The Beautiful Mess of Writing a Novel (And Why It’s Totally Worth It)
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams
Writing stories is the most human endeavour you can engage in. It’s like emptying your soul and making room for more life.
I’ve been writing for more than 15 years. When I first began to write it was all about getting a novel out; churning that nagging story outwards onto paper and publishing it.
I got to work. I wrote everyday. I told myself, “I’ve started, so I’ll finish.” — “And, if at any time I hear a little voice telling me that it’s not worth it, then that’s the devil. Ignore it.”
I did ignore all the little voices that butted into my daily thoughts and tried to convince me that it was a waste of time.
And those irritating little voices didn’t ever go away. There is always a reason to believe that writing is not your game. That it’s all over. That AI can do it better…
The novel that I began to write turned into a mess. I didn’t have any idea how to put scenes together, nor how to make sense of the chaos that I was creating.
It turned into 150,000 words of highly determined chaos.
But I did understand myself. I understood that I was wading around in a mess of ideas that I had created and I should do my best to make sense of them.
Some of the ideas were clearly useable. That’s enough feedback to know that I was onto something worth working on.
So, I broke it down and realised that I was good at writing short stories. I sat down and wrote my first decent short story. Boy, did I sweat.
I loved it. So I wrote more, and my focus went all short story writing — the novel became a vague idea that I’d get back to one day.
There’s something in the advice from great writers like Nabokov, Hemingway and more, that the short story is great training for telling longer stories — novels.
On the other hand, writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Monroe made the short story their fortress. They took the art of short story writing to a new level and packed in a lifetime of experience between those 30 pages of crisp white paper.
Writing short stories was partly motivated by the strong knowledge that I could finish a story. I did, I finished many short stories. I published some of them.
Of course, the short story became my thing, and I went from gleefully writing them in a day or two, to grinding them into what I thought was a better story, more perfect, perfecter, to not perfect enough.
I got all caught up in the world of making it the best I could ever do. I got stuck in a world that isn’t really about telling good stories but rather a world of hesitation, and worry, and blaming myself for not being good enough.
Sitting down to begin writing each day looked like the dance of the honey bee. The beautiful flower full of nectar before me, but my angst about whether I had the savvy to extract it when I sat at the keyboard became a world of worry.
Time passes rapidly. Years later and I’m still writing, still adjusting my mental position to the seat of writing.
The novel came back to me and begged me to face up to the reality that that’s where I want to be; writing my novel. telling the big story that rolls around inside of my dreamy bonce.
It’s always a battle. But if you’re a writer, really, it won’t ever go away. The need to put those words down on paper. To get the rest of the world to read it, enjoy it, and be entertained by the stuff of your own thoughts.
For a while there, I was confronted by the AI monster. Being informed that there’s this machine that they built, it’ll sweep the writer aside and take your place. People’ll love its stories — it can tell a better story about human experience than a mere mortal can. Oh yeah, since when?
I, like many of us, have been hyped about what this AI monster can really do.
“It knows what you want to buy”
“It knows more about you than you do”
“It can write a novel in zilch-nano-seconds while its still munching on old data”
It’s nonsense. No, it can never tell my story, nor can it ever tell the world about all the dreams and stories and feelings and loves that grow to become your world.
We tell stories that come from the heart of life. A machine can copy our stories.
We must first tell those stories and publish them before platforms like FB and company can steal them and pretend that by stitching them together they came from the warm beating motherboard of a machine.
Who cares if a computer can tell stories. That’s so far from the point, so distant from anything helpful.
If a machine can tell a story about what people have done, what they have experienced in life, who they have met, and why they did these things, then surely it makes sense to allow the human being tell that story directly to their brothers and sisters on this planet.
In the time that I wrote this little piece and got these thoughts out onto the screen. I’ve been interrupted several times.
I got a video call from a sick person asking for my help. I had to readjust my day to go shopping and bring her some liquid foods.
I got head butted by two cats — every writer needs a cat or two.
I suddenly stopped, and I felt an enormous desire to fill my cup with steaming coffee. That’ll help me write better, make me more creative. While I walk to the kitchen and get fresh coffee I’ll probably come up with a brilliant idea to write.
But then, I’ll have to get back into the seat and start writing again, or first drink the coffee — then start again. Or, I could go a do the shopping, come back, eat lunch, carry on writing till my business appointment at 4 pm.
Or, forget the coffee and keep writing.
