How I wrote Who Wants to Live Forever: Part One

Therapy, magical thinking, small acts

I’m Hanna Thomas Uose, a writer and a strategist for the progressive movement. Here I share what I’ve been thinking about (mainly how to make a new world and how we are with each other while we do it). Every quarter, I also send a list of things I’ve enjoyed. Take what you like and leave the rest.

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Hello,

Back in November I wrote a post on why I wrote my debut novel, Who Wants to Live Forever. Some very fun stuff has happened since that post – you can now pre-order signed and dedicated copies from West End Lane Books! And the book has been picked for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club with Sara Cox! Unreal.

Today, I want to share the first part of how I wrote it (Part Two is here). How did I get through those strange lonely hours that were full of self-doubt and a constant state of wonder at the fact that I was even trying?

This won’t be full of writing advice but rather all that had to come before. The stuff that helped me to build the confidence to follow my creative impulse and keep going, even when the act of embarking on a long-term project with no guarantee of success was highly counter-intuitive and even out of character.

Before I dive in, I should tell you a bit about my material circumstances since I know that no one’s hard-earned lessons can be directly transposed onto another life. I lived alone for the entirety of writing this book, with no dependents. For a lot of it, I was single. I had an extremely full-on job when I started writing it but then went freelance. While I still worked long hours, I could decide how my days looked. And finally, a global pandemic meant I had a confronting amount of free time on my hands and there was nothing for it but to finish the draft. I know plenty of people who manage to write alongside caring responsibilities, financial dependents and full-time jobs but I am not one of them.

Therapy

Gawd, I am afraid to say it (since I feel like a millennial cliché and I know it is a big financial hit) but it would never even have occurred to me to start writing fiction unless I had been in many years of therapy first. I started therapy at thirty to work through *some stuff* and I found it so useful that instead of stopping, I just…kept going. Turns out that when you are not in the middle of a crisis, therapy can be this creative, generative, free space where you get to noodle on all your ideas out loud. After noodling for quite a while, my therapist gave me his diagnosis – I was a writer.

That still, small voice

That same therapist said some life-changing words during one session, when I was complaining about feeling stuck. ‘Something wants to happen,’ he said. ‘You just have to listen.’ He recommended the book Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer. If you haven’t read it, imagine I am pressing it fervently into your hands. It is a bit religious and woo-woo, since he is a Christian mystic. If that is not your thing I think you might still enjoy it. The main point being, often we know what direction our life is supposed to take – we can hear that still, small voice – but ignore it out of fright.

During this period, I listened to a lot of commencement speeches, enjoying the encouragement and feeling of beginning again. These are a couple of my favourites.

Magical thinking

Elizabeth Gilbert and her book Big Magic (which I picked up Eat-Pray-Love-style from a hostel bookshelf in Bangalore) says that ideas are swirling round us all the time, just looking for someone to work with them. If an idea pops into our heads, it’s because it is tapping us on the shoulder. If we don’t respond, it will move on to someone else. This magical thought had stuck with me and so when the idea of Who Wants to Live Forever landed in my head one day, I took it as a sign.

It wasn’t easy to surrender to this thought. For the first few months (years?) of writing the book, I would have occasional freak-outs that I was completely delusional. The thing is, I was completely delusional. I had no evidence that I could write a novel, let alone publish one. But it was already in my head and I knew that I would go mad (mad!) if I didn’t try and write it down. As my friend Marcus likes to say, ‘The delulu is the solulu.’ And so, I would look at the postcard on my pinboard – an artist is someone who finishes things – and resolve to keep going until I was done.

Creative community

Before my therapist’s diagnosis, I knew that a creative path lay ahead, I just wasn’t sure what form it might take. I spread my bets and joined a number of creative communities. First, the trans-inclusive women’s pop choir, Lips, which I have now been a part of for ten years.

Then, I got involved with Girls Rock London. With them, I learnt to play the drums, played in a couple of bands and learnt some music production.

Finally, in the summer of 2019, I signed up to a Write Like a Grrrl course on a whim. The tutor, Kerry Ryan, and my cohort were instrumental in me taking my nascent short story and turning it into a novel.

It is no coincidence that all of these communities centred women and people of marginalised genders. It was where I felt safest and also where I found the most inspiration. To be surrounded by women, trans and non-binary people who were honouring their own creativity, often trying to make a living from it and handling all the attendant sacrifices in the meantime – it made me braver.

Small acts

Gradually, I started to take small steps. I wrote a couple of songs and performed them. At the start of the first lockdown, I submitted one of those performances to Miranda July’s International Covid Arts Festival and woke up to a flurry of Instagram notifications. That built my confidence. So did submitting some poems and novel extracts to various journals and schemes, keeping track of my success rate. Here’s a snapshot of my spreadsheet.

I received a lot of no’s but enough yeses to keep going. One of those yeses admitted me to the MA in Prose Fiction at UEA! More on that to come.

I gave things up

This is the hard bit. I had to clear the decks. As you may have gathered, I have always had hobbies but was happy to do them all to an amateur standard. But a novel demands more, I think. You have to be devoted. And so, I pared back. I had already (due to circumstance and a demanding job) got rid of the TV, become a very utilitarian cook and reduced my socialising to something bordering on monastic. That trend only continued during lockdown. Now, five years on and inhabiting a fuller life again, I sort of long for the period when I had swathes of time to think of nothing except the book I was writing. I feel the impulse to lock myself away again, an anchoress.

I began

So, you see? So much had to happen in order for me to be ready to begin. When I did, I started small, again. I wrote for 15-20 minutes a day at first, under the advice of Kerry Ryan. Then I built it up over time. I cobbled together a Whatsapp group of acquaintances which I called

🌸🌸🌸 Accountability 🌸🌸🌸

and every week I would report back on my goal of writing 2000 words a week. I very rarely made this goal but it helped to know that there were five other people out there who had a passing interest in me finishing this project! Sometime in lockdown, I discovered Writers Hour and tried to write for at least an hour a day. Slowly, slowly, I trucked my way to an almost-finished first draft. Looking back, I am genuinely amazed at the audacity.

If you are grappling with a creative project, I hope some little piece of this is useful! In Part Two, I’ll share more of what it was like to write this book when I was less alone – receiving regular feedback from my fellow students on the MA and then, later, from my brilliant editor Romilly Morgan, founder of Brazen.

Until then, please consider pre-ordering Who Wants to Live Forever, it is so useful for authors! And take care of yourselves as best you can.

Hanna