By Mat | Published:
June 30, 2005
Due to recent advances, I can now reveal the first and last line of The Last Monk. It begins with ‘The house is suddenly filled with music’, and ends with the words ‘small, green plastic frogs’.
It’s a philosophical piece, obviously.
By Mat | Published:
June 28, 2005
There isn’t really an effective way to describe it: I woke up Monday morning feeling positive, went through my normal Monday morning ablutions and habits in a perfectly normal Monday morning kind of way, sat down at the computer, turned it on, opened the correct file, and seized like an oilless motor.
By Mat | Published:
June 24, 2005
Milestones are a strange business. I’ve never had a problem with motivation writing this novel, except when driven to soulless despair by some of the insaner moments of a listless career in university administration, yet I do tend to go a bit wild when my word-odometer passes a number with four zeroes in it.
By Mat | Published:
June 22, 2005
Halfway through the week, I’ve added a few thousand words and laid down the bedrock for about half of the climax.
These intense typing sessions are very unusual: I normally sit down to the blank cursor feeling as though I’m leaning out over a cliff and the wind is turning. I know what plot is required, but how am I supposed to make it exciting and interesting? What will people say?
By Mat | Published:
June 19, 2005
I’ve spent much of the last three weeks informing the reader (also the spouse, the neighbour and the teen-aged sales assistant at J.B. HiFi) of my revelation that before I could type a single word of the grand climax of The Last Monk, time would be required to percolate, to mull, and generally to walk around parks scowling at ducks in the vain hope that someone would ask me what I was looking so thoughtful about.
Quite a bit of time, I thought. About a fortnight.
As it happens, it took about six hours.
By Mat | Published:
June 14, 2005
Typing is not writing in the same way that a cocktail shaker is not a jug of margaritas. Discuss.
The more you want to write, the more you will have to type, and the ratio is exponential. A simple email to a colleague can usually be banged off in a single, barely-considered pass, whereas any letter you have to write to your car insurance company will require at least three fully-edited drafts to construct the precise series of logical statements which best explain the entirely innocent physical circumstances which lead you to shunt a Mr Whippy van into a hearse.
By Mat | Published:
June 6, 2005
Welcome to the latest in this continuing series of instructional guides to the sandwich-making art. Today’s recipe, the Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Grill for Novelists, was learned during a six-month study tour of the finest sandwicheries of Paris, from a traditional French sandwichier whose great-great-grandfather claimed to have received the recipe from Victor Hugo in 1831 after a particularly messy bender during the early drafts of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
By Mat | Published:
June 1, 2005
I did some quick sums a couple of days ago and realised that my final act is now seventy pages long, and I haven’t even got to the really exciting bit yet.
This gave me an excuse to do something I’ve always enjoyed, which is editing in widescreen. Because there’s a lot of material, and the changes I anticipated would most likely involve shuffling big chunks of text around, the best way to do it is to print the whole thing out, spread it out on the floor and scan it from a distance to let the large-scale structures reveal themselves.
Here then is what my living room floor looked like this morning:
