Hey all, it’s been a while. About four months to be exact. Not as bad as my previous record but not great. I’ve decided to reinvigorate the blogging aspect of this website as a way to vent my thoughts and frustrations. This was, at least in part, inspired by my great friend Caitlin’s recent blog post (Seriously check her out, she’s a babe).
In her post, Caitlin talks about the optimism she feels around New Year’s Resolutions and it got me thinking back on my resolution, to finish my novel. This is a novel that I’d been working on for around five years and was working on the second draft. Or rather, it WAS a novel I’d been working on for five years.
Crisis Strikes
A few days ago, as I went to work on my novel and try to force my way through yet another bout of writer’s block, I had one of, if not the biggest disaster of my life. The hard drive, on which I had the only copy of my novel, as well as a significant amount of other works in progress and documents, stopped working. No matter what I did, I couldn’t access the files on it.
I’m not sure what happened to it, perhaps I’d knocked it somehow or something had happened to damage it, but what was certain was, it wasn’t working. My immediate response was panic, here was the piece which I had thrown so much of myself into, so much work, and in an instant, it was gone. My boyfriend, bless him, consoled me with promises to get it back but in my heart, I knew it was gone.
I remembered a story, about Ernest Hemingway, upon finding out that an editor wanted to read more of his writing, he wrote to his wife in Paris asking her to bring his manuscript to where he was staying in Switzerland. At the train station, his wife looked away for a moment and that was when someone stole the suitcase with the manuscript inside. In the suitcase had been every piece that Hemingway had written, not just the original drafts but the copies he’d made as well. Just like that, they were lost. The only two pieces that survived were “My Old Man” and “Up In Michigan” which he’d put in a drawer after Gertrude Stein pronounced them unpublishable.
I wondering if this hard drive would be my stolen briefcase. If the novel and the short stories on it would be lost to time, never to be seen again. My heart broke in grief for what I, for a moment, thought might be the end of my career as a writer. How do you recover from such a blow?
Acceptance
After a few days of looking around at data retrieval specialists, reading huge fees that I couldn’t afford, I came to accept that the novel was lost, and with that acceptance, came a realisation.
Because of the time I had put into it, the hours of writing, I’d failed to realise what in hindsight was obvious, I’d fallen out of love with the story. Over the four years that I had written my first draft, so much had changed about who I was and what I valued in a story that each chapter seemed to come out of a different book. In that time I finished two degrees in Creative Writing, I fell in love, I made friends and I lost them.
When the hard drive failed, I realised that I had attached so much of myself to that story, allowing it to become such a huge part of my identity that it was no longer something I could look on with pride. It was like I had tunnel vision, where finishing the novel was the only goal in sight when perhaps the novel didn’t want to be finished.
After those few days, I took a deep breath and said to myself, “You know what? I don’t care that it’s gone,” and the relief I felt after was immense. It was like a weight had been lifted.
I realised what a fool I’d been to grow so despondent. To go back to the example of Hemingway, a lost suitcase wasn’t the end. Hemingway went on to move beyond his catastrophe, he wrote “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “Fiesta: A Sun Also Rises,” novels that are read all over the world. If Hemingway could surpass his catastrophe then why couldn’t I? (Funnily enough, both mine and Hemingway’s lost novels focused on the First World War).
The Takeaway
When I was explaining to a friend my disaster, she said, “It takes everyone one major data failure to take data security seriously.” By God she’s right.
After scouring my laptop and emails for any old files I could, I backed up what I found in several places. From now on, each time I write I will save it on my laptop, on a cloud drive, and on a physical USB drive. That way I can hope to avoid any more lost suitcases.
With the loss of my novel, I realised that my New Year’s Resolution had failed only two months in. I would need a new resolution, a new goal to work towards, and what better time to start than the beginning of March, the oncoming of spring. I decided to return to my MA dissertation and expand it to a full novel. This is a story, that I feel I can tell far better than my previous one. Not only am I more comfortable with the story and my ability to write it, but I feel that it’s a story that I want to tell, right now and is a story people will want to read.
A part of me still mourns the loss of my first novel. I expect that one day I will return to it and give it a new breath of life. Such is life, we love, we lose, we move on. But for now, I am happy to crop it up as a lost suitcase on a train platform.
If there’s one thing I want you, the reader to take away from this, it’s not to care so much about the promises we make to ourselves. We are human and as we go ever forward into the unknown, it won’t matter if you have a cheat day here and there, break your promises to yourself once in a while, as long as you keep trying to develop and grow as a person, you’re doing all right.
Oh, and backup your fucking files!
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