Paul Stephenson

your novel

after Luke Kennard

is such a brilliant idea. When I hear you’re still working on it I’m so relieved. Not because you might have ditched it but because it’s not been published, not yet, after all these years of you doing nothing but working on it. Full-time. I couldn’t be more reassured to learn you’re suffering from writer’s block, spending the days reading around instead, and I must confess, I’ve repeated to others with glee all about your repetitive strain injury, giggled to myself at your carpal tunnel. Your appetite for accuracy paralyses you and this electrifies me. It’s important to be authentic but not as important as rewriting your first chapter thirty-two times until it’s almost there. When I inquire, feigning interest, and you tell me excitedly that you’re on a roll and impress me with your latest Word Count, I feel panicked and think about wiping your hard drive, consider breaking in with a torch at four am in search of your backup files which I’ll throw into a skip in the neighbouring street where they’re having a basement games room dug out. But not before jumping up and down on it first in my heavy winter shoes. When we meet for coffee after your writing group and you run their new suggestions by me and admit you’re not sure whether to ignore them or incorporate them, totally or in part, I shout Incorporate, incorporate! in a frenzy, all for every one of them, not doubting for an instant, as if non-incorporation were life-threatening, and hoping you will ruminate over the feedback in an old beige cardigan with elbow pads whose threads are loose, and then start pulling it all apart, cutting and pasting large chunks of text into new Word documents you’ll forget where you’ve saved. I feel like a million dollars when you go off on a tangent about a Mongolian mountain gradient and start googling inclines, insist that this is crucial to the setting. I’m jubilant when you say the three interspersing, unreliable narrators and the subtle-but-not-too-subtle parallels with a far-off small country we all love to ridicule, plus your newly dreamt-up surprise plot twist, have all the makings of a stronger, more exciting and original bestseller, though a literary one, one that will be lauded in the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, not on sale at airports. I tell you how much I’m loving what I hear and my face lights up as if with respect for your erudition, your prodigious talent, and I can hear myself urging you to keep going, to keep at it, each and every day, sympathizing that, yes it’s a slog and, yes, you’re in it for the long haul, because it’s all about delayed gratification, even if there are days when you can only manage a hundred words, which is still something, because you must know, have a sense of the glory and prizes to come, and that one day soon it will have all been worth it.

Paul Stephenson has three pamphlets: ‘Those People’ (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), ‘The Days that Followed Paris’ (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and ‘Selfie with Waterlilies’ (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He helps curate Poetry in Aldeburgh. His debut collection Hard Drive was published by Carcanet in 2023.

Paul wrote the following about ‘Your novel’:

As poets we are used to sending out work, receiving rejections and the occasional acceptance. The little victories feel like progress. But living with an aspiring novelist, I realised what a psychological marathon writing a novel must be, with none of the work published along the way, only the encouragement and feedback of sections shared with other writers. Luke Kennard has been an important poet for me in terms of giving me permission to write. I channelled the sarcasm and perverted glee of his poem 'My friend' to find a way to write about the frustrations, but also love, of living with my late partner, another writer, who was into fiction not poetry.