Neil Baker

I’ve been thinking about how the first draft of a novel is a lot like a new born baby – and when I say new born I’m talking minutes old, not hours or days.

I ended up with a list:

1. A baby, like a first draft, is messy, crinkled. They don’t come out looking quite how you expected.
2. Novels and babies seem like a great idea at the point of conception. What could be easier to produce? Or such fun? If you were thinking about all the worry, work and sleepless nights that would follow, you’d probably never have got started.
3. Neither come out easily.
4. Seeing that newborn baby finally in your hands is a great relief; same with a first draft. “It's over now,” you think. Wrong, this is where the real work starts. 
5. But I think the most important similarity is this: unless you’ve been there, you don't know what it's like - baby or novel.

Those tiny babies you see out in prams aren't newborns. They're at least a few days old – weeks, maybe. They’ve been cleaned up and straightened out. To see a true newborn, you've got to be in the room when it comes out.

It’s the same with a first draft. Unless you write one yourself – or a good friend lets you see theirs – you don’t really know what they look like.

I was wondering why the first draft of my novel was looking like such a crinkly, crap covered confusion. Then I realised: I’d seen my share of working drafts, but I’d never seen a genuine prime text, because, until now, I’d never produced one of my own.

My first draft is looking like a mess, but I guess they all do.

I was at the No Soul for Sale festival this weekend at London’s Tate Modern. To celebrate its 10th birthday, the gallery has given the space in its enormous turbine hall to 70 independent art groups and individuals. The event is meant to be “a celebration of the independent forces animating contemporary art.”

From the walkway overlooking the hall the festival looked like an indoor car boot sale. Arty types, tourists and weekend day-trippers wandered among a chaotic melee of installations and performance pieces, each of which occupied the space of a squash court.

Amid it all my eye – or rather ear – was caught by James Alec Hardy, who was using a bunch of bodged together electronics kit to fill the turbine hall with feedback noise. It sounded like Dr Who crash-landing the Tardis.

“What are you doing?” I asked, when he stopped to take a break. “Trying to change the world,” he replied. “But how?” I said.

James explained that his practice involved using feedback loops to comment on the relationship between people and technology: how we use it, how it uses us; how we become part of the systems we produce. Made me think of a recent interview I filmed (see below) with the historian of cybernetic art, Andy Pickering.

James was using video mixers to generate noise and images that fed into a TV monitor sitting on a stack of speakers. The sound from the monitor was then fed back into his mixers. He was also doing something with a microphone that he held between his teeth.

The sound and video equipment was redundant kit from the 1980s, because James wanted to say something about obsolescence too.

I asked him to explain the point of it all, and he spoke passionately about the project. It was all very complicated and theoretical, but I admired his enthusiasm. “And what have the people here made of it?” I asked, gesturing to the onlookers in the hall. “I don’t really know,” he said, “I’ve had my back to them most of the time."

An interview that I filmed and produced of Andy Pickering, University of Exeter

Did anyone at Ocado sense-check this customer email before hitting send?

Hurrah, 14th February is going to be an "annual service day". Oh hang on, that means there's going to be no service.

What one hand giveth, the other taketh away.

The brilliant Sarah Salway, inspired by Frank Auerbach, is blogging about the similarities between the processes of writing and painting. You need to find "the core" of a story, she says, whether you are working with words or paint.

Sarah quotes from an Auerbach exhibition catalogue:

"He would work and rework a painting in a restless search for a unique image, trying to achieve what he describes as a 'formal grandeur'."

Must try that next time I'm given some crappy copy to edit: "The problem is, you've not yet found the 'formal grandeur'. Please have another go."

Might work, might not.

I enjoyed the interview in yesterday's FT with management thinker Tom Peters, written by Stefan Stern.

Successful management is mostly about luck, says Peters. And time spent pondering strategy is less important than time spent actually getting stuff done. There is no secret: just try hard and, if you fail, try again, he says.

I like his emphasis on doing lots of things until something works. The contrary – and popular – idea of focusing on just one project at a time sounds logically appealing, but never works for me in practice: I'm too eclectic. As Peters says:

"Are you throwing enough spaghetti at the wall so that some of it will stick? Whoever does the most stuff has the highest chance of doing well. It’s about getting stuff done."