboard.
The computer always started with a protest, jilted as it was by
my preference for the pen. Slowly, painfully so, it opened a document and begrudgingly
allowed me to type my day’s work. And then once done I put it away back where
it belonged. And so on and so forth this was the rhythm until one day, one
happy, open a bottle of wine day, The Silent Land was completed.
The files are
on memory sticks and a hard drive and other things that have drives and clouds,
but the real copy, even more important than the copy with a spine on the
bookshelf, is the one in a box under the stairs, being kept company by other
boxes filled with lines of crossed out sentences and scribblings, and ringed
numbers; the daily word count numbers. This is the copy I cherish. Perhaps I’ll
do it again. Perhaps, I shan’t. But perhaps you should. Just get a good pen and
put the computer in the cupboard.
David Dunham
# # #
About the Author
David Dunham was raised in England and now lives in New Zealand. He has worked in the media industry as a reporter, sportswriter, deputy editor, chief reporter, senior producer and homepage editor. You can find David on Facebook at
Facebook.com/DavidDunhamAuthor and follow him on Twitter
@DDunhamauthor.
