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It’s every writer’s worst nightmare, one that gives them cold sweats in the dead of night: losing all their written work, with no chance of recovery. I’d spent 12 months writing my second book proposal, and was just days away from submitting the document containing everything my agent needed to pitch to publishers, including the first chapters. To treat myself, I booked a holiday to Brazil, deciding to do the final tweaks there, before sending it on.
One evening, after some caipirinhas, I flirted with a man with a large, attractive neck tattoo. We conversed via Google Translate before he snatched my phone – and legged it. Still unlocked from the translator, he changed my Google password – locking me out.
After trying for a week to restore my account, Google eventually told me I’d never get back in without access to the authenticator app, which is device-specific. It was on the stolen device. I lost all my gmails, contacts and Google docs. Everything I’d written over the past 15 years was gone. There was no backup – Google was the backup – just irreversible digital obliteration, including 35,000 words of my new book.
It’s difficult to convey the magnitude of emotional attachment writers feel about their work without resorting to melodrama and hyperbole. While I detest the phrase, some authors describe their manuscripts as “my book baby”. The emotional aspect only intensifies when your writing is infused with memoir, as mine was. You’ve laboured to ensure flow, fluency and pace. You’ve laboured to ensure all metaphors are original and all clichés are excised. You’ve laboured, in short, so that reading it doesn’t feel laboured.
Rewriting 35,000 words didn’t just mean “killing my darlings” – the practice of cutting sentences to which you’re absurdly attached because they sound eloquent – but instead accepting lexical genocide. (I warned you there would be hyperbole.) My sample chapter was also the most research-dense section, combined with anecdotes and observation. I wasn’t sure I could do it again. Writing is an act of creation. Rewriting felt stifling, and demanded digging deep into stores of discipline that I wasn’t sure existed. After three weeks of excavation, all I found was self-pity. I’d need to spend time progressing though the five stages of grief:
Denial? My harassment of Google’s live chat facility as I couldn’t believe it.
Anger and Bargaining? Maybe I’d be like writer Marina Kemp, whose laptop was stolen, leading to “impotent but all-consuming” anger at herself for not backing up her novel, then months of dread where she didn’t write a word. Or I could be lucky, as she was: her manuscript was mysteriously returned in the post on a memory stick.
Depression was next. I was determined to accelerate past this stage. I decided that, to rediscover the required motivation, I’d research other writers in my position, hoping their stories would console and inspire. I wanted to hear that their second drafts were better.
I learnt that Eimear McBride lost the first draft to her bestseller A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing after a handbag containing her notes was stolen. “Two years of preparation disappeared,” she said. “I had a massive panic, ran around looking in bins for months.” Finally, she gave herself what every writer needs – a deadline – setting a goal of writing 1000 words a day, sometimes typing the same word over and over to complete the task.
Inspired by McBride’s advice, I rewrote my first 1000 words, too, but they seemed limp and dry in comparison to whatever rose-tinted sparkle I’d convinced myself was lost.
There was no backup ... just irreversible digital obliteration, including 35,000 words of my new book.
Ernest Hemingway was unpublished when his wife left his briefcase – containing every story he’d ever written – at a Paris train station. Writing to his friend, Ezra Pound, Hemingway predicted that Pound would extol the positives in forced redrafting. “But don’t say it to me,” he wrote. “I ain’t yet reached that mood.” I hadn’t reached that mood, either. I wrote 500 more words, then sulked some more.
Essayist Thomas Carlyle sent his comprehensive history of the French Revolution to John Stuart Mill for feedback, and was instead granted obliteration when Mill’s maid mistook it for waste paper and put it on a fire. Carlyle reportedly took the news well and began afresh.
I finally reached acceptance when I read that the novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was rewritten – by hand – in a frantic three days by Robert Louis Stevenson, after his wife allegedly burned the first draft.
Taking solidarity from their pain and inspiration from their resilience, I committed to my own regimen. I flipped open my laptop and began typing, not stopping until the word count hit the 35,000 I’d originally lost.
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