Trouble and strife

There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people, surfing the net, idly contemplating, searching Amazon to see whether there are any more relevant research books you haven’t yet bought.

I’ve made it sound almost fun but the reason it’s not is that while all this is going on you feel terrible. At the back of your mind is the suspicion that it’s really just a displacement activity designed to put off the evil moment when you actually have to start writing the book. Also, it’s expensive and time-consuming and it doesn’t feel like real work, which is fine if you have a private income but frightfully guilt-inducing if you don’t.