Deadlines, drafts and the demons within

At the weekend, I submitted the near-final draft of my next book to my publishers. Bar some tweaks and twiddles, it’s done. Sixty thousand words, give or take. It was started during lockdown, lay dormant, then found new life. It’s called How to Write a Parliamentary Speech, and it’s out in the Autumn.

What can I tell you? Orwell said ‘witing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness’ and I know what he meant. It starts with an idea, then a plan, then a deal, then a deadline, then a draft, and then the final 48 hours of demonic typing.

Unlike Douglas Adams, who loved the noise of deadlines whooshing past, I have a horror of missing them. That means everything must be subsumed to the task of writing, and everyone around me must bend to my will. It is a deeply unpleasant couple of days for anyone within a three-mile radius.

They say you never finish a book, merely hand it over to the publishers. This is true. In the hours since submitting the draft, a hundred clever lines have come to me. Things I wish I had added. Little stories that would have illuminated some point. The perfect quote. Alas – each must now wait for the second edition, if there is one.

They also say the best way to spot a mistake in the manuscript of a book it to publish it. These post-submission hours are consumed with doubt. What glaring errors have we missed? What point of parliamentary procedure have I misconstrued? Who will be the first smart-alec to point it out? ?Mistakes, there will be some. One must hope they are forgivable and forgettable, not existential. A 1631 edition of the Bible contains the commandment ‘thou shalt commit adultery’ (and the rare copies of this ‘sinners’ Bible’ are worth a fortune). HarperCollins pulped 80,000 copies of a Jonathan Franzen novel because there were so many typos. These things happen.

Now, the limbo between submitting the damn thing and publication. One must trust the editor, proof-reader, the typesetter, the printer, and the distributer to perform their roles. It’s in no-one’s interest now to foul it up now. And the promise – the unalloyed joy of receiving the first physical editions of a book with your name on the cover, and holding in your very hands the product of those long hours at the keyboard. There are few feelings like it. Then a launch party, some reviews, some nice emails from friends, a few extra pounds in the bank, and its all over. Next stop, Oxfam.

Was it worth it? Yes of course it was. The second half of the Orwell quote about writing a book is ‘one would never undertake such a thing of one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand’. The demon is satiated, but not exorcised. On to the next one…

How to Write a Parliamentary Speech by Paul Richards is published by Biteback this Autumn.