Robyn Anderson

Haven’t I just.

I have always wanted to write a novel. Short stories and short films are great but I wanted to have lots of characters and I wanted them to do things that weren’t metaphors for something else. I waited for inspiration and when it didn’t arrive, I recall looking at a silent group of young people working their mobiles to death and I thought, “What would it be like in the future? Will people remember how to talk?”  It was an interesting premis (never made it into the book) and enough to get me going. I thought a decent sized book would take me 6 months. I began in the summer of 2015. About 12 months later I wrote “The End”. I have written “The End”  about 6 times since then, though it’s the beginning that has changed over and over again.  Now I read interviews with well-known authors and I see what I never saw before.  “The story is in the edit,” they say, and until you have beaten yourself blue trying to move something somewhere it makes more sense, you don’t understand what they mean. I had 90,000 words when I completed the first draft. I knew that was too many but having lost about 30,000 (and counting), I know what I am seeing is a story finally worth telling. Once the precious work is handed to an editor I have had to do more things that I had no idea about.  I have written the extra pages (the dedications and the blurbs and the biography) and I’ve done this website and ordered business cards so that I can thrust them into the hands of strangers and say “Check out this website!” in the hope that they like what they see and eventually buy my book. Yes, it has been a long time. And no, I still haven’t quite settled on a title. But I won’t be much longer. Already I can hear the distant sounds of another long-form story and despite all the things I know now that I didn’t know before,  I am still looking forward to the ride.