Writer’s Diary
12 September 2025
I’m deep in the work of a new book. Some things have changed since the last time I wrote one.
For one, last time around I still lived with the thirty-year-long running joke of being the man who was always writing a book and had never quite written one.
For two, I have the blessing of being able to write to thousands of you here on Substack, while hundreds of you support my work through your paid subscriptions.
They say you never learn how to write a book, only how to write the book you just wrote. Each time, you get to start over.
Among the things I’m learning this time around, one is how the long slow dive of book-writing relates to the words I publish in this medium of write-and-hit-send.
So I keep on turning things around, paying attention to where the life is. Which is how I realised I want to try this, a different way of posting, something like the Writer’s Diary
keeps.Except I don’t write plays or live in New York City.
Yesterday, I came face to face with the otter.
I’d seen him once before on my morning walk, a few weeks ago. As I crossed back over the farm bridge by the sewage treatment station (or the “shit factory”, as me and Alfie call it) there was a heavy clump and a splash below. For a second, I thought some wood had fallen off its structure, then I looked over the side and saw a trail of bubbles. His slicked back broke the surface for a moment and I saw the start of his tail as he dived.
I was thinking of him again yesterday on the walk out, and then on the return, thirty yards upstream from the bridge, there was a thrashing and splashing among the reeds, as though a small dog were rushing up and down, and I knew who it had to be.
I waited, moving up and down along the bank to find a place where I could see past the overgrowth to the surface of the stream, and he was still crashing about. Then up popped a wet brown head and he looked straight at me.
We held each other’s gaze for three seconds, maybe four.
He dived and disappeared, the ripples ebbed out, and only the muddiness of the water still showed that anyone had been there.
I’ve been wrestling for the essence of the big, simple, disorienting thing I’m trying to say with this new book, the few paragraphs around which the other hundred thousand words or so crystallise.
Some mornings, I come to the desk and everything I already wrote seems to unravel. Other days, I arrive and there’s a gift waiting for me, as though from an unseen helper.
When I was younger, days of the first kind would undo me. I’d keep pulling on the thread until, in my imagination, it had unravelled any claim I ever had to be a writer. Part of getting older is knowing that this is all weather, that you can’t claim too much credit for the sun or the rain, or blame yourself for their absence.
A powerful book often grows out of a powerful essay. The Dawn of Everything is a good example, or The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks.
As a writer, I’m not sure anyone ever drew my attention to this, or if they did, I heard it as something more calculating: “Write an essay that goes viral and get a book commissioned off the back of it!” Or someone will say, “All the bits that were worthwhile in [book X] could have fit into an essay, but publishers want you to fill it out to 90,000 words.”
There can be truth in both, but there’s something else I’m seeing now: within a book which makes good use of all those words, there will often be something more essay-proportioned that is the detonator, the concentrated force that sets the whole thing in motion.
You don’t have to write it and publish it as a standalone piece, but it’s also not quite what you’re encouraged to write as the “overview”, the part at the front of the proposal where you’re pitching the book as a whole. Or maybe it is – I’m no expert on proposals! – but it’s not just a sales pitch, it’s going to make its way into the book itself.
Four years ago this month, I sat down to write an essay.
Three days later, I had the first three chapters of the book that became At Work in the Ruins, and knew that I would have to write the rest.
It’s forty years this year since
published Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.Human totality is more than the sum of the parts. We are more than what happens to us. In Oranges, I wanted to draw on my experiences, and to build out of those experiences an imaginative place where other people could go. People whose lives were far away from mine.
Reading this, I think of people I’ve known who survived a season in hell by climbing inside a particular book, into the refuge of the “imaginative place” made by an author giving their all.
As a writer, you sometimes hear these stories, but mostly you will never know, and that doesn’t matter.
But it’s what I believe in most deeply, when it comes to writing, the possibility that you can make out of words a space that offers shelter, a place where encounters can happen, somewhere off to the side of the ordinary flow of time.
Me (having read out the words I wrote today): “So what do you expect to come next?”
Anna: “I expect a whale to come.”
Me: ?
Anna: “Because you sound like David Attenborough!”
DH, Östervåla, 12 September 2025
Looking forward to what the whale looks like ;)
I love this way of posting, Dougald. Looking forward to more excepts from your writer’s diary.