"What if they're all dogs?"

I'm writing a novel.

By that I mean, once a month I meet up with my writing group and if they're lucky I've sent them 500 new words of the novel, and if they're less lucky I've sent them a blog post draft, and if they're not lucky at all I have sent them nothing at all.

So I am writing a novel... at the rate of 500 words a month or less. I recently calculated that at this rate I will be finished the novel in 13 years. This terrifies me – mostly because I have read too much about climate change and I am just generally terrified of the future. I want to get my dystopian novel published before we are living in an actual dystopia (if that hasn't already happened).

Each writing group session goes for two hours, which we divide up roughly equally between the three members. I often use up a good chunk of my allocated 40 minutes as free therapy, whingeing about how I'm never going to finish this novel. My write-mates respond with a goldilocks mix of encouragement and tough love. Encouragement as in, you have a lot going on, go easy on yourself. Tough love as in, you do read a lot of books and go on many side quests, if you really wanted to spend more time writing you would.

The weird thing about my doubts in my own capacity to write this novel is I have already written a novel (unpublished, most likely will never be published). It seems to me this achievement should give me more confidence in my ability to do it again. (Although, now that I think about it, that other novel took me the best part of ten years to write... and that was before I became a parent.)

I haven't given up hope, though, and the reason connects to the title of this blog post.

There is an episode of the podcast Sentimental Garbage in which the host, Caroline O'Donoghue, chats to her friend and sometime co-host Ella Risbridger about the process of writing her (Caroline's) second novel, Scenes of a graphic nature. One of the main themes of the episode is that Caroline wrote a lot of versions of this novel, and the one that was published is just one of them. Ella talks about having a kindle that is 50% different drafts/versions of what ended up being Scenes of a graphic nature.

Caroline, with the help of her beta reader Ella, pulled this novel apart at the seams several times over in order to get it to where she wanted it to be. She needed to be creative and ruthless. No idea was too silly. Nothing she had written so far was sacred. At one point she asked, "What if they [the characters] are all dogs?"

This thought experiment tickled my pickle and it stuck with me. It has helped me to keep going on my own novel. Instead of painstakingly penning each word, fantasising about this will be the sentence that thousands will read in published form, I remind myself that words are cheap. They can be written quickly and just as easily deleted. (Or archived on your friend's non-kindle ebook.)

Instead of seeing my novel as a mountain of unwritten words it will take me over a decade to build, I am experimenting with having a playful, light approach. I am thinking about writing fan fiction about my own unwritten novel. I am cutting down on reading to make more brain space so that I can sink deeper into the world of my novel and what it could be.

I am trying to be less precious about my "darlings" so far.

I am asking myself:

"What if they're all dogs?"