The seven-year cellular reset

On writing novels

The complete seven-year cellular reset sounds like it belongs on a packet of rehydration salts marketed to middle-aged women on Instagram. Except that you may also recognise it as the idea that when every cell has gone through its life cycle and renewed itself, within seven years, then a mostly new… you, results.

Apparently the notion is a scientific simplification, though: cells in the body all renew at different speeds, some even taking ten years and others a lifetime. And yet, taken at its simplest, the idea is compelling: that we become mostly physically renewed, reborn almost, within the even more compelling timeframe of seven years. In western culture, seven is a lucky number. It is linked to phases of the moon, the seven ages of man, the seven candles of the Jewish menorah. In psychology, seven is the ideal number of items for a person to remember (mine is more like four). There are seven harmonies in music, seven primary colours: in other words, the number’s significance comes from its regular appearance in concepts that resonate with the human condition. For me, seven is how I structure stories: seven sequences within four acts.

Writers are, I think, obsessed with patterns, with finding ways of relating one idea to another, with seeing if there is a story to be told between two points and then plotting the journey accordingly. So I looked at what I was doing exactly seven years ago and asked myself what any self-respecting writer asks themself at the end of a hard-earned draft: but has the protagonist learnt and therefore changed?

Seven years today the weather was sweltering and The Union Club in Soho was packed with friends, family and colleagues drinking rose and celebrating the launch of my first novel ‘Mother’. I was happy, elated even, to be surrounded by my favourite people but I also thought that with this book - a vastly fictionalised account of some painful, true experiences - I’d landed exactly where I was supposed to be as a human being and writer. I thought that the process of writing it had excised some of the concern and anxiety, while launching a whole new career about which I had clearly found my voice and genre. Had that truly been the case, and the start of an actual film or book, the story would have ended there and would also be Bo-Ring.

In actual fact the book was just a book, not a catharsis, and as weeks turned to months I realised it had not deleted, metabolised or changed the reality of anything, and if anything, because I’d lived its far more dramatic, fictional version as a writer for the several years it took to write, I was even more haunted by the possibilities of what might happen. This psychological discomfort put a safety catch on my next book and while I wrote about an environment I knew well (the film industry) I steered clear of personal connection.

This time the story was topical, examining workplace and gender politics at the start of MeToo in 2019, prior to Harvey Weinstein’s trials and based very loosely on accounts in the press. I liked it as a book, it was called ‘Blurred Lines’ - but I treated it more scientifically than the first: plotting, outlining, twisting, building. It came out in the middle of the pandemic when the very definition of workplace had changed and when people’s concerns had understandably re-prioritised themselves to feature how they were going to survive financially, physically and psychologically speaking. It did fine, it even won an award, but it wasn’t floating around in a mire of zeitgeist weeds. It was a good lesson in what can happen if you roll the dice on topical subject matter. Sometimes the timing works in your favour, sometimes it doesn’t and anyway, I’d learnt to write to an outline.

Then as soon as the pandemic began abating and I was due to hand in a new book, life came pouring down. There was so much life in the ensuing years, happening mostly, painfully, to the people closest to me: the kind of stuff you can’t ignore, don’t want to ignore, that you are the first port of call, for. As such, anything I wrote for the third book sat next to these events feeling plastic and contrived. One day I printed the draft on paper to take a distanced read and when I’d finished, hurled the whole thing to the other side of the room in an angry flutter. Then I took my hairdryer and blew the shit off of all the constipated plotted post-its notes I’d put on a giant chart to write the thing. I should have felt devastated at the loss of months of work but I didn’t. I felt relieved and freed.

Then one day, worried about how far I was traveling from my missed deadline, I sat with the basics of what I’d been wanting to write about but hadn’t yet found a form for: Friendship - and all its fascinations and frustrations. Friendship as refuge and mirror and challenge and mainstay and source of joy. I sat still with the basics of an idea: four best friends and their less-friendly partners enjoying a precious bank holiday weekend together where the women get stranded mortally, physically and psychologically speaking.

I wrote intensely for six weeks unfettered by post-its and outlines, also putting aside what was happening in my life and trusting that the stuff that wanted to make it into the story, would. I explored what happens when the draw bridges go up in middle age alongside all the potential misunderstandings and miscommunications and the excitement of being together for intense and short periods. All the the stuff you sweep under the carpet and then cannot sweep under the carpet if you cannot escape each other. The draft was a mess and by all accounts had a lot of theme and character without knowing what it was really about. Then I got out my post-it notes and red pen and draft, by painful draft, I realised I was testing the destructibility theory of female friendship (but with more comedy and tears that this scientific sentence implies.)

It was called ‘The Last Weekend’ and it was the hardest yet most joyful thing I’d written, bringing in the comedy I’d missed in my writing for so long, using a few post-it notes, a few outlines, and many of the intense feelings of love and disempowerment I’d felt with all the preceding years. I wouldn’t have known how to do any of that seven years ago. Wouldn’t have known because that life had not been lived and learnt from yet. I wouldn’t have known the frustration of knowing that my ability to write was not moving quickly enough to catch up on the life I wanted to write about, nor would I have learnt the wisdom of knowing where to stop trying. Or that the whole point of writing, life, anything is not to land anywhere, ever, for very long but to keep moving through it all.

And today, seven years later I hand in the screenplay of my first novel to my partner (in adaptation, in life). It is not the first or last draft but it is pleasingly populated with new characters and storylines and themes that did not exist in the original book. Partly this is the exigencies of screenwriting, that TV often needs much more story for a series than exists within a book (well my book, at least) and partly this is the work of a new set of cells that keep turning over. Maybe there are some ideas - for stories, for life - that are meant to be made by a new version of you further down the line.