In October 2018, on the craggy shores of Newfoundland, I found myself dreaming of Ireland. My partner Richard and I had been living in Canada since 2011, part of the generation of young people that reluctantly left Ireland in the wake of the recession of the late ‘00s/early ‘10s. The initial plan was to head to Toronto for a year or two to “wait it out”, but as with so many other Irish emigrants, life got in the way. Seven years later, we found ourselves applying for citizenship.
Prior to getting our citizenship, we thought we should actually see a bit of the country first. Canada is enormous and after seven years, we still hadn’t explored much beyond Toronto and Montreal. So, in August 2018, we packed up our lives and set off on a three-month road trip to the east coast. I had left my job in July and for the first time in many years, I found myself with excess time on my hands and I knew I wanted to use that time to write a book.
Like many aspiring authors, I had written on and off since childhood and had actually written a handful of books before (well, parts of books), but I always ran into the same problem - I would write myself into a corner and have no idea how to get out of it. I was also a chronic self-editor and would find myself tinkering with the same chapter over and over in a vain attempt to make it perfect. The result was a hard drive filled with half-written novels and a serious case of self-doubt.
I knew that if I wanted to get it right this time, I’d have to do things differently. Firstly, I knew I needed to have an outline, or at the very least, a few plot points to guide me on my way. I also needed to know the ending so I had something to work toward. This was a dramatic departure from my usual MO of “just start writing and see what happens”. Secondly, in order to silence my inner editor, I decided I would sign up for NaNoWriMo. If you’ve never heard of it, NaNoWriMo or “National Novel Writing Month” is an annual writing challenge where participants from around the world are tasked with writing 50,000 words of a novel during the 30 days of November. It’s entirely self-directed and there are no prizes, but you can “win” by successfully meeting the word count goal.
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I had a vague plan but still no idea what to write about. I considered going back and finally finishing one of the half-written novels I’d accumulated, but I quickly decided against it. I wanted this to be a fresh start.
In early October, our travels took us to St John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland, and I immediately felt at home. Don’t get me wrong, St John’s is very much its own place, but it’s also very Irish. From the accents on the streets to the trad music pouring out of the pubs at night, St John’s gave me a real pang of homesickness.
One morning, I left Richard behind in the AirBnB we were renting so he could work in peace, and headed into town, intent on finding a quiet spot to write for a while. I ended up in that most stereotypical of writers’ haunts - a Starbucks. Sitting down with my overpriced coffee, I cracked open my laptop and navigated to my Dump Sheet.
Let me explain - for me, ideas rarely (if ever) arrive in my brain fully formed. Instead, I’ll think of a stray line of dialogue, an interesting character, or a random premise and I’ll save them all in one giant Word doc. I allow these half-formed thoughts to percolate in the back of my mind for months or even years, until I start to see connections and a story starts to take shape.
On that October day, feeling a little heartsick for Ireland, I was drawn to a few lines I had jotted down more than a year prior, “In the town of Clonbridge, the children know three things: If you hear the music of the Sídhe, block your ears; If you hear a scratching at your window, do not look out; And once the sun has dipped below the horizon, do not, under any circumstances, go outside.” Suddenly, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about home.
I began pulling together other elements - the photos I had taken a few years prior of a ringfort near my hometown, the stories I had been told in childhood of fairies and ghosts, my own memories of being a kid and feeling like my whole world was changing and everything was out of my control. Slowly, an outline started to emerge and, for the first time in a very long time, a tiny voice whispered in my ear, “you can do this!”
November 1st rolled around, and I began to write…badly. I’m not being self-deprecating, it really was awful. In times gone by, I would have given up or fallen into the trap of tinkering with the same scene endlessly and never making any progress. But with the challenge of NaNoWriMo hanging over my head and the belief that I might actually have a story worth telling, I somehow powered through. Then, around day 10, something magical happened - I stopped caring. I stopped caring that my prose was bad (“I can fix it in the next draft!”). I stopped caring that there were plot holes (“I’ll figure it out later!”). I stopped caring that the story I was writing wasn’t perfect. Because, by November 30th, I had something even better - for the first time in my adult life, I had a story that was finished.
Of course, it took many months of rewriting and editing to turn that messy first draft into the story that became The Book of Secrets, but I have no doubt it would never have gotten there if I hadn’t learned to let go. So here is my advice for any aspiring writers out there who find themselves stuck in the same rut - tell your story imperfectly if that’s what it takes, because I promise you, it’s easier to edit a messy draft than one that only exists in your mind.
The Book of Secrets by Alex Dunne is in bookshops now. Published by The O’Brien Press, priced €12.99
