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you have to be prepared to wait

On first drafts, perseverance and patience.

you have to be prepared to wait
The printed-out timeline I created to help me understand the flow of my novel in progress's final chapter, LIMANAKIA B. Unlike the others in the book, which each unfold over several days, this one unspools over several years. Which is fun and exhilarating and a little daunting, too, hence creating a timeline where I could visualise the span of the chapter in its chronological entirety and be able to pencil things in / move things around and see how they intersected/were influenced by world events etc. Provisory planning and way-finding to make it less intimidating. I took this photo in my library at home in California on 1 December 2025. 3.5 months later, the timeline sits next to me in Cape Town (it folds quite nicely, fyi). The chapter has greatly progressed but I feel like there is a fair bit more work to be done. Most of that is slow, subterranean, thinking work (what next... what next... how about...?) as opposed to flinging words on the page (though there is some flinging required, too; if I get too precious, if I'm too unwilling to risk a terrible first draft, then the slow work risks coming to a total stop).

Before I left California I tried to go through a bunch of evergreen print things that I hadn't gotten around to (hadn't prioritised? because they're evergreen?) yet. This included an issue of The Gentlewoman that I'd purchased because it included an interview with the masterful Irish author Claire Keegan, someone whose work I greatly admire – her stories haunt and inspire and linger like an echoing whisper.

It's a lovely interview. But what really leapt out at me (in a "I've got to take a picture of this and save it and return to it" kind of way) was the bit below about first drafts, about perseverance, and time. Such encouraging wisdom, so gorgeously expressed.

From issue 31 of The Gentlewoman. Happily, the interview with Keegan is published in its entirety on the magazine's website.

I think this struck a particularly shimmering chord. Partly because of how frustrated I can be by the messy state of a first draft. And partly because of the reference to time being a secret ingredient. About the language being generous back to us, giving us what we're looking for (if we wait!).

In August 2024 I began revising Flailing, my current novel, again after a few months' hiatus (and some bruising feedback from a beloved mentor). This would be Flailing's fourth major draft. I thought I'd be done by the end of that year. It's mid-March 2026 and I'm still not done yet. I'm working on the final chapter, a completely new one, which is scary and wonderful – because this puts me in that machete-whacking, ink-splattering terrible first draft territory as much as it involves the intimate muscle-memory-like familiarity of being immersed in a project I began in 2020.

And: there is impatience. I agree time is important. It's as important as showing up to your desk. And yet, I get impatient when the work is taking longer than I think it should. Impatient when progress is haphazard, erratic and slow – unfolding at a speed that I don't have apparent control over, that I can only influence (and I do that by continuing to show up to my notebooks, my laptop).

Anyway. That this novel is now almost six years in the making and still not finished has led to moments of shame, frustration and embarrassment. (These moments are, I suspect, connected to the same part of me that feels "guilty" and "lazy" when there aren't "enough" new sentences on a page – as if that's my only metric for what defines a "productive" morning.) I think I've made progress; those moments, those feelings have been hitting me less stridently lately; there is a more equanimity, more acceptance that the work will take its own time. That if I persevere, that if I'm willing, if I'm open-minded, if I wait, the language will give me what I need, the words will get written, the novel will (someday) be complete.

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