Starting a Novel- An Insurmountable Challenge?

The past couple of months I have been working on a novel set in the Victorian period about a woman who wants to be a travel writer. This is a project I've been thinking about for several years, maybe almost ten, researching, writing scenes and character sketches in between working on Young Adult fiction. This year marks the start of trying to write a draft.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish
dress, 1756. She is credited with bringing
 the small pox inoculation from Turkey
back to England.

I started thinking about the project during my Master's when I read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters from Turkey. I was fascinated with the liberty of traveling to a foreign country, combined with the restricted lives Victorian women lived. For my own novel, I imagine a woman traveling to India, a place I have visited. Yet most Victorian women didn't travel in India, they lived there, not as settlers they way they did in other outposts of empire such as in Canada or Australia, but as wives to temporary, but long-term employees of the Empire. Through reading I learnd that India, was not as I imagined a place to escape to, but a place with an even more rigid social structure than society in England. A character started to unfold in my mind. What if my Victorian woman protagonist chafed under these restrictions? What if she wanted to travel and write instead of marry and propagate? What if she read female writers like Emily Eden and Isabelle Bird, but didn't have enough money to be like them?

My questions have led to some exceptionally rich research reading. Judith Flanders',  Inside the Victorian House, A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, taught me about Victorian women through the outlines of their homes. Ruth Brandon's Governess: The Life and Times of The Real Jane Eyres, made me think deeply about the lives of Victorian governesses. Margaret MacMillan's Women of the Raj provided details about the lives of women who went to serve in Victorian India. Most recently Emily Eden's Up The Country, a collection of the author's letters in the 1840's from her travels across the subcontinent has helped me imagine what writing my protagonist might have read that spurred her on to travel herself.

 

While certainly not an expert in the field, I now know a lot about the history of flush toilets and the development of septic systems and disease. I know about cholera belts that were to prevent disease by keeping "women's organs" warm.  I learned about "bokkus" boxes where visitors in British India left their visiting cards in a box to let someone know they intended to visit. I know that Whiteley's Department store in London was where women heading to India bought their goods. 

 

For the past six weeks I've tried to wade through all my notes, scenes, and character sketches to try and write some preliminary chapters. This has not been straightforward. Some scenes are in third person, some are in first, others are in present tense while others are in past. Not all are in the time period, or deal with the same plot. Scenes are written in different styles. I found a twenty page intro that read like a children's story. Luckily, they are all from the point of view of the same character, a hungry girl named Alice, who is neither girl nor woman, too old to be a girl, yet not married, so not really a woman. A whole entourage of characters have emerged around her, a kindly mother, a cousin who encourages her reading and writing, an eclectic aunt, a mentor who won't marry her.

Through all the many pages, I found one paragraph that I liked. One paragraph. This is both dispiriting and yet, even in my frustration, I was happy to find one small section that worked. Yet how does one face an entire novel of 75,000 words when one only has 150 written? It's enough to make you give up. There are other things that make me want to quit before I start: is writing about white women in India problematic? Have I done enough research to pull this off? What if my premise itself is wrong?

Whenever I face what feels like an insurmountable writing goal, I think back to my favorite writing book, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont. The title comes from a chapter where Anne's brother as a child feels overwhelmed by an assignment on birds that he has left to the last minute. Anne's father advises her brother to tackle the assignment "bird by bird." Any difficult or insurmountable task must simply be started and worked on bit by bit. Every novel originally begins with one good paragraph, or even one good sentence.