I spent a bit of time in the previous post considering why somebody might write. A more relevant question at this point might be not ‘why?’, but ‘when?’.

Chapter 23 (the penultimate chapter) of Survival of the Fittest is now published here (and on LinkedIn), but I must say that the very act of finishing the novel seems to have become a matter of survival itself. These last chapters are being forced out of me slowly and painfully.

The first half of this novel took around 4 months (I’d begun to write it before I began to put it online) to complete, and I’m now well past 8 months for the second half, and there still a chapter left to locate. It bothers me. What has changed?

I suppose it’s more difficult to finish a novel than it is to start one. You may begin with an extended outpouring of characters, action, emotions, wisdom and the like – I mean, why else would you feel the need to write a novel unless all that was sloshing around inside you somewhere? – but there comes a time when the well of inspiration starts to run dry (just ask Paul McCartney – circa 1970) and the writer is more reliant on his creative nous than a simple spewing forth of everything he knows. In other words, the plot has to be progressed, somehow, towards an appropriate ending. This, it appears, is more time-consuming. Even though I map out my entire work before starting to write in earnest (at least, that’s what I’ve done for all three so far), there’s always plenty of pulling together loose ends, and the actual ending never seems to be totally clear when I start.

Or is it because I’m less angry about it all now? Maybe that well, in this case at least, was filled with vitriol rather than inspiration? I have noticed the effect: it takes me longer, and more effort, to drag myself back to the position in which I found myself during the period of time the novel covers. I have to remind myself that, when I started, I was in that boat on the endless and unforgiving ocean and the memory of Colonel Watson et al was very raw. Now, I’m in a much less straitened condition.

Maybe the process of serialisation is to blame. I tend to attack the work in an episodic manner – get to the end of this chapter, I tell myself, then you can relax a bit. It leads to extended gaps between finishing one chapter and starting the next, but, worse than that, it can lead to publishing chapters with which I’m less than totally satisfied. I can always go back and improve it when I polish the completed work. Well, maybe I can. But maybe I won’t. Even if I do, I find myself regularly referring back to earlier chapters to check facts, words, devices and so on. And often I can’t even remember how the previous chapter ended up. It’s a combination of time and detachment: if I’ve just published three or four chapters I’m not totally happy about, am I as close, emotionally, to the whole thing as I should be? I do try to be, but I’m having to spend more and more time in reacquaintance mode than fluent creative mode.

But really, I know it’s not any of those. The problem is that I now have a job. A day job, I mean. Once for which I am given a salary. I held out great hopes, when I took the job, that it wouldn’t affect my output. I still have the evenings, I thought. I don’t watch telly any more, and there’s plenty of time in the day to make sure I can still churn out a chapter a week. Some hope. I suppose that’s just life – you can’t stay at it for 18 hours a day.

And, despite the fact that Survival of the Fittest is inspired by, in fact is a direct result of, what I experienced the last time I had a day job, getting it all down into words does appear to come much easier when there’s some distance. Everything seemed more ludicrous, less defensible, more demanding of ironic reporting when I was looking back from the outside. Being back inside has maybe taken the edge off a little bit.

So, I’m just one chapter away from reaching the end. I’m sure there will be a reappraisal of the work once I’ve finished, but it’ll be a good feeling to get there, over a year after starting. I have two more projects in the creative pipeline. One of them is mostly about football, or it might be about Greeks and the reaction to them of the people around them. I haven’t decided yet. The other features plenty of curry and Nick Drake songs. It was actually my first ever idea for a novel, and I’m desperate to see how it comes out.

But when will I find time?